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Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America (1995)

Image by Kenneth Zirkel, via Wikimedia Commons There have been many theories of how human history works. Some, like German thinker G.W.F.

Two-hun­dred and twen­ty years after Vico’s 1774 death, Carl Sagan—another thinker who took human irra­tional­ism seriously—published his book The Demon Haunt­ed World, show­ing how much our every­day think­ing derives from metaphor, mythol­o­gy, and super­sti­tion. 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 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… As Direc­tor of Pub­lic Radio International’s Sci­ence Fri­day, Charles Bergquist tweet­ed, “Carl Sagan had either a time machine or a crys­tal ball.” Matt Novak cau­tions against falling back into super­sti­tious think­ing in our praise of Demon Haunt­ed World.

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