Carl Sagan

Presents an interview with Carl Sagan the author. His book 'The Demon-Haunted World'; Contents of book.

By PT Staff, published on January 01, 1996

PT: You've been most associated with issues of outer space. But you haveturned very much to a world of inner space, the human mind.

CS: Well, the boundary between space and the earth is purely arbitrary. And I'll probably always be interested in this plan-et--it's my favorite. I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions. So it isn't a new departure for me to be concentrating on humans. Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I've had a lot of experience with that.

PT: Some of your best friends are humans. Your new book, The Demon-Haunted World, seems at times a litany of how the mind is fooled: by its own memory, by its senses, by shoddy reasoning. Is there intelligent life on Earth?

CS: Well, sure. But our intelligence is limited, and who would have expected otherwise? We're imperfect, and wisdom and prudence lie in understanding our imperfections. If we ignore our imperfections on the grounds that it's too depressing to concentrate on them, then we greatly limit our future options. On the other hand, if we know where our limitations are, not just in thinking but in emotional things, if we know about any hereditary predispositions we have towards ethnocentrism, xenophobia, dominance hierarchies, then we have a chance to moderate those tendencies. If we ignore any genetic predispositions in those directions, then we don't make any serious effort to ameliorate them and we're in much worse shape. This is one of those issues that every generation has to learn anew, because every generation has the same hereditary predispositions.

PT: But some of the issues you address in the book seem especially endemic to present times: UFOs, repressed memory. Are these kinds of things cropping up now more than before, as we approach the millennium?

CS: No. If you concentrate on the first few centuries of the Christian era, let's say, or the time of Mesmer in France, or almost any time in human history, you find just as many examples as from our present time. This is an endemic human characteristic--to be credulous, to believe what others tell us, to prefer what feels good to what's true.

PT: But until now, we've never been able to blow ourselves up . . .

CS: Quite right. The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking, it's that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

PT: You point to the statistical likelihood of people in power periodically showing up in the guise of a Stalin or a Hitler. Given this probability, and given nuclear proliferation, what are your feelings about the future?

CS: Well, it's a very serious issue. We are, fortunately, in a time when the United States and the former Soviet Union are divesting their nuclear arsenals. According to the present treaties, agreed to if not ratified, each side will go down to something like 3,000 strategic weapons and delivery systems by the first decade of the 21st century, from 10 times that number. So that's very good news. On the other hand, there are only about 2,300 cities on the planet, so if each side gets 3,000 weapons, that means that each side retains the ability to annihilate every city on earth. That is certainly not comfortable news, because if you wait long enough you are bound to have a madman at the helm in one of these countries.

PT: Are you saying it's inevitable?

CS: If you look at the history of the world, such people regularly come to power. We may comfort ourselves in the United States that it hasn't happened to us, but even here I would say that a number of times in our recent history we've come dose to having somebody dangerously incompetent or drunk or crazy in power in a time of crisis. Hitler and Stalin are reminders that the most advanced countries on earth can have such leaders.

PT: You spend a good deal of The Demon-Haunted World talking about, to use your term, scientific illiteracy. What do you think we should do? Clearly everything is going in the wrong direction.

CS: Well, the first thing I would say is that every generation has bemoaned the supposed lack of education of the next generation, and that goes back to some of the earliest Sumerian tablets that we have, from about 5000 years ago.

PT: With elders complaining about the youngsters of the time?

CS: Right: "They're not nearly as sharp as they were in my generation. They're not motivated. They don't do homework." So, there's always a danger of crotchety, elderly people comparing their generation with youngsters and concluding their generation was much harder working, more serious, had better values, better music, and so on.

Nevertheless, it's dear that there's a rampant dumbing down in progress in which not knowing things is considered a virtue and in which knowing things is considered a cause for embarrassment. I don't throw up my hands in despair. But I do try to indicate that it's a very serious problem that has no single point to face.