Carl Sagan: When The Demons Begin To Stir

Carl Sagan (1934-1996) wrote The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark (1996) for the same reason he devoted most of his adult life to popularizing science; “When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.”

But he also points out that science isn’t a mere body of accumulated facts, nor a single organized industry run by men and women in white coats peering through microscopes. Science is a way of thinking, a method of inquiry. Anything utilizing the scientific method – that gorgeously respectable logic – can be called science.

Sagan writes correctly that science is “by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans.” Its history, which was just as if not more important to popularize than its fruits, "teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us." 

The eschewal of scientific thinking is a sentence to decay for a prosperous and ethically fair society. (On ethics, Sagan is clear that “Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action.”) Describing what he fears the future of the United States could hold, Sagan is worried but also hopeful because the preventive medicine is obvious and available. He explains his

“foreboding of an America in my children or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all key 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.”

This is written at the water’s surface of the second chapter of The Demon-Haunted World with plenty of depth yet to be dived into. He sets up the context for what follows in this chapter, titled “Science And Hope”, with a warning that sadly needs reverberation around the halls of American Democracy now as surely as it will again in the future. This often quoted exert stands on its own, needing no summary or extra comment, so I will leave you with it.

“Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. 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.”

Affording A Sense Of Proportion

The upside of monotonous labor is the time provided for contemplation, if you're into that sort of thing. This may be a sentence to hellish boredom for people who have little to analyze or wonder about, but I savored it. Five years washing dishes at a small local restaurant had offered me many long a productive hours of this sort. I’m not the first to realize that creative juices flow less viscously when the body is occupied in repetitive labor of the sort that can be completed on autopilot. (For some, a long walk might suffice.) This is why I began looking forward to busy work nights, bringing a small notepad to help remember what came to mind on evenings like this one. 

I was mulling over something I read in Douglass Adams' outrageous and insightful science fiction novel The Restaurant At The End of the Universe. Zaphod Beeblebrox is captive and being shuttled into the Total Perspective Vortex, which he is told will kill him. The Total Perspective Vortex was created by a man named Trin Tragula in order to annoy his wife, who always told him to "have a sense of proportion." In his usual absurdly humorous tone Adams writes,

“And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole of creation and her relation to it.  

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a universe this size, then one thing it can not afford to have is a sense of proportion.” 

Unlike the limp fall characteristic of victims' usual exit once the machine's door is reopened, Zaphod sprang out like a flower on an April evening and ate the fairy cake with delight. The reason he survived, he is later told by Zarniwoop, is that he is actually inhabiting an artificially constructed universe (made by Zarniwoop) that was made specifically with him in mind. He concludes by confiding that "[y]ou are therefore the most important person in the universe." In the real universe, Zaphod is assured, he undoubtedly would have perished. 

Adam’s style makes quick reading and tempts you to move on past this ageless insight because of his ability to communicate it with innocuously absurd humor. Our sense of proportion haunts us, especially as we have discovered so much more about the literally incomprehensible immensity of the universe.  

Homo sapiens carries the burden of needing to feel a sense of meaning, which is not a burden shared by other animals insofar as we can tell. Not in the same way, at any rate. This need has historically been in conflict with our increasing understanding of reality, the limits of which have been expanded far past the alleged firmament. Its known limits have retreated to distances so great they can hardly be comprehended by us except in the form of numerical measurements. These limits may be pushed beyond the universe itself, if the multiverse theory is correct. This contradicts what common sense tells us is possible, but so do many other things we now take for granted. Its worth echoing the theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss’s reassurance, that if common sense were enough to understand the universe, we’d have no need for science.

Appreciating the size of the universe necessitates acknowledging our cosmically insignificant position. We're capable of terrifying influence locally on our own planet, but not cosmically. Yet despite what many worried minds believe, our unimportance to the amoral universe and our inability to significantly influence its fate is not itself the issue. The issue is the emotional reaction to this observation. People often react to cosmic insignificance with unenjoyable emotions and blame the insignificance itself rather than their own method of interpreting it. The irony there is that after a moment of shedding our anthropocentric view of reality to understand humanity’s position within it, you discover only a moment later that you are knocking your head over what consequences this understanding has for your view of self. In other words, we are back to assuming we are so important, or ought to be at the very least.

