Candles In The Dark

Books read this week: The Demon-Haunted World 8/10 (Carl Sagan)

I first read The Demon-Haunted World twelve or thirteen years ago. There was a (rather battered) copy in the local library, rather ironically filed with the books on alien abductions and the razor-blade sharpening properties of pyramids (I've always wondered why it is that pyramids are supposed to sharpen razor blades specifically - why not knives or forks?). The Demon-Haunted World had a profound effect upon me; it is probably one of the two or three most influential books I have ever read and I very much doubt I would have studied science at university had I not read it. There is a certain symmetry then, in returning to it now, when my thesis is almost done and I'm nearly done with the scientific part of my life.

The Demon-Haunted World is Carl Sagan's plea for better scientific education as a buttress against superstition and stupidity and for teaching sceptical thinking as a tool for preserving democracy. I remember that it moved me when I was young - but I am older and more cynical now. Not that I don't still think scientific thinking and scepticism are important things to learn' in fact, I think one chapter of this book  - "The Baloney Detection Kit" - should be compulsory reading for all school children, as it contains the best and most succinct summary of the ways in which people (let's be honest, primarily politicians) try to lie to us. Of course, that is why, the world being as it is right now, no one is going to give it to them. This is why I find the book less impressive than I did when I first read it: yes it would be nice if the general level of scientific education was higher. Yes it would be nice if fewer people believed in astrology/homeopathy/etc. Yes it would be nice if people were more sceptical and less willing to take pronouncements from authority on faith. But what we really need is a way in which to make that happen, and Carl Sagan comes up a little short on policies. Partly this is a matter of timing: the book was written in 1996, during that brief, odd, hopeful decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11 when economic growth was high and international politics were relatively quiet (insert the obvious caveat about Rwanda and Yugoslavia) - it's a decade when we could have fixed the world's problems and chose not to. I'm sure that in the future historians will look back on the 1990s as the Wasted Decade and ask why we didn't do more about poverty and climate change and whatever other crises are hurtling towards us. But as I said, it was a hopeful time, and I think that's why I saw it so positively back when I first read it - it seemed like all we had to do was identify the solution, and then implement it. Now I recognise that you also need to work out how to implement the solution.

Looking at the book with a more critical eye, I also notice now how American-centric the book is: it was rather surprising, for example, to be told that the concept of a trial by jury was an invention of the Founding Fathers, when we've been using it in one form or another in England since at least 1100, and probably since before the Norman Conquest. Also, were I constructing a list of "Fathers (and Mothers) of Democracy" I have to say that not only would Thomas Jefferson not be at the top of the list, I doubt he'd be on the list at all. Certainly Cleisthenes, Pericles, the Gracchi and John Lilburne come above Jefferson. I'd also rate Robespierre, Danton and Saint-Just as well as Marx and Tom Paine far above Jefferson. I'd also take issue with any description of the USA as a "democracy" before about 1965 (in the same way that the UK can't really be described as a democracy until at least 1918 (universal male suffrage and women's suffrage) and probably, really 1928 (when women were granted the vote on the same universal terms as men)).

That said I am forever endebted to Sagan for introducing me to both Frederick Douglass and Tom Paine, both of whom are heroes of mine. I have relatively few heroes, but I have always found Frederick Douglass, in particular, an enormous inspiration: a testament to the power of human determination and the indomitable human spirit. His autobiography is a brilliant account of the power of literacy and knowledge (the message Carl Sagan takes) and also of the way in which absolute power corrupted the slave owning aristocracy of the antebellum south absolutely: Douglass' description of a previously pleasant woman turning slowly into a monster when she inherited slaves is one that has always stayed with me. I have often been struck by the similarities between the Confederacy and the Nazi regime - both were essentially regimes of bullies, and fundamentally cowardly ones at that, and both had a strongly antagonistic relationship with the truth.

Ultimately, for all the imperfections I found reading The Demon-Haunted World again after all these years it remains a fascinating book, and an excellent introduction to Science (with a capital S) and to sceptical thinking, and it has a brilliant dissection of the alien abduction and witch hunting crazes that swept the world. The book is worth reading just for "The Baloney Detection Kit" alone. I just wish I could still be as optimistic as I was the first time I read it.