Bamboozled

 

Today is astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s birthday (November 9, 1934, > December 20, 1996)

Most Americans do not learn from history. They will ignore, deny, or rewrite it to conform to their ideological bias.

We can’t expect the average American to be knowledgeable or even curious about science. It requires a basic foundation of math, biology, and chemistry with an understanding of the scientific method. An open mind and motivation to pursue a vast and enlightening, but also confusing, area of study isn’t in the nature of most people.

I’ve read some books by Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and even “A Brief History of Time” by Stephan Hawking. That was enough to make my head spin, but also gave me a glimpse of our universe and a primitive understanding of astrophysics.

History, on the other hand, is more suited to simpler folks like me. Its lessons can be of equal importance to humanity as what we learn from science.

"Never again" seems to never sink in.

Sagan wrote a book on the evolution of human intelligence titled “Dragons of Eden” that explored human psychology and behavior in our journey from the trees to the savannah and caves, up to our so-called “advanced civilization”.

In his later book from 1995 “Demon-Haunted World” he notes a disturbing trend in America that explains its inevitable fall into Christian Nationalism and Trumpism.

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. 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 key 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... The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

This week’s election has revealed the disturbing reality that most American voters have succumbed to negligent, self-serving corporate media dereliction of purpose, and the primitive emotional manipulation by a con man, that resulted in this kind of bamboozled celebration of ignorance.