Up to a point, Carl Sagan’s biography and my own run parallel. We both were children of the Great Depression, raised in blue-collar homes at a time when respect for science knew no class lines. In the 1950s, we were undergraduates together at the University of Chicago where student minds were honed against the Great Books.
After that, our paths diverged. At his death last December, Sagan was the nation’s, perhaps the world’s, best-known scientist. Millions of viewers saw his 1980 public television series “Cosmos.” Certainly, he must be the only astronomer ever to become a staple of standup comedians’ routines–thanks to his “Tonight Show” appearances and Johnny Carson’s unquenchable delight in his enumeration of the universe’s “billions and billions” of stars.
It wasn’t possible for me to follow Sagan through all the technical footnotes and mathematical formulae of his professional achievements.
Save for those with test tubes in the pockets of their lab coats, who isn’t intimidated by scientific papers like “The Titan Haze Revisited: Magnetospheric Energy Sources and Quantitative Titan/Triton Tholin Yields”?
Yet I remained fascinated by the same things that fueled his scientific passions: exploration of the solar system, the search for life in space and a fuller understanding of its origins on Earth. And, it now seems, in his final years and stricken by bone-marrow disease, Sagan worried less about his own passing than mine. Not me personally, but the type that I represent–lay-people with some appreciation of science.
America used to produce lots of those when he and I were young, and for a generation or so thereafter. A college degree wasn’t even a prerequisite for at least an aesthetic understanding of what scientists do. But such is no longer the case. Instead, we seem headed pell-mell for a rerun of the Dark Ages, Sagan sadly prophesied in “The Demon-Haunted World” (Random House), his last book and, in effect, his intellectual will and final testament.
“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive,” he wrote. “The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”
En route once to an academic conference, Sagan was picked up by a limo driver delighted to have a famous scientist in the back seat. Announcing himself a fan, he peppered Sagan with questions about subjects that had provoked the driver’s curiosity: astrology, the power of crystals, Nostradamus’ oracles, communicating with the dead through channeling, the lost continent of Atlantis, frozen spacemen supposedly hidden away at some Air Force base . . .
Finally it dawned on Sagan that his driver wasn’t some kind of mystic preaching reason’s limitations. He truly thought that his litany of superstition and irrationality was science, indeed, cutting-edge science. He had been taught to think that by television shows reporting alien abductions and movies claiming government cover-ups on the scale of President Kennedy’s assassination.
“He had a natural appetite for the wonders of the Universe,” noted Sagan, who was 62 at the time of his death. “He wanted to know about science. It’s just that all the science had gotten filtered out before it reached him. Our cultural motifs, our educational system, our communications media had failed this man.”
Nor did Sagan have to leave home to discover that TV and Hollywood have eroded reason’s once firm hold on the American mind. The evidence was undeniable even on the campus of Cornell University, where Sagan taught for almost three decades.
“I can find in my undergraduate classes,” he wrote, “bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.”
Childhood then and now
Those kinds of experiences troubled Sagan not just as a scientist but as a citizen. Democracy’s health is dependent upon voters making intelligent choices between political alternatives. An electorate lacking the capacity for critical thinking puts the republic doubly at risk in an age when science is closely linked to public policy in everything from environmental issues to national defense.
Sagan’s is the kind of jeremiad that often provokes Congress to hold hearings and prompts presidents to call for educational reforms. But if any are so inclined, they would be wasting their time. Great shifts in a nation’s culture are neither started nor stopped by legislative action; and “Demon-Haunted World” demonstrates that America may well have already passed a historical watershed.
Consider, for example, how childhood mutated during the half-century that separates Sagan’s and my own youth from those of his students. When he and I were young, a passing acquaintance with science was as much a part of growing up as, say, pickup softball games or ogling schoolgirls. I was raised in a working-class community on Chicago’s Northwest Side, not unlike the Brooklyn of Sagan’s youth. Few parents were university graduates and not many more of their children were headed for college. Still, high on the list of standard birthday and Christmas presents–ice skates and model-airplane kits, crystal-set radios and football pads–was the Gilbert Chemistry set.
