Colombia: Paramilitaries "allies" of the Government

October 16, 2005

Paramilitaries as Proxies
Declassified evidence on the Colombian army's anti-guerrilla "allies"

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 166

For more information contact
Michael Evans - 202/994-7029

Posted - October 16, 2005
Washington, DC

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Today, the Colombia Documentation Project proudly announces the first in a series of articles to be published in collaboration with Semana, Colombia's leading news magazine. The column, which will appear monthly on Semana.com, is the result of a mutual desire to publish and disseminate in Colombia declassified information now emerging from United States files about the major issues in the U.S.-Colombia relationship, including the drug war, security assistance programs, human rights and impunity.

The first article, published here in English and in Spanish at Semana.com, reveals new information about the hidden history of collaboration between Colombain security forces and their paramilitary allies, offering a unique and intimate perspective on the institutional pressures that encouraged cooperation with paramilitary atrocities.

Each month, the National Security Archive will simultaneously publish an English-language version of the article along with scanned images of the documents cited in the column. Watch this space for upcoming articles or sign up to receive the National Security Archive's free email update every time the website is updated with new material.

Click here to read the article

The Colombia Documentation Project

Michael Evans, project director
(mevans@gwu.edu)
About the Project - The National Security Archive's Colombia Project seeks to identify and obtain the release of documents from secret government archives on United States policy in Colombia and to disseminate these records through publications, conferences and the Archive's web site. Major themes of the project include security assistance, human rights, impunity and counternarcotics programs.

U.S.A. The "Human Rights" Record of the United States in 2005. By: The Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China. 2006

