Book Favourite: A Demon Haunted World

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan 📚

This is one of my favourite books. So much of what is wrong with the world is within the pages of this book. Nostradamus would have been proud of Sagan.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

And

“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

Sadly, Sagan’s children were the ones to experience this, life didn’t need to wait for his grandchildren. The “lowest common denominator programming” is now quite literally “programming”. Algorithms on social media sites promote behaviours to motivate the most base of instincts, all to keep you on the site for as long as possible.

Science, or more precisely, teaching the scientific method, is one of few ways I can see a survival for mankind in the long term.

“One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.”

Every day, I see more evidence of this kind of backsliding. A mixture of religion and emotive nationalism fuels it. MAGA ideology is based on emotion, rather than data and logical hypothesis.

“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. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

I know it’s just me getting old, but it’s difficult to believe that Sagan died 28 years ago. The Millennium has long since past. Children born at the time of his death are well into the prime of their lives. But his words just keep getting louder as the years go by. The demons, they are a stirring.

But the book isn’t just a scary vision of the here and now, it’s a call to how to fix many of the world’s ills.

“Deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.”

Sagan has a critical lens, yes. But that lens is rooted in compassion and hope for his fellow man. I often listen to the audiobook when I’m feeling despair about the state of the world. There is a way forward that doesn’t end in the destruction of the world we’ve created. This book should be near the center of any path forward. It definitely is for me.