Our book today is Carl Sagan’s intensely personal and snarkily intelligent 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, a reasoned cry of defiance against what Sagan, approaching the end of his life, viewed as the gathering forces of intolerance and stupidity. Sagan spent his entire life waging a smiling, well-mannered, entirely humanist battle against those forces, but he usually did it through education, through eloquently conveying the wonders of science in such infectiously loving books as The Dragons of Eden and Broca’s Brain and Cosmos. In The Demon-Haunted World, he employs a more personal register, frequently acknowledging the allure of what’s characterized as “the dark”:

Sometimes I dream that I’m talking to my parents, and suddenly – still immersed in the dreamwork – I’m seized by the overpowering realization that they didn’t really die, that it’s all been some kind of horrible mistake. Why, here they are, alive and well, my father making wry jokes, my mother earnestly advising me to wear a muffler because the weather is chilly. When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether there’s any sober evidence for it.

This is the kind of gesture a strong mind can make that a weak one can’t, this concession that an argument can be wrong but also powerful. Sagan would like to see his parents again, and he understands why so many countless millions of people look to concepts of such personal continuation – but he also sees clearly (and flays relentlessly) the con-men and hucksters who prey on those people. The Demon-Haunted World tilts all the time at both opportunism and credulity, devoting quite a bit of its page-count to the then-current fad of alien abduction, for instance. Sagan notes the similarity of alien abduction accounts to earlier accounts of changeling babies, or demonic possession. He can’t help but notice how similar the alien abduction stories are to each other, and the similarities depress him:

Despite this apparent variety of extraterrestrials, the UFO abduction syndrome portrays, it seems to me, a banal Universe. The form of the supposed aliens is marked by a failure of the imagination and a preoccupation with human concerns. Not a single being presented in all these accounts is as astonishing as a cockatoo would be if you had never before beheld a bird. Any protozoology or bacteriology or mycology textbook is filled with wonders that far outshine them most exotic  descriptions of the alien abductionists. The believers take the common elements in their stories as tokens of verisimilitude, rather than as evidence that they have contrived their stories out of a shared culture and biology.

(Virtually all the calm sense and open wonder of Sagan’s best writing is well summarized by that great line “Not a single being presented in all these accounts is as astonishing as a cockatoo would be if you had never before beheld a bird” – it’s the quintessential Sagan appeal to the glories of the world we all share)

In The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan is alarmed to see the growing alliance between stupidity and official power; he sees the constant migration of hucksters into education boards and the halls of elected power. The book ends with many of these kinds of warnings against lazily frittering away the very safeguards that protect the inquiring spirit he values so much:

Whatever the problem, the quick fix is to shave a little freedom off the Bill of Rights. Yes, in 1942, Japanese-Americans were protected by the Bill of Rights, but we locked them up anyway – after all, there was a war on. Yes, there are Constitutional prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure, but we have a war on drugs and violent crime is racing out of control. Yes, there’s freedom of speech, but we don’t want foreign authors here, spouting alien ideologies, do we? The pretexts change from year to year, but the result remains the same: concentrating more power in fewer hands and suppressing diversity of opinion – even though experience plainly shows the dangers of such a course of action.

Sagan died in the winter of 1996, and re-reading The Demon-Haunted World, it’s impossible not to think about how dark the world has often been in the decades since then. The candle-flame represented by this book seems more than ever in danger of flickering out. But the book is still here, and reading it is still a warming pleasure.