Looking back, I can hardly think of a single school-yard buddy who didn’t get a chemistry set, some of which got played with for longer than others, of course. But the simple act of picking up those little test tubes labeled “Potassium Phosphate,” “Magnesium Sulfate” and “Gum Arabic,” then looking up in the instruction manual their potential combinations (especially those that produce a loud bang) was enough to fix forever in the mind the idea that the world runs according to unvarying rules.
One boy was so fascinated by that discovery he kept sending off to the manufacturer for more and more chemicals until the shelves he built to hold them made his parents’ garage look like Edison’s laboratory. I don’t know if he went to college. Given his family’s circumstances, I doubt it.
Yet it is inconceivable to me that he could have grown up to become a gullible sucker for every form of pseudoscience, like Sagan’s limo driver. Or, stunningly ignorant of the simplest facts of astronomy, like some of Sagan’s students who, given the cost of elite colleges, surely came from far more fortunate circumstances.
Somewhere between that young man’s generation and the current one, the chemistry set was replaced by the television set as the formative experience of childhood. Instead of doing, playing and experimenting, children now spend enormous amounts of their growing-up years passively staring at a TV tube–and one broadcasting a view of life virtually guaranteed to stunt intellectual growth.
“An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth–scru-
tinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books–might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity and consumerism,” Sagan observes.
Even the educated fall victim
With TV as its collective tutor, it’s little wonder that the average American’s storehouse of knowledge makes him seem to share the mental universe of a medieval peasant. A variety of public opinion polls, Sagan reports, show that most Americans think we are being visited by UFOs, and nearly half the populace believes in psychic healing. Forty-two percent of Americans don’t know where Japan is. The Central Intelligence Agency spends taxpayers’ money to see if clairvoyants might be able to locate submarines on the ocean depths.
Meanwhile, American young people flee from science courses in such numbers that half of all graduate students in science and technology at U.S. universities are now foreign students. For those raised on the instant gratification of pop culture, laboratory work and lectures make science seem boring.
“Especially for an MTV generation,” Sagan wrote, “beset by attention disorders in various degrees of severity, it is boring.”
Yet what do Americans get in return for their flight from reason? Essentially a boring view of life.
“Carl was always amazed at how pedestrian TV and movies portray all these aliens who supposedly are visiting us from outer space,” recalled Joe Burns, a professorial colleague of Sagan’s at Cornell. “They generally turn out to look not much different from human beings. Yet the beauty of nature, Carl used to say, is that she always surprises us.”
During most periods of cultural decline, rationality’s failure begins at the bottom of the social ladder. This time, though, it seems to be receding almost as fast among the educated as the unwashed. During the recent wave of “repressed memory syndrome” cases, 12 percent of the membership of the American Psychological Association reported that they had treated patients who had been abused during satanic-cult rituals. Evidently those shrinks can’t differentiate between reality and their patients’ fantasies and delusions: When the FBI and the British Department of Health investigated, they couldn’t find evidence of a single case of satanic abuse.
Having devoted his life to the life of the mind, it had to be enormously frustrating to Sagan to see America turning away from reason. His personal response paralleled the medieval monks’ commitment to keep the art of writing alive during the Dark Ages: He undertook to help a few young people at least learn how to differentiate between astronomy and astrology, real science and pseudoscience, through a course he called “Critical Thinking.”
According to Christopher Chyba, a former graduate student, Sagan insisted on offering it to undergraduates, even though as a distinguished professor he could have limited his teaching to graduate seminars.
“Carl would take 35 students and for a term pose questions for them like: How do you think through an issue? What kinds of evidence do we need to decide between alternate hypotheses?” said Chyba, now a faculty member at the University of Arizona.
In a way it isn’t surprising that, despite the enormous demands on his time, Sagan would chose to spend some of it trying to pass on his enthusiasm for science to a younger generation. He simply couldn’t imagine an alternative to the way he had always lived–trying to tempt nature to give up still one more of her always surprising secrets. In an earlier book, “Broca’s Brain,” Sagan wrote a passage that could serve as his epitaph. An agnostic, he didn’t believe in heaven, but if there was to be one, he noted, he’d like to provide a few of the blueprints.
“Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death,” he wrote, “especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.”