Full text of Human Rights Record of the US in 2005 Following is the full text of the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2005, released by the Information office of China's State Council Thursday. The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2005 The Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China March 9, 2006 People's Daily Online --- http://english.people.com.cn/ On March 8, the U.S. Department of State, posing once again as "the world's judge of human rights," released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2005. As in previous years, the State Department pointed the finger at human rights situations in more than 190 countries and regions, including China, but kept silent on the serious violations of human rights in the United States. To help people realize the true features of this self-styled "guardian of human rights," it is necessary to probe into the human rights abuses in the United States in 2005. I. On Life and Security of Person For a long time, the life and personal security of people of the United States have not been under efficient protection. American society is characterized with rampant violent crimes. Across the country each year, 50,000 suicides and homicides are committed (Va.Violent Deaths Are Mostly Suicides, The Washington Post, October12, 2005). The U.S. Justice Department reported on Sept. 25, 2005 that there were 5,182,670 violent crimes in the United States in 2004. There were 21.4 victims for every 1,000 people aged 12 and older, which amounts to about one violent crime victim for every 47 U.S. citizens (Crime Rate Remains at 2003 Level, Study Says, The Washington Post, September 26, 2005). According to figures released by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), murder increased by 2.1 percent across the United States during the first six months of 2005, compared with the same period of 2004. A total of 4,080 murders were reported in cities with more than 10,000 people, while homicides were up 13 percent in cities with a population of 10,000 or less (Murder Rate in Small Cities Jumps 13%, USA Today, Dec. 20, 2005). The Washington D.C., with a population of less than 600,000, had 194 slayings in 2005 (D. C. Area Slaying Climbed In 2005, The Washington Post, Jan. 2, 2006). In Chicago, the number of various crimes exceeded 125,000 from January to September of 2005, including 352 murders, 11,564 robberies, 8,903 assaults and 534 arsons (http://egov.cityofchicago.org). From January to mid-November of 2005, 334 persons were murdered in Philadelphia, exceeding the total number of murderees in the city in 2004 ( Philly: 334 Killings So Far This Year, Philadelphia Daily News, Nov. 14,2005). During the first half of 2005, 198 murders were reported in Los Angeles, 11 percent more than the same period of 2004 (Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2005). Seventy-two people were murdered in Compton, California, with a population of only 96,000 ( Compton Killings Highest in Years, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 2, 2006). Camden in New Jersey has become the most dangerous city in the United States, with its homicide rate more than ten times the national average and robbery rate, more than seven times the national average (Camden, N.J., Ranked Most Dangerous U.S. City, The Washington Post, Nov. 22, 2005). The United States has the largest number of privately owned guns in the world. According to statistics released in June 2005 by the Brady Campaign, an organization aiming to prevent gun violence, there were approximately 192 million privately owned firearms in the United States (Firearm Facts, Issued by The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, June 2005, in: http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/factsheets/). A survey conducted by the Washington Post and the American Broadcasting Company showed that about ten percent of the surveyed were once shot, and 14 percent threatened by guns. According to figures released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Justice Department in 2005, in the year 2004 the United States recorded 339,200 firearm-related crimes, including 11,300 murders, 162,900 robberies, and 165,000 assaults (Statistics Crimes Committed with Firearms, Issued by U.S. Bureau of Justice, in: http://www.ojb.usdoj.gov/bjs). The Washington Post reported on Dec. 25, 2005 that every year nearly 12,000 Americans use guns to kill people. In the reports of crimes received by American police in 2004, 70 percent of the murders, 41 percent of the robberies and 19 percent of assaults on persons were committed with firearms. The unchecked spread of guns has caused incessant murders. In February 2005, mother and husband of U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow were shot to death at home in Chicago. In March, a rape suspect killed one judge and two others at a courthouse in Fulton County in Atlanta and hijacked four cars to escape. On March 12, a gunman opened fire at a church service being held at the Sheraton Hotel in Brookfield, Wisconsin, killing seven people and injuring four. On March 21, 17-year-old Jeff Weise killed his grandparents and went on a shooting rampage at the Red Lake High School in Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, killing another eight persons including school security guard, teacher and students and injuring 14 others (CNN, March 21, 2005). On April 25, a 14-year-old girl shot her father to death in Colorado. On Christmas Day of 2005, a man shot and killed his mother at home in the suburb of Washington and then drove eight miles to another home and killed three other people, before turning the gun on himself (Washington, AP April 30, 2005). II. On Infringements upon Human Rights by Law Enforcement and Judicial Organs There exist serious infringements upon personal rights and freedoms by law enforcement and judicial organs in the United States. Secret snooping is prevalent and illegal detention occurs from time to time. The recently disclosed Snoopgate scandal has aroused keen attention of the public in the