Ballookey

Last night before going to sleep, I read the first chapter of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, and was just astonished at the following paragraph. (stick with me here)

It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer.

How can we affect national poicy—if we don’t grasp the underlying issues?

Drink that in for a minute. This was written in 1996(¹) – and yet so many of those items in the first paragraph remain hot-button issues 12 years later. Not just topics of interest, THE topics of interest.

At the time Sagan wrote this, he noted that Congress was shutting down the Office of Technology Assessment, the “nonpartisan analytical agency that assisted Congress with the complex and highly technical issues that increasingly affect our society”. One of the rare scientifically-literate public servants of the 20th century, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was crucial in leading the world to ban CFC’s worldwide in response to the depletion of the ozone layer.

So perhaps it was a bad idea to start on this book right before bed because I woke up at 2:00 am and couldn’t go back to sleep on account of worrying about this.

Seriously? Which U.S. President of the last two hundred years do you think really understood that that big glowing ball which makes an appearance in the east every day does so because we orbit it, and not because God rolls it around our big cookie with his own hands? Personally, I can’t vouch for any in my lifetime.

And yet every thing we do these days is deeply impacted by science.

A girl at work was incredulous that one of the artists read Wired magazine. He said “Why? It’s just about technology and stuff.” She responded that science and evolution were the devil’s work. Even as she used her cell phone (dependent on communication satellites) to take provocative self-portraits to be beamed straight to her MySpace profile.

This is just the sort of blinkered philistine pig-ignorance that I can’t put up with. And we can’t afford to be this stupid and fool-hardy anymore. Stop it. Stop being fucking ridiculous. Read up. Someone says something incredible, don’t just take their word for it, look it up. Someone claims that a long-dead man of questionable historical reality is speaking to them from beyond the grave and offering them love and advice – you do what comes naturally and kick them the fuck out of elected office! Because we have serious shit to deal with and we haven’t done a goddamn thing in over a decade. Stuffing our heads in the ground doesn’t change scientific truths, so you believe in your invisible man if you like, but learn the provable, functioning truths of science and learn to deal with it because either it IS true or god wants us to use it as he gave it to us. I don’t give a shit which you believe, but it’s time to start cracking.

And seriously, too, if you really think science is the devil’s work, stop driving your car with it’s onboard computer and satellite navigation system, cast out your television, cut off your cellphone, cut off all your phone service, cancel your medications, chuck the computer, take those contact lenses out of your eyes, crush your eyeglasses, walk over to Water & Power and tell them you no longer require their services, grow your own food, live in a house you built without science, and stop using flush toilets.

Or shut the fuck up.

(¹)The book was published in 1997, but as noted, Sagan references Congress’ dissolution of the OTA, which was done in 1995 and shut down in 1996.