Marianne Fredriksson's novel Simon and the Oaks opens and answers this curiosity with beautiful brevity. Simon and his new acquaintance, the mysteriously felicitous and prophetic trucker named Anderson, are sitting atop a large rock, which Simon compares to the Rock of Gibraltar, overlooking Sweden's Lake Vättern. Anderson begins the conversation,

'Isn't it odd' he said, 'that all knowledge from the outside has you believe that you're nothing but a fly spot on the universe? But what comes from inside insists that you're everything and have everything.'

Simon hadn't given that any thought. He pondered for a moment before answering. 'I suppose its some instinct for survival persuading you that you're so damned important."  

Spoken like someone with a firm grasp of evolution, his explanation makes sense. The takeaway is that we are saddled with this natural inclination for better or worse. One of the chief tasks of Homo sapiens is to continuously recreate the stories it tells itself about its existence in light of newly discovered facts of reality, and doing so in a way that confers a feeling of importance and a comfortable sense of control. Professor Youens put it more succinctly to Lip Gallagher in the television series Shameless. "We have only two jobs on this earth. The first, to learn. The second, to cope." The alcoholic professor may not be a proper model of the best coping mechanism however.

The most human way of coping is through stories that make us feel our lives have meaning. Religion has long done this, and has in fact done a good job in sedating people when their discomfort arises. The Abrahamic religions even declare that, in the eyes of God and therefore the universe, our existence is paramount. They create an imaginary universe in which we, like Zaphod, are the center, and are protected from the vulnerability we feel when afforded with a sense of proportion. Today, increasingly more people reject the trappings of organized religion but adopt a vague belief in "something greater" for the reason that it makes them feel better. Need I explain that the benefit a belief may bring to the person or group that believes it is not evidence for the truth of that belief? The evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein gave an example (in a slightly different context about how false beliefs can be adaptive) of believing a porcupine can shoot out its quills. It can not do this, but believing it can will seriously decrease the believer's likelihood of approaching a porcupine close enough to be quilled in the first place. The belief may serve a purpose, but it is still false.

What I am building to is that a lot of time and energy is spent worrying about one's feelings and especially one's sense of meaning in life. We exert extraordinary effort just so we might feel comfortable with our own existence. We are but poor players who strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then are heard no more. Is there any confusion about what Shakespeare meant when he concluded that "Its a tale told by an idiot?" This indictment can be taken cheerfully if you, like myself, believe that the death of your brain is the end of your consciousness and anything meaningfully "you." Raising your consciousness to be aware of the idiocy of the tale as commonly told should couple with an understanding of your imminent destruction and allow you the beautiful privilege of perspective. Perhaps you’ll one day gaze back on a long life lived, or you’ll too soon cross that hair’s breadth between you and death. If looking back, what will you feel you have wasted time and worry over? Where could you have been more kind, more attentive to the stories of others? If your end comes tomorrow, or next week, or next year, what would you most regret having squandered your precious time and happiness over now? Considerations of this kind turn many troubles trivial as you decide what matters most to you.

Lifetimes of scientific inquiry have revealed a poetic aspect to our existence that also ought to be kept in mind. We are not separate spectators observing the universe, we are the universe. We do not reside within it but arise from it. Echoing Carl Sagan’s fond phrase that we are all “starstuff”, Lawrence Krauss explained this in a 2009 lecture on A Universe From Nothing in a manner necessary to include in full. He said,

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

The obvious conclusion is that insofar as we learn about the world and everything outside it, as many have said before, we are at least one example of the universe knowing itself. Richard Dawkins wrote in The Selfish Gene that "Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence." Could a similar statement be made about a universe "coming to age" when it first becomes aware of its own existence? If so, we are on the forefront of that coming of age tale, and its author is no idiot. 

Booker T. Washington and The Great Responsibility of Being Free

Any time given to reading Booker Taliaferro Washington’s (1856-1915) autobiography Up From Slavery will be rewarded with necessary complications about what freedom meant at the time of the abolition of American slavery. Like most of the other people born or brought into the United States of America as capital, he was freed when the Union Army conquered the South and brought the Emancipation Proclamation with it. “Finally the war closed, and the day of freedom came,” wrote Washington. The day of freedom came to him in Virginia, where he'd spent his entire young life up to that point as another person's property. In this same state the author of the morally irrefutable American Declaration of Independence had lived and owned his own children as property too. (Prior to DNA sequencing, the main line of evidence for his fathering of Sally Hemmings’ children was that he allegedly promised Sally he would manumit their children when they reached adulthood. The rumor was confirmed by his keeping good on the promise, and that they were the only humans he ever set free from his enslavement.)