United States. After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the U.S. President has for dozens of times authorized the National Security Agency and other departments to wiretap some domestic phone calls. With this authorization, the National Security Agency may conduct surveillance over phone calls and e-mails of 500 U.S. citizens at a time. It is reported that from 2002 through 2004, there were at least 287 cases in which special agents of FBI were suspected of illegally conducting electronic surveillance. In one of the cases, a FBI agent conducted secret surveillance of an American citizen for five years without notifying the U.S. Department of Justice. On Dec. 21, 2005, the U.S. Senate voted to extend the Patriot Act, a move that aroused keen concern of public opinion. The law makes it easier for FBI agents to monitor phone calls and e-mails, to search homes and offices, and to obtain the business records of terrorism suspects. (Senate Votes to Extend Patriotic Act for 6 Months, The Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2005). According to a report of the U.S. National Broadcasting Company on Dec. 13, 2005, the U.S. Defense Department had been secretly collecting information about U.S. citizens opposing the Iraq war and secretly monitoring all meetings for peace and against the war. According to a report of the New York Times, in recent years, FBI had been collecting information on large numbers of non-governmental organizations that participated in anti-war demonstrations everywhere in the United States through its monitoring network and other channels. The volume of collected information is stunning. (The Fog of False Choices, The New York Times, Editorial, Dec. 20, 2005). Among it, there are 2,400 pages of information on Greenpeace, an environmental group. On Jan. 9, 2006, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection announced that in the "anti-terrorism" fight the U.S. customs has the right to open and inspect incoming private letters, which again sparked protests. (The AP, Jan. 9, 2006.) On Jan. 17, 2006, the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights separately filed suits in U.S. district court for eastern Michigan and a federal court against the U.S. President and heads of security agencies for spying on U.S. citizens. Police abuse is also very common in the United States. According to a report of the Los Angeles Times on July 14, 2005, Los Angeles police shot dead the 19-month-old daughter of a suspect when trying to arrest the suspect, which triggered public outcry. On Oct. 9, five New Orleans police officers battered a 64-year-old retired teacher on the street while trying to arrest him, and he suffered injuries. (AP, Oct. 9, 2005) The incident caught the attention of public opinion. On Dec. 26, a New Orleans Police officer fired at least six shots at a black man carrying a knife and killed him. Cases of police abuse are usually hard to get just settlement. According to a report of the Los Angeles Times on March 31, 2005, only eight out of more than 200 charges against police mistreatment and abuse were resolved, and the rest were either shelved or settled privately. There exist obvious injustice and frequent rights infringements in the judiciary system. In 2005, the U.S. media disclosed several cases of citizens wrongly convicted. After 24 years in prison, Robert Clark Jr. from Georgia was released after a DNA test proved him innocent. Clark's was one of the longest incarcerations served by the 164 people who have been exonerated by DNA testing. (After 24 Years in Prison, Man Has a Reason to Smile, the New York Times, Dec. 8, 2005). On the night of Dec. 21, 2005, the CNN Larry King Live program interviewed four convicted felons that have recently been proven innocent by DNA evidence after having stayed more than 10 years behind bars. Well-known Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Mark Geragos said during the program that he had seen studies that there are up to 20 percent of wrongful convictions in the United States. (Many Convicted Felons Have Been Proven Innocent by DNA Evidence, CNN Larry King Live, Aired Dec. 21, 2005.) A report of the U.S. Death Penalty Information Center released in October 2005 said the U.S. death penalty system is "woefully short of justice," because of "misconduct in misinforming the juries." (AFP, Oct. 18, 2005) The United States proclaims to be a "paradise of freedom," yet the total number and ratio of its people behind bars both rank the first in the world. According to data released by the statistics bureau of the U.S. Justice Department on Oct. 23, 2005, the total number of people incarcerated in the United States was 2,267,787 at the end of 2004. This meant an incarceration rate of 724 per 100,000, up 18 percent from ten years earlier and 25 percent higher than that of any other nation. (Study Notes Upswing In Arrests of Women, the Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2005.) According to a survey of the New York Times, the number of people sentenced to life in prison had doubled in the United States over the past ten years. (Packing Prisons, Squandering Lives, the Baltimore Sun, Oct. 21, 2005.) From 2003 to 2004, the number of prisoners grew at a rate of 900 each week. In the first half of 2004, the number of newly incarcerated in the 50 states grew 2.3 percent over the same period of the previous year to 48,000. As the prisons were packed, the situation of prisoners worsened. On Dec. 31, 2004, 24 state prison systems were operating at or above their highest capacity. The federal system was 40 percent over capacity. (The Nation's Prison Population Continues Its Slow Growth, U.S. Department of Justice, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs) As the government cut back on expenditure of prisons, some state prison systems reduced input on medical care for prisoners. As a result, a large number of prisoners were infected with tuberculosis or hepatitis. In April 2005, a 44-year-old male inmate died in a prison of New York for lack of timely treatment. In recent years, hundreds of