Carl Sagan - Science and Skepticism

How can we defend ourselves from false or misleading claims that we are told by certain elected officials in their efforts to obtain, retain, or regain power? In the final interview before his death, astrophysicist Carl Sagan talked about his concern for the future when citizens lack the scientific and technological understanding to make informed decisions. Interview with Charlie Rose, 27th of May 1996: Source: LibertyPen YouTube channel.

Transcript:

SAGAN: It is that it’s not that pseudoscience and superstition and New Age so-called ‘beliefs’ and fundamentalist zealotry are something new. They’ve been with us for as long as we’ve been human. But we live in an age based on science and technology, with formidable technological powers. And if we don’t understand it, and by ‘we’ I mean ‘the general public,’ if it’s something that, ‘Oh, I’m not good at that, I don’t know anything about it,’ then who is making all the decisions about science and technology that are going to determine what kind of future our children live in? Just some members of Congress? But there’s no more than a handful of members of Congress with any background in science at all.

There are two kinds of danger. One is that we’ve arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?

And the second reason that I’m worried about this is that science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along. It’s a thing that Jefferson laid great stress on. It wasn’t enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in a Constitution or a Bill of Rights. The people had to be educated, and they had to practice their skepticism and their education. Otherwise we don’t run the government — the government runs us.”