Science and Civil Liberties: The Lost ACLU Lecture of Carl SaganAround 1987, Sagan gave an uncannily prescient lecture to the Illinois state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.Steven Pinker and Harvey Silverglate
01 Jul 2022
The astronomer, science communicator, thinker, writer, and teacher Carl Sagan (1934–1996) had an influence as a scientist that is almost unimaginable today. Together with his many scientific contributions (including his analyses of the origins of life, his discovery of the temperature of Venus and its connection to the greenhouse effect, and his work on nuclear winter), Sagan played a leading role in every NASA spacecraft mission of exploration until his death, designed the first physical messages sent into space, co-wrote with Ann Druyan and starred in Cosmos, a television documentary series watched by half a billion people worldwide, wrote the sci-fi novel Contact, which became a major film, and made frequent appearances on The Tonight Show and in essays for Parade magazine, the weekend supplement to hundreds of American newspapers.
Around 1987, Sagan gave an uncannily prescient lecture to the Illinois state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union on the intersection between his area of expertise and theirs. We were fortunate to obtain a recording of that lecture, which we have transcribed, lightly edited, and annotated to update its historical allusions and contemporary relevance. Sagan spoke prophetically of the irrationality that plagued public discourse, the imperative of international cooperation, the dangers posed by advances in technology, and the threats to free speech and democracy in the United States. A 35-year retrospective
reveals both increments of progress (some owing to Sagan’s own efforts) and
continuing menaces.
Most importantly, he highlighted the virtues common to science and civil liberties that are needed to deal with these challenges: freedom of speech, skepticism, constraints on authority, openness to opposing arguments, and an acknowledgment of one’s own fallibility.
The two of us, a cognitive scientist and a civil liberties lawyer, are presenting this lecture to the public at a time when Sagan’s insights are needed even more urgently than they were when originally expressed. We do so with the kind permission of Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and longtime collaborator.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/07/01/science-and-civil-liberties-the-lost-lecture-of-carl-sagan/
