The Dumbing Down Of America
By Carl Sagan
Extract from, “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” – 1995 – By Carl 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 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.
The dumbing down of America 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. As I
write, the number one video cassette rental in America is the movie Dumb
and Dumber. Beavis and Butthead remains popular (and influential) with
young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning – not just
of science, but of anything – are avoidable, even undesirable.
We’ve
arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements –
transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture,
medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even
the key democratic institution of voting – 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.
A Candle in the Dark is
the title of a courageous, largely Biblically based, book by Thomas
Ady, published in London in 1656, attacking the witch-hunts then in
progress as a scam ‘to delude the people’. Any illness or storm,
anything out of the ordinary, was popularly attributed to witchcraft.
Witches must exist, Ady quoted the ‘witchmongers’ as arguing, ‘else how
should these things be, or come to pass?’ For much of our history, we
were so fearful of the outside world, with its unpredictable dangers,
that we gladly embraced anything that promised to soften or explain away
the terror.
Science
is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a
grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course.
Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago
was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.
Ady
also warned of the danger that ‘the Nations [will] perish for lack of
knowledge’. 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.