I have always been a great admirer of Carl Sagan (1934-1996). He taught me a lot and I owe him a lot. Among so many other things, he introduced me to Frederick Douglass (whom I then translated…), guided me in my discovery of skepticism (his famous The Baloney Detection Kit!) and made me love science like no other.
I still remember the emotions felt while watching his series Cosmos— we would have been half a billion people to do it!
An example ? Sagan taught me, and it is unforgettable, how Eratosthenes had taken it, two centuries before Jesus-Christ, to (fairly) correctly estimate the circumference of the Earth. (Go see it quickly if you don’t know this feat. Chills guaranteed!) Nowadays, some still claim that the Earth is flat…
It is therefore with great joy that I learned that an unpublished work by Sagan had just been discovered and published by Steven Pinker and Harvey Silverglate. This is actually a talk that Sagan gave around 1987 to a local chapter (in Illinois) of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Some of the things he says, on this point where science and civil liberties intersect, still have a strong resonance today, especially in education. I couldn’t not tell you about it.
Freedom of expression in science and in politics
Sagan first points out that new technologies, new realities (such as global warming, nuclear weapons, biotechnology, genetic engineering, acid rain, AIDS, etc.) often have consequences that we did not suspect. not and who ignore borders. To face the problems that will arise, and sometimes surprise us, we will therefore have to devise transnational solutions and rethink national sovereignty.
However, in the face of all this, we will also have to be modest and admit our ignorance. “In many cases, we don’t know how to control these technologies, even though the people responsible claim otherwise. How to prevent the worst mistakes from occurring? ” he asks.
Education is a promising avenue for doing this.
The role of education
First, says Sagan, we need a broad and widespread understanding of science and technology. The school, through its curriculum which gives them their rightful place, of course has a major role to play in this.
But above all, Sagan establishes a rich parallel between what these new realities, these new technologies, require of us, and an important thing, a virtue, which science, precisely, implements and can teach us: the recognition of our fallibility and what follows.
What follows in science are things like that arguments from authority carry little weight; that what is affirmed must be demonstrated; experiments should be reproducible. All of this contributes significantly to the value of science.
Sagan asserts that this set of habits of thought, of virtues, which the school can and should make known and practiced, could contribute to setting up this mechanism of correction of the errors which our society desperately needs. “Serious critical thinking and skepticism of new and even old claims are not only permitted,” he writes, “but are encouraged, desirable, and are the lifeblood of science. »
To do this, we must encourage and above all practice, in the political field, what science gives us as an example: the free discussion of all ideas. “Education concerning the nature of civil liberties, writes Sagan, their necessity, the manner of exercising them, all this is an essential element of the democratic process. And science precisely gives the example of what should be valued and practiced.
Sagan, as anyone who has read him would, quotes JS Mill at length on this. What he said, like what Sagan says, resonates particularly strongly today: “What is particularly harmful about imposing silence on the expression of an opinion is that it amounts to stealing humanity: both posterity and the present generation, and the detractors of this opinion even more than its holders. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if it is false, they lose an almost equally considerable benefit: a clearer perception and a more vivid impression of the truth produced by its confrontation with error. »
Thank you once again, Mr. Sagan.
The text referred to here is: Science and Civil Liberties: The Lost ACLU Lecture of Carl Sagan “. It appeared in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer46, noh 6, November/December 2022.