Emancipation was not equality and it was not the salvation it has often been portrayed as to the public. Emancipation opened a door that led to a world of problems people with dark skin had been forbidden to prepare for by design of America's Peculiar Institution. When a Union Army officer read the Emancipation Proclamation to Washington and the other slaves gathered around the plantation mansion, the reality of their sudden situation soon sunk in. Washington describes the reality as such:

“The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possession of them. It was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself. In a few hours the great questions with which the Anglo Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved. These were the questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches. Was it any wonder that within a few hours the wild rejoicing ceased and a feeling of deep gloom seemed to pervade the slave quarters? To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it.”

Freedom is serious enough for landed and educated people to navigate. It was made intentionally more difficult for emancipated black Americans by denial of reparations and often successful efforts to keep rights and privileges only in the hands of white society. This denial reinforced itself by circular reasoning: A group is forcefully denied opportunity, unable to achieve similar prosperity as their oppressors as a result, and this lack of achievement is then declared to be the result of inherent deficiencies within that group and used as justification for further oppression.

For some elderly freed persons, freedom was beyond their ability to bear. On Washington's plantation, which he says was not nearly as violent as some others, this coupled with a sentimental attachment to their master’s family, who they raised for most of their lives. As a result, some decided to stay on working and living at the plantation after being freed. Most freed persons were too happy to leave, but those who stayed to live where they’d been held by force had their rationale. Decisions that seem otherwise astounding appear much more rational when the details of one’s circumstances and mental scope of future possibilities is better understood. When we put ourselves in the shoes of people from the past, our folly is that we put ourselves in their shoes with our own memories, knowledge and expectations.

Freedom is still a serious matter and always will be. Depending on your perspective, Homo sapiens was either gifted or burdened by its evolutionary history with the ability and the unshakable need to make moral judgments. The entire scope of human conflict has and will result from the question “what ought we to do?” This question is present in every choice made and underlies the problem of freedom. For example, how ought education be conducted and for how many years? How ought children to be raised and to be reprimanded for bad behavior? How ought criminals be weeded out, tried, and reformed or isolated from the public? Ought we to prioritize individuality or community? If anything, this simple realization stresses the importance for every individual to think critically, honestly, and above all, withhold opinions when they've no reason to have one.

Most of our pressing questions are sheltered under the umbrella inquiry that asks, how should I effect the experiences of the poeple and other feeling creatures around me? Samad Behrangi’s The Little Black Fish turns the question into an answer. In Hooshang Amuzegar’s translation, the Little Black Fish restores her confidence while traversing dangerous waters by assuring itself,

“I know that death can come at any moment. As long as I can stay alive I’ll do everything in my power to thwart it. Of course, once death is inevitable it becomes unimportant. What is important is the effect my life, or my death for that matter, will have on others…”

Behrangi offers a simple yet meaningful dictum. (It is meaningful because the Little black Fish's goals were good. This is obvious because after saying these words it soon dies while saving another fish from the belly of a heron.) Washington shares this belief, which evidently underlies his assertion “that those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.” He was neither first nor last to realize this though. It is notably a central tenet in The Book of Joy by the fourteenth Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. Happiness is not the same as temporary pleasure, it is more akin to the active pursuit of something you feel is meaningful.

Working to turn the human world into a more fair, safe and sustainable realm is both meaningful and laudable, but the conflict is in the details. What does a fair and free world look like? Who deserves the help of those who can provide it, and what does effective help look like? Offering bibles and prayers to people in need of clean food, water, and access to healthcare certainly isn't it. But we'll avoid getting caught in the weeds here. For the sake of argument, we'll assume that one's aims for a future that is more safe, fair, and free from unnecessary suffering applies to all people and even all feeling creatures. So if you believe this to be a good aim, then what?

Sincere belief in the righteousness of one's goal isn't always sufficient to pursue it. Trouble comes  during moments when tempting incentives are aligned against your pursuance of that goal. Overcoming these incentives requires that you understand when and how they act upon you, which is nearly impossible if you do not first understand yourself. 

You are very difficult to understand of course. If you are like most others you are adept at excusing yourself for, if not outright ignoring, your sins and shortcomings. The philosopher Martin Buber expressed this well through a religious parable about when God called upon Adam in the Garden of Eden. In The Way of Man According To The Teaching of Hasidism he writes,

“Adam hides himself to avoid rendering accounts, to escape responsibility for his way of living. Every man hides for this purpose, for every man is Adam and finds himself in Adam’s situation. To escape responsibility for his life, he turns existence into a series of hideouts.”

