A Haunting Voice From the Past . . . .

The Gadfly ran across this amazing video while tramping around the intertoobs this morning.  It is amazing because it is from 17 years ago and it is of a very wise man foretelling circumstances which frighteningly appear to be coming to fruition in contemporary American society today.

Watch:





That was astronomer, astrophysicist and scientific skeptical thinker Carl Sagan in an interview with Charlie Rose shortly before his death in 1996 at the too young age of 62.

The Gadfly considers himself blessed to have, as an impressionable young lad, discovered Carl Sagan as an author, skeptical inquiry thinker and host of the PBS series 'Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.'

At a time when The Gadfly was trying to find the meaning of his existence and his place in an intimidating and confusing world, Carl Sagan's love of the beauty of the natural world around us, his intense desire to learn all that could be learned about the scientific foundations which comprise our solar system, and giddy wonderment at the speculation of what lay beyond, inspired The Gadfly to choose the joy-filled, inspiriting path of knowledge and scientific inquiry as opposed to the bleak and hopeless path of superstition and learned ignorance.  And not a day goes by that The Gadfly does not feel gratitude to Carl Sagan for opening his eyes, his mind and his heart to something that is much grander than his own infinitesimally small individual existence.

But getting back to this video -- it is a stark warning from Sagan that the American, and by proxy the human, experiment is doomed if unbridled ignorance and superstition, combined with a wholesale disregard of the responsibility to properly educate our citizenry, are allowed to propagate and dominate the public discourse and American socio-economic policies, at the expense of scientific inquiry and rational thought.

And when you take a cold, hard analytical look at how the American conservative movement, over the past three decades, has veered even harder right by openly embracing biblical fundamentalism, exhibiting proud disdain for established science, entrenching their belief in pseudo sciences like creationism, and sacrificing the rock solid efficacy of scientific skeptical inquiry on the altar of their gods -- unfettered free-market capitalism and political tribalism, it truly does give cause for The Gadfly to ponder the prospect that life for The Gadfly's grandchildren could very well be a life of increasingly regressive misery and meager existence.

Change begins with standing up and speaking out for what you know is morally right and fair and being unafraid to confront the ignorance and the narrow-minded, selfish tribalism, which like a cancer, is slowly consuming our society from within.

Carl Sagan > Quotes > “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

----TFG