The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [201]
It’s hard to tell how it’s going to turn out.
The business of scepticism is to be dangerous. Scepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of sceptical thought, they will probably not restrict their scepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials and 35,000-year-old channellees. Maybe they’ll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious .nsdtutions. Perhaps they’ll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?
Ethnocentrism, xenophobia and nationalism are these days rife in many parts of the world. Government repression of unpopular views is still widespread. False or misleading memories are inculcated. For the defenders of such attitudes, science is disturbing. It claims access to truths that are largely independent of ethnic or cultural biases. By its very nature, science transcends national boundaries. Put scientists working in the same field of study together in a room and even if they share no common spoken language, they will find a way to communicate. Science itself is a transnational language. Scientists are naturally cosmopolitan in attitude and are more likely to see through efforts to divide the human family into many small and warring factions. ‘There is no national science,’ said the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, ‘just as there is no national multiplication table.’ (Likewise, for many, there is no such thing as a national religion, although the religion of nationalism has millions of adherents.)
In disproportionate numbers, scientists are found in the ranks of social critics (or, less charitably, ‘dissidents’), challenging the policies and myths of their own nations. The heroic names of the physicists Andrei Sakharov’ in the former USSR, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard in the United States, and Fang Li-zhu in China spring readily enough to mind, the first and last risking their lives. Especially in the aftermath of the invention of nuclear weapons, scientists have been portrayed as ethical cretins. This is an injustice, considering all those who, sometimes at considerable personal peril, have spoken out against their own countries’ misapplications of science and technology.
[* As a much-decorated ‘Hero’ of the Soviet Union, and privy to its nuclear secrets, Sakharov in the Cold War year 1968 boldly wrote - in a book published in the West and widely distributed in samizdal in the USSR - ‘Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of peoples by the mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demogogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships.’ He was thinking of both East and West. I would add that free thought is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for democracy.]
For example, the chemist Linus Pauling (1901-94) was, more than any other person, responsible for the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which halted above-ground explosions of nuclear weapons by the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. He mounted a blistering campaign of moral outrage and scientific data, made more credible by the fact that he was a Nobel laureate. In the American press, he was generally vilified for his troubles, and in the 1950s the State Department cancelled his passport because he had been insufficiently anti-communist. His Nobel Prize was awarded for the application of quantum mechanical insights - resonances, and what is called hybridization of orbitals