Self-reflection takes courage because we are often afraid of what we might discover. Of course, in order to improve, you have to learn how you became who you are from who you used to be. That is, why do we hold our beliefs about the way the world works, and how do we make decisions?

Our actions in the world are not truly free. We are born with genetic codes, parents, siblings, local communities, nationalities, and all other constructions of influences which we did not choose, and which are themselves the product of historical processes. (Not to mention natural circumstances, down to the laws of physics by which we must abide and did not create.) Peering into your past is to look back at history, and then beyond our personal past into the history that created the particular circumstances that shaped our life's experiences. This is what John Tosh emphasized when he wrote in The Pursuit of History that “[t]o be free is not to enjoy total freedom of action – that is a Utopian dream – but to know how far one’s action and thought are conditioned by the heritage of the past.” 

The heritage of the past made the freedom of emancipation incomplete, and therefore not freedom at all. This is best summarized in the ironic falsehood that the Army officer told Washington and the crowd on the day of their emancipation. “After the reading,” Washington wrote, “we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased.” Washington discovered this was untrue while making his way to the Hampton Institute, a boarding school for blacks in Virginia. He was the only black person on board a stage coach that was travelling over the cold mountains of Virginia. At night it stopped at a small hotel, where the passengers all were given room and supper while he was told the inn would not take a black lodger. Nor would they sell him food. He had an experience that black Americans the country over have still today. “It was my first experience,” he wrote, “in finding out what the colour of my skin meant.” Left outside to suffer sickness or death, Washington walked and walked and walked to keep warm during the night until the party left again in the morning.

The most generalized history of what followed the civil war is well known to even an occasional spectator of American history. Jim Crow soon legalized the violent separation of blacks and whites, homeowner covenants and red-lining stopped blacks from free relocation and encouraged the process of urban ghettoization, and lynchings were committed without a hint of justice. The list is long, and it adds more emphasis to two salient points. The first is that emancipation did not mean freedom. The second is that the responsibility of freedom was hard to bear precisely because it was not complete and because the conditions of bondage were designed to deny black people all of the opportunities, education, and generational wisdom accumulated through decades of freedom which white society had at its disposal. 

How then have African Americans gone about claiming and obtaining the full measure of their freedom while also endeavoring like everybody else to bear its accompanying responsibility? How has the larger society in which they are a part of helped or hindered their efforts and aims, and how has this varied by location and time? Frequently the non-black general public have vague, uncomplicated, and as a result, often false ideas about how these should be answered. The answers are by necessity complicated, given to general trends with exceptions that sometimes prove insightful. and other times are solely curiosities.

Emphasizing black America's past and present oppression does not ignore the progress made toward racial equality. The emphasis is necessary for identifying the origins of the historical processes, and the processes themselves, which have resulted in the settings of black experiences today. The progress so far achieved cannot be appreciated without a more complete comprehension of where we've progressed from, and no amount of progress will be sufficient to ignore the problems that still exist. Everybody understands this when it applies to issues that affect them personally, but wish to ignore it when they might be implicated in the problem. 

The temptation to reduce black Americans to the role of perpetual victim may follow continuous descriptions of their suffering, but this reduction denies both black agency and therefore history. This is especially prominent among those inoculated against a particularly insidious strain of the avian flu- who are resistant to the virulent desire to ostrich one's own head deep in the sand.  The remedy they administer to the flu-infected is an emphasis on oppression so singular that it morphs from one vital factor of African American history into the only shape that history could ever take. One of the effects of this is that the only household names of influential black Americans are not the inventors, engineers, politicians, etc., but Civil Rights leaders or victims of racist violence. Having recognized this, we have a responsibility to educate ourselves, to be critical of the thought processes and available or cherry picked information beneath our beliefs, and actively pursue the most complete truth whenever it is clear we do not possess it.

A person can be said to be growing up as they obtain a sense of duty and begin taking responsibility for themselves. This is serious business. People live and die for their ideas of how that responsibility ought to be taken up. Wars are waged, people enslaved, and sometimes truly good ideas do prevail. Other times, bad ideas triumph enough to remind us that the universe cares not for justice, and that if there is to be any of it at all, it begins and ends with us. In other words, how we bear the responsibility of being free.