Days of Future Past

I recently read this quote,

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), the lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstitions, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

Carl Sagan, the famous astrophysicist and popular science writer and presenter, wrote this in his book “Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” in 1995. The number of predictions in this passage which have come true is just staggering. Some of them took until the age of Trump to come to fruition, while many of them have been slowly taking hold since the 1980s. Superstition was already thriving in the American halls of power during Sagan’s time because then President Ronald Reagan regularly made policy and scheduling decisions based on advice from an astrologer.

The first part of the quote is demonstrably accurate. America is largely a service and information economy and most of its manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to other countries. According to The Balance, a reputable financial advice and news website based in New York City, manufacturing used to be the largest component of the U.S. economy. In 1970 it made up 24.3% of America’s GDP, but by 2018 that percentage had shrunk by half. Several economic changes put in place by Reagan’s government made this decline inevitable. It was none the less insightful of Sagan, not an expert in economics by any stretch, to connect the dots from Republican financial policies enacted in the 1980’s to the current dismal state of American manufacturing.

There actually are several very powerful and intrusive technologies which are employed exclusively by select groups, bearing out Sagan’s next prediction. Online retailers and social media platforms employ algorithms to collect personal data about their users, and the U.S. military uses state-of-the-art drones and GPS tracking to target their enemies. Also, increasing numbers of governments and law enforcement agencies have huge banks of footage taken daily by CCT cameras. They use sophisticated facial recognition programs to tag and sort these images, claiming they will only use such information for the greater good, such as to catch criminals. Then there is the information leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 concerning the existence of numerous global surveillance programs employed by the National Security Agency to covertly amass information about private citizens.

I barely even need to address the next bit about people not being able to “…knowledgeably question those in authority” because it is so clearly true. Many reporters either won’t or can’t ask probing questions in the polarized reality of present-day American journalism. Remember when, in a 2016 Republican debate, the moderators allowed Trump and Rubio to make leering innuendos about one another’s penises? Trump gave a disastrous interview in August of 2020 to Axios, one of the few remaining news outlets which still asks challenging questions. He repeatedly pointed to graphs which showed that the US was doing more testing than any other country, and doggedly maintained that this proved his administration’s efficacy. The interviewer kept circling back to the obvious truth that the only valid gauge for the success of any leader’s Covid-19 response was not the number of tests administered, but rather how many people had died. Trump looked very bad by this metric, so he licked his wounds by running back to the safety of Fox News where a fawning host lobbed fatuous softball questions like, “…are you going to commit more resources to exploring UFO’s and open the documents to the public?”.

There are so many examples of American society slipping into “…superstition and darkness” that it is hard for me to choose just two. In 2007, Georgia governor Sonny Perdue led a lengthy and well-attended church service praying for rain, and in 2011 Rick Perry employed the same tactic in Texas. The state was in the midst of a profound drought when Perry asked that all Texans pray, “…for the healing of our land”, and for God to give them rain. Unsurprisingly the prayers didn’t work and the drought continued to worsen over the next four months. It is beyond alarming that elected officials are openly suggesting that prayer is a viable solution to real-world problems, and perhaps even more disturbing that constituents are fine with this approach.

Sometimes blind faith can lead one down a superstitious or fact-denying path, but increasingly social media and the internet have come to serve that function. NBA superstar Kyrie Irving insisted that the world was flat in 2017. He received a lot of push-back from parents and educators of young fans who believed him, and Irving apologized in response, saying he was sorry for any confusion he may have caused. What he never said, however, was that he was wrong. His exact words were, “And even if you believe in that, just don’t come out and say that stuff. That’s for intimate conversation.” In other words, the only mistake he made was voicing his belief in public. The shape of the earth is an irrefutable fact, yet here is an influential person who, from “…watching a whole bunch of Instagram videos”, has formed a belief which was empirically proven wrong in 1522 when Magellan circumnavigated the globe. Irving is just one amongst many who, as Sagan writes, “…is unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true”. Beliefs and opinions have become conflated with facts.

