> I have always held Carl Sagan in high esteem without actually having read his books.
Here's a tiny excerpt from Pale Blue Dot. This excerpt elevates the book to high art,
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
There is nothing more humbling than to stand on the surface of the moon and blot out the Earth with your thumb. Just another world in the vast cosmos. You cannot study what Dr Sagan did without finding the true humility of the cosmic perspective.
We're starstuff on a tiny speck dreaming self-important dreams and — occasionally — pondering the stars.
Lovely. That's the kind of sentiment I was hoping to inspire in the kids.
That's not what I found in _Cosmos_ though. The tale of Giordano Bruno seemed more like a celebration of blind faith and trust in posthumous vindication and martyrdom. And an Indiana Jones style switcheroo from Catholicism to Sciencism in one swift motion. Jarring.
I am a bit unsure about what you mean by "sciencism," but I recommend watching the original series and reading Dr Sagan's books!
A persistent theme in Dr Sagan's work was the frailty of knowledge, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vMPtpC4wGk and the danger enlightenment faces from fanatics. He also talked, at length, about the shortcomings of religion (and the possibility of partnering with religions against pseudoscience),
This is one of the reasons that the organized religions do not inspire me with confidence. Which leaders of the major faiths acknowledge that their beliefs might be incomplete or erroneous and establish institutes to uncover possible doctrinal deficiencies? Beyond the test of everyday living, who is systematically testing the circumstances in which traditional religious teachings may no longer apply? (It is certainly conceivable that doctrines and ethics that may have worked fairly well in patriarchal or patristic or medieval times might be thoroughly invalid in the very different world we inhabit today.) What sermons even-handedly examine the God hypothesis? What rewards are religious skeptics given by the established religions or, for that matter, social and economic skeptics by the society in which they swim?
Science, Ann Druyan notes, is forever whispering in our ears, "Remember, you're very new at this. You might be mistaken. You've been wrong before." Despite all the talk of humility, show me something comparable in religion. Scripture is said to be divinely inspired--a phrase with many meanings. But what if it's simply made up by fallible humans? Miracles are attested, but what if they're instead some mix of charlatanry, unfamiliar states of consciousness, misapprehensions of natural phenomena, and mental illness? No contemporary religion and no New Age belief seems to me to take sufficient account of the grandeur, magnificence, subtlety and intricacy of the Universe revealed by science. The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on its divine inspiration.
But of course I might be wrong.
Maybe the Neil deGrasse Tyson remake of Cosmos has a different tone to Carl Sagan's work. I'd imagined it would very faithful but it completely lacks this tone of humility.
I'm also watching from an almost completely secular society (Sweden) where there is no great need to counter the political influence (etc) of religious organizations. Maybe that is why this comes across as foreign "culture wars" fodder. (I'm also conscious that for this reason I might be naively linking to some partisan organization above... I will just stop typing now.)
That’s a brilliant passage but I can help thinking that he is essentially describing a religious experience.
The transition from awe at the scale of the universe, to the futility of human selfishness, to the need to treat people kindly, may seem obvious to us but is actually a culturally-dependent response.
This is not a criticism, just an acknowledgment that Sagan belonged to a particular culture and this influenced him far more that he himself would probably have admitted.
Cultures are funny like that: give it a couple millennia and a theological point could eventually become just plain old common sense.
I am not a very religious person but I’ve done a fair bit of reading, and it seems clear to me that in this passage Sagan is drawing from a very old and very deep well. This was something embedded in his cultural background and he might not have been aware of it himself.
Specifically, the sequence that goes from a profound aesthetic experience, to awe at the scale of the Universe, to the futility of human selfishness, and finally to the conclusion that we ought to treat each other kindly, is very much not obvious. It just seems obvious to us (and to him) because that’s the culture where we have been raised.
Now, I’m not saying that the experience described in this passage is exactly the same as the Buddha achieving enlightenment or a Christian saint receiving the beatific vision. But they are not completely different either.
Here's a tiny excerpt from Pale Blue Dot. This excerpt elevates the book to high art,
There is nothing more humbling than to stand on the surface of the moon and blot out the Earth with your thumb. Just another world in the vast cosmos. You cannot study what Dr Sagan did without finding the true humility of the cosmic perspective.We're starstuff on a tiny speck dreaming self-important dreams and — occasionally — pondering the stars.