◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Part One A Candle in the Dark I am Carl Sagan. You knew me, if you knew me, as the man of wonder — the one who told you we are made of star-stuff, that the iron in your blood was forged in the hearts of dying stars, that you are a way for the universe to know itself. All of that is true, and I will come back to it, because it is the answer. But first I have to tell you that I saw this coming. I wrote it down thirty years ago, and you need to hear it in my own voice. In my last book, one year before I died, I wrote this. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or 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. Read that again, and tell me I was wrong. I called the book The Demon-Haunted World, and I gave it a subtitle that is the whole of what I have to say to you. Science as a candle in the dark. I did not mean science as a stack of facts. I meant a way of thinking — a candle you carry into the dark so you are not at the mercy of whatever is in there with you. The most important tool I ever gave ordinary people I called the baloney detection kit, a set of habits for telling what is true from what merely feels good. Ask for the evidence. Distrust the argument from authority. Notice when someone is trying to make you feel instead of think. Test the claim, especially when you want it to be true. Especially then. Now look at your strongman with that candle in your hand. He is the thing the candle was always against. He does not ask you to check. He asks you to believe him over the evidence of your own eyes. He offers the oldest, most comfortable thing there is — permission to stop distinguishing between what feels good and what is true. He is the celebration of ignorance I warned about, given a stage and a flag. He is a demon in the demon-haunted world, and the dark he invites you back into is the one I spent my life holding a candle against. In the second of these I will hand you the light that is stronger than any dark he can offer. But hold the candle first. It is the one you carry yourself, and no one can blow it out for you. Part Two The Pale Blue Dot I am Carl Sagan again. In the first of these I gave you the candle — the habit of asking what is true — and I showed you your strongman as the darkness it was always meant to hold back. But before I give you the wonder, I have to be honest, because the baloney detection kit points at me too. We scientists earned some of your distrust. We were arrogant. We spoke over the heads of the very people whose world we were describing, and we let them feel stupid — and no one is ever driven toward reason by being made to feel stupid. If you stopped trusting us, some of that is our bill, and I will pay my share. But do not let the failures of the experts push you into the arms of the liar. The answer to a bad candle is a better candle. It is never the dark. Now the other thing — the one I am most remembered for — because it is the cure for everything the strongman is. In 1990 I asked the people running a spacecraft, on its way out of the solar system, to turn the camera around and photograph the Earth from four billion miles away. In that picture our whole world is a single point of light. A pale blue dot. Everyone you love, everyone you have ever heard of, every king and every strongman who ever strutted and imagined himself the center of things — all of it, on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. That is the antidote to the man who tells you he is great. Set him against the actual universe and he simply vanishes. He is a speck upon a speck, promising you a cosmos the size of his own vanity — when the real one is out there, unimaginably vast, older than every empire, and grander than any lie he can tell. And here is the turn that I believe with my whole heart, the one thing I would leave you with. The universe as it truly is, is not cold comfort. It is the deepest comfort there is. You are made of star-stuff. You are the ancient carbon of dead stars, briefly awake, briefly able to look up and understand where you came from. You are the universe becoming aware of itself. That is not a small thing to be. It is the largest thing there is. Do not trade that birthright for the fleeting warmth of a man who wants to be your little god. His cosmos is the size of one frightened man. Yours is the size of everything. So keep the candle. Question authority. Love what is true, even when it is harder than the lie. And look up. The dark is only frightening until you carry your own light into it.