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.”