Can You Meet the Standards of the Future?
Can You Meet the Standards of the Future?
Carl Sagan on censorship (and cancel culture).
Welcome to this week’s issue of Abandoned Curiosities. Starting today, readers can support the newsletter with a paid subscription. That is: if you can afford it, I’d like you to consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5/month or $50/year. If you’re not ready yet, that’s fine too. The newsletter will still be free for everyone.
Meanwhile, there are still more ways you can support the newsletter. You can share it with a friend or on social media, or even leave a like or comment on a post. It signals to me that you appreciate the work I do and inspires me to keep writing.
Thank you so much for your support, and I hope you enjoy this week’s issue.
“When I announced that I wanted to be an astronomer, my parents never suggested that, all things considered, it might be better to be a doctor or a lawyer,” writes Carl Sagan, American astronomer, science writer, and, among everything else, a most-popular advocate for scientific skepticism and the scientific method.
Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World, is one such proof of his advocacy.
In one passage in the book, Sagan proposes that scientific discoveries must not be criticized based on the personal biases or motivations of the scientists behind them.
“Postmodernists have criticized Kepler’s astronomy because it emerged out of his medieval, monotheistic religious views. And Darwin’s evolutionary biology for being motivated by a wish to perpetuate the privileged social class from which he came, or to justify his supposed prior atheism.” Similarly, historians have criticized Newton for “rejecting the philosophical position of Descartes because it might have challenged conventional religion and lead to social chaos and atheism.” And so on.
“Some of these claims are just. Some are not. But why does it matter what biases and emotional predispositions scientists bring to their studies — so long as they are scrupulously honest and other people with different proclivities check their results?”
“Presumably, no one would argue that the conservative view on the sum of 14 and 27 differs from the liberal view,” or that Hindu mathematics differs from Muslim mathematics. “Mathematics might be prized or ignored, but it is equally true everywhere — independent of ethnicity, culture, language, religion, ideology.”
The same is true for science.
According to Sagan, “How Newton was buffeted by the intellectual currents of his time is of course of interest to the historian of ideas,” but it has little to do with the “truth of his propositions.” Similarly, Darwin was a lot better than most of his peers. “But even if he was not, how does it affect the truth or falsify natural selection?”
“Such criticisms amount only to the charge that scientists are human,” writes Sagan.
It’s safe to extend Sagan’s reasoning to include fields that are not just maths and science. As Sagan himself goes on to suggest, “Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves; Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi were imperfect husbands and fathers. The list goes on indefinitely. We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future?”
“Yes, the Darwinian insight can be turned upside down and grotesquely misused: Nazis and other racists may call on “survival of the fittest” to justify genocide. But Darwin did not make Adolf Hitler.” The Wright Brothers did not cause 9/11. “Very likely these or similar events would have transpired with or without them.”
Surely, it is important that we exert some discretion, especially when it comes to safety. “But censoring knowledge, telling people what they must think, is the aperture to thought police, foolish and incompetent decision-making, and long-term decline.”
If I may add to the above list — the current trend of cancel culture.
Here’s what we need to consider: “If we could censor Darwin, what other kinds of knowledge could also be censored? Who would do the censoring? Who among us is wise enough to know which information and insights we can safely dispense with, and which will be necessary ten or a hundred or a thousand years into the future?”
As you ponder over these questions, heed the words of the famous science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, who said, “It takes a calm sense of security to be willing to let each person have his say in speaking and writing, regardless of the content thereof.”
And that’s mostly it. As the newsletter continues to expand and evolve, I will be experimenting with new formats and types of content. So if you notice anything different with this issue, consider it intentional.
Anyway, I spent most of the last week playing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And if you haven’t already tried it, what the hell?
By the way, this piece was not written using AI.
Appreciate your readership.
Until next time,