![]() That’s the beginning of a chilling excerpt from Sagan’s 1995 book, “The Demon-Haunted World,” which was dug up and splashed across social media this week. ![]() ![]() The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantative content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.’ ‘I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or my grandchildren’s time - when the United States is a service and information economy when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. We might want to add soothsayer to the list. The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan: 9780345409461 : Books A prescient warning of a future we now inhabit, where fake news stories and Internet conspiracy theories play to a disaffected American populace A. The late Carl Sagan was a celebrated astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, TV narrator and best-selling author. ![]()
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