Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
story, especially when some amazing claim to pseudoscience is
adjudged newsworthy. It used to be (and for much of the global
news media it still is) that every levitating guru, visiting alien,
channeller and faith-healer, when covered by the media, would be
treated nonsubstantively and uncritically. There would be no
institutional memory at the television studio or newspaper or
magazine about other, similar claims previously shown to be
scams and bamboozles. CSICOP represents a counterbalance,
although not yet nearly a loud enough voice, to the pseudoscience
gullibility that seems second nature to so much of the media.
One of my favourite cartoons shows a fortune-teller scrutinizing
the mark's palm and gravely concluding, 'You are very gullible.'
CSICOP publishes a bi-monthly periodical called The Skeptical
Inquirer. On the day it arrives, I take it home from the office and
pore through its pages, wondering what new misunderstandings
will be revealed. There's always another bamboozle that I never
thought of. Crop circles! Aliens have come and made perfect
circles and mathematical messages ... in wheat! Who would have
thought it? So unlikely an artistic medium. Or they've come and
eviscerated cows - on a large scale, systematically. Farmers are
furious. At first, I'm impressed by the inventiveness of the stories.
But then, on more sober reflection, it always strikes me how dull
and routine these accounts are; what a compilation of unimaginative
stale ideas, chauvinisms, hopes and fears dressed up as facts.
The contentions, from this point of view, are suspect on their face.
That's all they can conceive the extraterrestrials doing . . . making
circles in wheat? What a failure of the imagination! With every
issue, another facet of pseudoscience is revealed and criticized.
And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in
its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on
the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid
doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if
not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not
get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent
minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the
beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and
superstition might be much more widely accepted.
If we understand this, then of course we feel the uncertainty and
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