Influences: Robert Tracinski
How Carl Sagan Ruined Science
This is Part 4 in a series where I explain some of the influences and experiences I have had over 40+ years of studying science. You can find Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 in these links.
My last essay I made the claim that Carl Sagan had a strong influence on the culture highlighting positive aspects and some unintended consequences. He succeeded in getting the public excited about the wonder of science. But he failed to communicate the language and methods of science. In this essay, I go over an article by Robert Tracinski that offers one explanation why Carl Sagan’s influence didn’t result in a scientifically literate culture.
The 2017 March for Science struck me as strange when I first heard of it. Science is an activity of the mind, not the body. Scientists don’t march. They think. Robert Tracinski managed to capture the essence of this absurdity in an article called The ‘March For Science’ Shows How Carl Sagan Ruined Science. (I take some liberties pulling quotes from this essay to make my point. I recommend the reader review his original essay to determine if I mis-represent his thoughts.)
“[Sagan] is remembered as a great popularizer of science, explaining the achievements of physics, mathematics, and astronomy in glowing, inspirational terms. But he faced the basic problem of all such popularizers.
“Science has its own unique language and methods: . . . The reason science tends to be opaque to the public is because it ultimately requires that they understand its language and learn to use its methods.”
When I read this article for the first time, it became clear why there was conflict between opposing sides of the COVID and climate debates. People on both sides do not understand the language and methods of science. They use catch phrases or post graphs, charts and diagrams that appear to communicate an understanding, but they fail to communicate the context of these materials. Tracinski goes on,
. . . [To make science more appealing to the public you] turn science into something they can understand. You make it into a narrative, a story.”
“Sagan mostly turned [science] . . . into a narrative of good guys versus bad guys, of the forces of light and progress against closed-minded reactionaries.”
This is a very appealing narrative. Who doesn’t like to think of themselves as the ‘good guy’. And that is exactly how the arguments surrounding climate and COVID are couched. “Climate change is an existential threat brought on by the big bad oil companies who just want to maintain control and profits”. Implicit in this statement is that ‘I’ am the good guy fighting against this evil. “COVID is just another example of big bad pharmaceutical companies grabbing government money and pushing flawed products on the public”. This also casts the speaker as nobly standing against closed-minded reactionaries. This is the type of narrative playing in the back of the mind. There are attempts to use science as window dressing to justify one’s position. But ultimately, the person is anxious to defend their narrative, not explain the science.
This state of affairs didn’t come out of the blue. The March for Science is just the culmination of decades of science being co-opted for political purposes. The 1960s and early 1970s saw the rise of the environmental movement. Prominent voices such as Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich popularized the notion that humans were causing extinctions and environmental degradation and were a general blight on the planet. Earth Day was established in 1970 as a result. Their books were used to justify wide ranging new regulations on pesticides, air and water. Whole new government bureaucracies were created across Western countries to protect the environment. Politicians who sought an ever-larger role for government learned a dubious lesson during this period – wrap your ambitions in science to successfully implement your ideas.
Carson and Erhlich offered a message of doom and gloom. Their warnings of impending disaster were enough to establish new Federal agencies and push through major environmental legislation. But it lost momentum in the late 1970s and 80s because doom and gloom can only take you so far. A positive message is necessary to achieve long-term political goals. And Carl Sagan provided just that sort of narrative.
Sagan changed the tone from one of worry and concern to wonder and awe. His stories of Kepler and Galileo helped personify the subject of astronomy. He made genetics tangible using interesting analogues. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was made intelligible with his wonderful narration. Cosmos and Carl Sagan’s other works managed to ignite the public imagination in a way that Carson and Ehrlich could never do. He had managed to cast a positive light on science. Sagan became a celebrity that the public admired and was the go-to authority on science.
But, Carl Sagan wasn’t perfect. His political views tainted some of his work. As Tracinski points out, “[Sagan] used “Cosmos” as a platform for the Cold War-era moral equivalence of the “anti-nuclear” movement and homilies about environmentalism.”
This is why I say that Sagan was a welcome ally to the politicians. He provided an opening for those who wanted to use science for political gain. Later in the article, Tracinski elaborates,
“[Sagan] forgot his own admonitions about following the evidence wherever it leads, and indulged the conceit that science would just happen to line up neatly with his own political preferences. What he didn’t do was entertain the possibility that human beings aren’t destroying the planet or cruising toward planetary catastrophe. He did not even consider this null hypothesis as a possibility.”
Sagan’s success set the template for future science communicators. Those celebrity scientists who followed in the 1990s and early 2000s copied Sagan’s approach. But they became less interested in actual science and placed increasing importance on the narrative. Tracinski puts it this way,
“Sagan clearly hoped that his stirring narrative about science would inspire young people to go beyond and beneath the narrative and learn the actual method of science. Instead, his successors saw the success of his approach—in terms of attention and celebrity and moral authority—and chose to use the narrative as a substitute for science.”
This was apparent to me the first time I saw a promotional video for a Master Class taught by Neil deGrasse Tyson. His opening statement in that video was, “One of the great challenges is knowing enough about a subject to think you’re right, but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong.” He emphasizes that last part pointing into the camera and looking the viewer dead in the eye – “you’re wrong!”. Neil deGrasse Tyson comes off as a stern taskmaster, more interested in teaching dogma than science. Later in the same video, deGrasse Tyson claims that this course will “teach you how to think”, which sounds more like indoctrination. This type of attitude contributes to the tensions surrounding COVID and climate change.
To change this state of affairs, it is going to require a new approach. Educators need to use engaging stories and narratives to ignite an interest in science. But, the narration must be used as a vehicle to dive into the language and methods of science. Further, it has become more important for all of us to understand the proper role of science in society. Science will continue to be used as cover for the politically ambitious until that role is firmly fixed in the public mind.
In my next essay, I explore how and why science and politics have become so entangled. I will use three lectures (turned into books) by C.P. Snow to explain his perspective on Science and Government. The three lectures/books are titled The Two Cultures (Cambridge Press, 1959), Science and Government (Harvard Press, 1961) and The State of Siege (Scribner’s, 1968). This series of lectures helped shape my view on government science.