Richard Dawkin's Review
Richard Lewontin's New York Review piece
Another review by Jeff Schult

This books cover, on which the name of the author is in bigger type than the title, provokes skepticism about the prospect that the book's contents will live up to expectations for Carl Sagan. As a long-time Sagan fan, I can report that I was not disappointed. Readers get to experience the wonder of discovery as they follow Sagan from his boy-hood visit to the 1939 World's Fair and into battle with an army of demons from the enveloping darkness of post-Cold War America.

Sagan's career as a planetary astronomer has been a spring-board for his public service as a popularizer of science through books such as The Dragons of Eden, the phenomenal TV series Cosmos, and his essays in Parade magazine. Feedback from the widely-read Parade essays has given Sagan a unique understanding of the mind-set of Americans as related to issues like pseudoscience and education.

Human nature itself is the source of the demons that haunt our world.
Sagan relates many enjoyable tales of scientific discovery that show how learning about the universe allows people to replace mistaken pseudoscience-based beliefs with the more surprising and wonderful truth. Many of today's favorite pop-culture demons are debunked including the mysterious alien visitors who amuse themselves by eviscerating livestock or making crop circles in wheat fields.

One well-developed example is comparison of the current trendy craze of belief in aliens who abduct sleepers from their beds and the out-of-fashion belief in witches. Sagan argues that such demons are created as natural side effects of the physiology of our brains. These side effects of brain function often have their origins in frighteningly realistic brain-generated nightmares and hallucinations. Depending on the century and the cultural setting, the possessed describe their mental experiences in terms of demons: either space aliens or witches, and Sagan shows that the descriptions are remarkably similar.

After equipping his readers with a baloney detection kit for their struggle against the demons of pseudoscience and mysticism, Sagan moves on to a detailed discussion of the role of education and scientific methods in a democratic society. Sagan describes how the methods of
investigation that are integral to the remarkable success of science can also be applied to social and economic issues so as to promote personal freedom and democracy.

Sagan emphasizes the fact that when America stepped onto the world scene, its open society was able to use science, technology, and its educated population to defeat Hitler and the Evil Empire. Sagan laments the fact that even after these victories, so many Americans are turning away from science and education.
As an outspoken guardian against some of the most demonic technological excesses of the 20th century Sagan has fought against the idea of being able to win a thermonuclear war by improving the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction with the addition of a Star Wars defense system. Readers follow Sagan on a voyage of discovering what must be done so that the cumbersome institutions of democracy can keep up with the fast pace of technological change.

Sagan's hope for our demon-haunted world lies in a revival of Jeffersonian Democracy and a return to America's commitment to education as a way of trying to assure that Americans remain free and not dominated by mysticism, an elite of technocrats, or some other authoritarian group. But it remains to be seen if education in Americacan respond successfully to the challenge of rapid technological and social change.

Television feeds today's pop-culture hunger for stories of alien invaders from space (above). Witch trials (below) once provided popular live theater. Sagan describes belief in aliens and witches as examples of demons that can be confronted by skepticism and vanquished by the methods of science. For Sagan, the results of science and technology are more wonderful than fantasy demons.

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Sagan documents the fact that societies like Japan's are doing much better than Americas at maintaining a well educated population. Sagan points out that if we could just let children keep their innate senses of wonder and skepticism alive, then many of our problems in education would be solved. Sagan discusses new tools to slay the demon of ignorance, such as proven programs for at-risk children that teach literacy to children and their parents at the same time.

Sagan is disappointed that more Americans do not seek a rigorous education system like that of the Japanese. He frets that too many Americans continue to abandon the technological fast-track and drift into mysticism. Sagan hopes that the continued efforts of educators and popularizers of science will counter this threat of declining education.

Sagan touches on the prickly issue of When Scientists Know Sin. The very Alliance between Big Science, Big Government, and Big Business that won the Cold War came at the price of some of the personal freedom that America was founded on. With respect to the demonic excesses of this Alliance, Sagan quotes the CIA Inspector General, "absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely". Sagan uses Edward Teller's love affair with the Hydrogen Bomb as a telling example of this problem. Sagan tries to show that when tempered by a strong democracy, science can be a candle in the dark (as suggested by the book's subtitle) even when successive generations of children have grown up in fear of this flame that has grown to include the image of a star ignited over Hiroshima.

Sagan's plan for confronting America's demons is essentially a timely attempt at re-animation of what worked to make the birth of democracy in America possible. It is hard to fault Sagan's plan, as far as it goes, but 1996 is not 1776. Hopefully, as Americans read Sagan's powerful ideas they will be stimulated to continue creating new demon-slaying tools that will allow for America's future to live up to the high standards and expectations set forth by the Founding Fathers and reiterated by Carl Sagan.

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