The Demon-Haunted World:
Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
(New York: Random House, 1995)
The demons of irrationality, quacks, unreasoning religion, and commercial hyperbole haunt our present world. In many ways Sagan's book is a worthy successor to Martin Gardner's 1952 Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science on which many of us cut our baby teeth as skeptics. Like Gardner Sagan looks at the wide variety of nonsense which is retailed by the media and believed by the people. Sagan, however, goes further and deeper in his assessment. Further in that he casts his net over many more every day popular beliefs. Deeper in that he asks how can anyone accept such nonsense, and what is the remedy needed? "... how is it possible to fly in airplanes, listen to the radio or take antibiotics while holding the earth is around 10,000 years old or that all Sagittarians are gregarious and affable?" (p. 297).
Sagan's sees scientific thinking as the only way to obtain insight into reality. Only careful questioning, examination of the evidence, experiment, logic of how does this fit in with other things we know, healthy skepticism, and checking the facts will lead to accurate insight. This method he sees as applying to all aspects of human society, including politics, education, and commerce. Unfortunately people who can be perfectly rational about one thing, usually what they understand well or professionally, do not apply the same reason to other aspects of their surroundings. Rather than the tools of logic we tend to apply the criteria of feel good to everyday knowledge.
The Wall Street Journal (26 April 1996) panned the book as "repetitious, cloying, sanctimonious, self-regarding". I wondered why, until I realized Sagan took on the commercial world and their advertising hype, which drives our communications industry. One of the first things a small child needs to learn is that what it sees on television is mostly fiction and falsehood. Adults take the prevarication for granted. Sagan sees the connection between the profit driven media, the need of some preachers to hold an audience no matter what, and the political election lies. On all sides we are inundated by false and misleading views of reality, while science gets short shrift, and scientists are depicted as weird, nerdy, or "mad". This spills over into the education of our young people. Too much of what passes for knowledge in school or is omitted is affected by religious demands, ethnic prejudices, political convenience, or commercial hype.
Because we are ensnared in a seamless web of nonsense and because Sagan sees the many interconnections and similarities between the different aspects of bunk, the book is indeed a little repetitious. It is an excellent book and a "must read".
Guilty: The Collapse of Criminal Justice
by Judge Harold J. Rothwax
(New York: Random House, 1996)
The American legal system has become a crap shoot in which juries decide which party has the more engaging and dramatic lawyer. The lawyers feel entitled to mislead the jury with contrived or psychiatric testimonies, with arcane and intricate maneuvers, with arbitrary search for error, and any number of moves designed to delay and impede the proceedings. The search for truth as motive and goal of the law has been utterly abandoned in favor of public spectacle and court room theatrics. At the same time the decisions of the US Supreme Court have gone far in the direction of protecting the guilty, and giving the defense and the accused many advantages against the police and other forces trying to protect the public. Far from being the best legal system our trial by jury has become an impossibility. Juries are selected from those who don't know anything and can't read, and are too stupid to get out of jury duty. Trials are too long, too costly, too labor intensive to be provided for all accused. Hence, trial by plea bargain has become our equivalent of medieval torture.
All of this we know, but here Judge Rothwax says it with verve, with uncompromising clarity, and with 25 years of experience on the New York bench. In various asides Rothwax compares the US law with better systems in Europe. He suggests ten major common sense reforms. If you have any interest in American law and society, if you have any illusion about trial by jury, this is a must read.
What has all this to do with science and rational thinking? The law is our foremost example of applied social science or social engineering, a system of human made rules to control society and channel our actions away from evil and to acceptable ends. The law attempts to translate our ideals and ethics about living together in a community into operative rules about what is and is not acceptable. When the legal rules by which we are supposed to live do not accomplish the ends we have set ourselves, when the courts and the legislatures cease to promote the well being of the community, when the rules as they are implemented do not reflect the needs of people, the republic is in danger. The system of criminal justice has become an elaborate game in which the real question: "Did he do it" has become lost in a morass of ill conceived statutes, procedures, and rulings.
Copyright 1992-2005, The Association for Rational Thought