The next part of Sagan’s quote implicates the media in this incremental “dumbing down” process. There is currently very little television with “substantive” content, and 10-second sound bites have proliferated with the number of platforms vying for our attention. As for “lowest common denominator programming”, I could fill up the rest of this page with the titles of shows whose sole purpose is to pander to their audiences’ most prurient interests. The “Real Housewives” series, “The Bachelor”, “Jersey Shore”, “Survivor”, and “Big Brother” immediately come to mind, but the list goes on and on.

Sagan’s concern about the credulous consumption of “pseudoscience” has proven prophetic. Perhaps the best known and most damaging example of this phenomenon is the anti-vaccination movement. English physician Andrew Wakefield published a study in the highly-regarded British medical journal The Lancet in 1998. Wakefield’s research found that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was causing autism. No other lab could reproduce Wakefield’s results, so the British General Medicine Council, or GMC, launched an investigation into his research and practice. In 2010 the GMC found Wakefield had been dishonest in his research, had acted against his patients’ best interests and had mistreated developmentally delayed children, and had “…failed in his duties as a responsible consultant.” The Lancet immediately retracted Wakefield’s findings, and he was barred from practicing medicine in the U.K. A British court found that there was “…no respectable body of opinion” to support Dr. Wakefield’s assertion that the “…MMR vaccine and autism/enterocolitis are causally linked.” In other words, the man and his findings were completely discredited.

This is when Jenny McCarthy took over the story. Ms. McCarthy is an American B-list celebrity whose career began when she appeared in Playboy. She is currently most famous for being Mrs. Donnie Wahlberg, and has absolutely no medical expertise whatsoever. McCarthy’s son was diagnosed with autism in 2005. Experts have since agreed that the boy’s symptoms are more in keeping with something called Landau-Kleffner Syndrome, and many have suggested that he was misdiagnosed. McCarthy still insists that her son is autistic, however, and maintains he was made so by the MMR vaccine. She was the face of the pre-Covid anti-vaxxer movement, and promulgated her dangerous views on various talk shows and in her book on the subject.

The dark and harmful side to McCarthy’s stance on vaccination is that many people believe her despite all scientific evidence to the contrary and the public health community’s constant efforts to debunk her claims. The anti-vaxxers she has thus spawned are responsible for ever-increasing and sometimes deadly outbreaks of diseases which would otherwise have been eradicated. A 2019 CDC report confirms 1,282 cases of measles in 31 states – the highest number reported in the U.S. since 1992. The vast majority of these outbreaks cropped up amongst unvaccinated individuals. Vaccine hesitancy appears in a World Health Organization report entitled “Ten Threats to Global Health in 2019”, which states,

“Vaccine hesitancy – the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines – threatens to reverse progress made in tackling vaccine-preventable diseases. Vaccination is one of the most cost-efficient ways of avoiding disease – it currently prevents 2-3 million deaths a year, and a further 1.5 million could be avoided if global coverage of vaccinations improved.”

The popularity of the pseudoscience grounding the anti-vaxxer movement continues to grow, and is responsible for untold thousands of preventable deaths due to Covid-19.

Sagan was referring largely to popular movies and TV shows of the day when he suggested that a “celebration of ignorance” was especially culpable in the “dumbing down of America”. In 1994, the year before Sagan wrote his book, “Beavis and Butt-Head” began its eight year run on MTV, and both “Forrest Gump” and “Dumb and Dumber” were hugely successful. All three of these feature main characters with very low IQs. “The Simpsons”, “Family Guy” and “South Park” all provide biting social commentary, but I fear only their more intelligent fans pick up on this subtext. The amount of idiocy presented on the surface of these programs may well have helped to normalize stupidity in general to a largely non-discerning audience.

Almost all of the fears Sagan enumerates in the quote from “Demon Haunted World” have unfortunately come to pass. This passage proves how acutely attuned he was to the nature of his times, the character of the American people, and the price they would eventually pay for walking heedlessly down such a misguided and self-defeating path. Sagan again proved prescient in the final interview he gave before his death in December of 1996. He said,

“If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.”

Enter Donald Trump.