thiggibooks 's review for:

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

3.0

hopeful slow-paced

---

I love Carl Sagan and his commitment to both the skepticism and wonder of science. In today's political climate of weaponized ignorance, I expected the Demon-Haunted World to be more relevant than ever and hoped re-reading it would yield helpful insights, but I'm afraid to say it is not up to the task. 

The chapters on The Most Precious Thing, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, and Science and Witchcraft are perhaps the most relevant today. 

But the book elsewhere chooses targets that are less relevant (e.g., belief in God and alien abductions) or wholly out of step (e.g., downplaying the prevalence of child abuse). For these targets, his method of topic-specific refutation is of questionable persuasive value, even if people could be made to pay attention, and anyway the arguments he makes are not directly addressed to today's strains of pseudoscience (e.g., antivaxxers). 

I was hoping for a study of why people believe nonsense and how they can be persuaded to change their minds, not a rational argument about why other people's views are nonsense. 

Fundamentally, there are powerful interests who benefit from public ignorance and illiberalism. Sagan bumps up against several examples, but never asks why Rupert Murdoch would air footage of an alien autopsy, nor does he recommend how to counteract the deliberate misinformation of the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. 

Thirty years after publication, the specific pseudoscientific beliefs have changed, but the perils for our society and government have grown.