inmates suffered head injuries from maltreatment in New York City alone. In a Rikers Island jail of New York, an inmate was punched on the head by a prison guard and he lost the sight in one eye; an inmate had his eardrum broken and the cheekbone of another inmate was fractured from police maltreatment. (In City Jails, A Question of Force, the New York Times, Oct. 30, 2005.) In Phoenix city, inmates were kept in tents and forced to undertake various sorts of labor, fed with only two meals a day and bereft of any entertainment. (El Universal of Mexico, Aug. 26, 2005.) In August 2005, a Qatar student that had been detained for two years without indictment described the living conditions in the prison: no guarantee of basic life necessities, long-time confinement in a very tiny ward with the longest period lasting 60 days, handcuffed and fettered even in the ward, including during bath. During Hurricane Katrina, between Aug. 29 and Sept. 1, 2005, correctional officers from the New Orleans Sheriff's Department abandoned 600 inmates in a prison, as many were immersed in chest and neck level water and left without food, water, electricity, fresh air, or functioning facilities for four days and nights. Sexual infringement is quite common in prisons. According to a report released by the U.S. Department of Justice in June 2005, an estimated 8,210 allegations of sexual violence were reported by correctional authorities, of which almost 42 percent involved staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct. A report of the Human Rights Watch said that 21 percent of inmates in seven Midwestern prisons in the United States suffered sexual violence perpetrated by inmates of the same sex. III On Political Rights and Freedom The United States has always boasted itself as the "model of democracy" and hawked its mode of democracy to the rest of the world. In fact, American "democracy" is always one for the wealthy and a "game for the rich." The democratic elections in the United States, to a great extent, are driven by money. During the mayoral election of New York City in November 2005, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent 77.89 million U.S. dollars of his fortune for re-election. That came to more than 100 U.S. dollars per vote. The election was termed by the Associated Press as the most expensive mayoral re-election in history. In the race for governor of New Jersey, the dueling multimillionaires spent 75 million U.S. dollars combined, with 40 million dollars by Jon S. Corzine, who won the election. Taking into account the 60 million U.S. dollars he spent on a Senate seat in 2000, Corzine had spent 100 million U.S. dollars in five years for elections. According to a survey, in Washington D.C. a U.S. senator needs about 20 million U.S. dollars to keep the seat in the Senate. The Washington Post criticized the U.S. political system in an editorial: "But a political system that turns elective office into a bauble for purchase is not a healthy one." Decisions of the U.S. Congress and the Administration are deeply influenced by money. It is known to all that in the United States, various firms and interest groups hire public relations and consulting companies to lobby the Congress and the Administration, spending money to influence their decisions and win government contracts. On Jan. 4, 2006, mainstream U.S. media carried reports on super lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleading guilty to three felony charges including a conspiracy involving corruption of public officials and agreeing to cooperate with U.S. prosecutors in investigating members of Congress and aides suspected of corruption. The case is the largest power-for-money scandal in American politics for several decades. It was reported that 20 members of Congress and their aides have been involved in this unusual large-scale scandal. But the Abramoff case is just a tip of an iceberg. According to the Washington Post and the British Observer, lobbying has become a great growth industry with huge profits in Washington. Currently, the number of registered lobbyists has reached 34,750, that comes 60 to 1 compared with the total number of the U.S. federal officials elected. Meanwhile, the lobbyists handle more than two billion U.S. dollars of funds a year. Washington downtown's K Street with many lobbying firms is called "the road to riches" and "the fourth largest power" next to the President, the Congress and the Court. From 1998 to 2004, lobbyists spent 13 billion U.S. dollars to promote realization of their clients' wishes. In 2004, 2.1 billion U.S. dollars was spent on lobbying the federal government and the Congress, and 3 billion U.S. dollars for elections of the President and members of Congress in the United States. The USA Today revealed that since 2000, 5,410 trips of Congress members were financed by undisclosed sources and Congress members have taken 16 million U.S. dollars in privately financed trips. It's a "revolving door" for lobbyists to turn into politicians and retired politicians from government service to engage in influence peddling in the private sector. It was reported that since 1998 more than 2,200 former U.S. government employees have become lobbyists; among them are 273 former White House staff members and 250 former Congress members and department heads from the Executive branch. On Oct. 24, 2005, a national public opinion survey released by the U.S. News and World Report revealed that 73 percent Americans believe their leaders are out of touch with the average person; 64 percent of Americans feel that their leaders are corrupted by power; 62 percent think that leaders seek for increase in personal wealth. A joint Gallup Poll by the USA Today and CNN found job approval for Congress, which has a Republican majority, has fallen to 29 percent, the lowest level since 1994; 49 percent American adults say they believe "most members of Congress are corrupt." Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said it is an offense to democracy to describe the United States as a democracy. The United States flaunts its press freedom but scandals about the U.S. government blocking and manipulating information came out continually. The New York Times reported on March 13, 2005 that the United States is in "a new age of prepackaged TV news." The federal government has aggressively distributed prepackaged news reports to TV stations. At least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years. The U.S. military pays Iraqi newspapers and journalists for the so-called information operations campaign. The Los Angeles Times reported on Nov. 30, 2005 that the U.S. military troops have been writing articles burnishing the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq, sending them to a Washington-based firm, which translates them into Arabic and places them in Baghdad newspapers. It said the military also has purchased an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station "to channel pro-American messages to the Iraqi public." Other reports said that U.S. army officers created an outfit called the Baghdad Press Club that pays members as much as 200 U.S. dollars a month to churn out positive pieces about American military operations. The Washington Post in an editorial called these activities against freedom of the press as "planted propaganda." The U.S. government's ban on different voices through various means has been condemned by the international community. On Nov. 22, 2005, British newspaper the Daily Mirror, citing a "top secret" memo on April 16, 2004 from Downing Street, said the U.S. government wished to bomb the headquarters of Arabic TV station Al-Jazeera in Doha, Qatar, during the Iraqi War to block information about the real situation of the war and remove its negative influence on the U.S. side; the revelation resulted in protests by all the Al-Jazeera staff in more than 30 countries and criticism from the International Federation of Journalists. On Nov. 27, British Observer said Al-Jazeera offices in Baghdad and Kabul had all been bombed by the U.S. military and its journalists detained, threatened, abused and harassed by the U.S. military during the Iraqi war. In fact, U.S. crude intrusion into press freedom happened repeatedly. On April 8, 2003, cameraman Jose Couso of the Spanish Telecino television station was shot dead by U.S. soldiers. After Couso's death, the Spanish court issued warrants for the Spanish police and International Criminal Police Organization to arrest and extradite three suspected U.S. soldiers immediately. On Aug. 28, 2005, U.S. forces opened fire at a team of Reuters reporters; one Reuters soundman was shot several times in the face and chest, and he was killed on the spot. Two Iraqi reporters who rushed to the spot were also arrested and forced to exposure to the scorching sun. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the United States is holding four Iraqi journalists in detention centers in Iraq and one journalist of Al-Jazeera, at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo bay, Cuba. None of the five have been charged with a specific crime. In July 2005, the New York Times reporter Judith Miller was sentenced to jail for refusing to disclose her source. Covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a photographer for Canadian Toronto Star daily was hurled to the ground by New Orleans police. The police grabbed his two cameras and removed memory cards. When he asked for his pictures back, the police insulted him and threatened to hit him. A reporter for a local newspaper of New Orleans was also attacked while covering a shoot-out between police and local residents. The police detained him and smashed all of his equipment on the ground. IV On Economic, Social and Cultural Rights The United States is the richest in the world, but its poverty rate is also the highest among the developed countries. In the United States, problems such as poverty, hunger and homelessness are quite serious, and the economic, social and cultural rights of working people are not guaranteed. A study of eight advanced countries by London School of Economics in 2005 found that the United States had the worst social inequality, Reuters reported on April 25, 2005. The poverty rate of the United States is the highest in the developed world and more than twice as high as in most other industrialized countries (Newsweek, The Other America, Sept. 19, 2005). In recent years the fortunes of the rich have continued to rise in the United States. According to two new studies by Spectrem Group, a Chicago-based wealth-research firm, and the Boston Consulting Group, millionaire households (excluding the value of primary residences) in the United States controlled more than 11 trillion dollars in assets in 2004, up more than 8 percent from 2003 ( Millionaire Ranks Hit New High, Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2005). Meanwhile, the income of ordinary employees in the United States has seen a sharp decline, causing the increase of poor population. The data issued by the U.S. Census Bureau said that the nation's official poverty rate rose from 12.5 percent in 2003 to 12.7 percent in 2004, with the number of people in poverty rising by 1.1 million from 35.9 million to 37 million, which means one in eight Americans lived in poverty. Poverty rates in cities such as Detroit, Miami and Newark exceeded 28 percent. The New York Times reported on Nov 22, 2005 that in 2004 3.9 million families had members who were undernourished. Homelessness is a serious problem. The USA Today reported that a snapshot tally conducted in June 2005 found 727,304 homeless people nationwide, meaning about one in 400 Americans were without a home (National Count of Homeless Puts Issue In Human Terms, USA Today, Oct. 12 2005). According to a survey by the United States Conference of Mayors in 24 cities including Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles, requests for emergency shelter in 2005 increased in the survey cities by an average of 6 percent from a year earlier, with 71 percent of the cities registering an increase. Requests for emergency food assistance increased by an average of 12 percent, with 76 percent of the cities registering an increase. More than 3,100 families with nearly 6,000 children apply for emergency shelter in Washington D.C. annually, with many sleeping on the streets or in cars or bus stations (Lifting up the Poor, Letters To the Editor, Washington Post, Oct. 28, 2005). The Los Angeles Times reported on June 16, 2005 that Los Angeles County has become "the homeless capital of America," with the average number of vagabonds or people in shelters hitting 90,000 a day, including 35,000 people chronically homeless. The rights of American labor are not guaranteed. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, in November 2005 the number of unemployed persons in the United States was 7.6 million, with an unemployment rate of 5 percent. Nearly 20 percent of the unemployed had been out of work for six months or more (Union: Job Cuts at GM 'Unfair', USA Today, Nov. 22, 2005). And about 3.6 million people were out of unemployment insurance (The New York Times, Jan. 1, 2005). Low pay, inadequate work conditions and lack of work protection are also a problem. The Washington Post reported on Aug. 3, 2005 that employees in American meatpacking plants face hard work in tough settings, and they suffer cuts, amputations, skin disease, permanent arm and shoulder damage, and even death from the force of repeated hard cutting motions. The China Press in New York City reported on Nov. 1, 2005 that employees in most New York restaurants lacked basic labor protection. They usually work overtime, with low pay and have hardly any health insurance. About 38 percent of them have been burned or scalded, and nearly half have experienced cut injuries. On Oct. 31 last year, transit workers in southeastern Pennsylvania of Philadelphia went on strike, due to disputes over health care insurance with the employer. In New York City, the transit workers union began a citywide strike on Dec. 20 last year after failing to reach a deal with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in negotiations on wage and pension issues. Per capita medical expenses in the United States are higher than in any other countries, however, the crisis of health insurance for workers is quite prominent. Statistics show that in 2004, the overall costs of health care increased 8.2 percent over 2003, but 45.8 million people or 15.7 percent of the total population were out of health insurance coverage, an increase of 800,000 people from the previous year. New York City alone had nearly two million residents without health insurance, with two thirds of them on payrolls. Each year 18,000 Americans die due to lack of medical treatment. A survey released by Kaiser Family Foundation in September 2005 found that only 60 percent of employers offered health insurance coverage, down from 69 percent five years earlier. In 2005 the average annual premium for family coverage hit 10,880 dollars. In coming years rising health care costs will price more and more people out of coverage. On Nov. 21, 2005 U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill of budget reduction by 50 billion dollars, including funding for health care, food aid to the poor and support to children's projects, which suggests worsening of living conditions for the poor. V. On Racial Discrimination The United States is a multi-ethnic nation of immigrants, with minority ethnic groups accounting for more than one-fourth of its population. But racial discrimination has long been a chronic malady of American society.Black Americans and other ethnic minorities are at the bottom of American society and their living standards are much lower than that of whites. According to The State of Black America 2005, the income level of African American families is only one-tenth of that of white families, and the welfare enjoyed by black Americans is only three-fourths of their white counterparts. In 2004, the poverty rate was 24.7 percent for African Americans, 21.9 percent for Hispanics, and 8.6 percent for non-Hispanic whites. In New Orleans, 100,000 of its 500,000 population live in poverty, with the majority of them being black Americans. The homeownership rate for blacks is 48.1 percent compared with 75.4 percent for whites. The Washington Post reported on April 11, 2005 that in 2004, about 29 percent of African Americans who bought or refinanced homes ended up with high-cost loans, compared with only about 10 percent of white Americans. Statistics released by the Federal Reserve in September 2005 also indicated that according to the 2004 mortgage data, the average incidence of higher-priced home purchase loans was 32.4 percent among African-Americans, 20.3 percent among Hispanic whites and 8.7 percent for non-Hispanic whites. The Los Angles Times quoted on July 14, 2005 a report on the State of Black Los Angeles as saying that black Americans were behind other ethnic groups in income, housing, medical care and education. Blacks had the lowest median household income of 31,905 dollars, compared with whites at 53,978 dollars. Although just 10 percent of the population, blacks were estimated to make up 30 percent or more of the homeless. Minorities face discrimination in employment and occupation. According to a report of the U.S. Department of Labor, in November 2005 the black unemployment rate was 10.6 percent, compared with the white unemployment rate at 4.3 percent. Black male earnings were 70 percent of white males, and black females earnings, 83 percent of their white counterparts. Ethnic minorities are often kept away from high-end occupations. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission quoted a report as saying that the employment discrimination rate was 31 percent for Asians and 26 percent for African Americans, and the discrimination against Muslims doubled after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The China Press reported that although Africans, Hispanics and Asians accounted for 57 percent of the work force in New York City, only less than 19 percent of them have got senior management positions, compared with whites who dominate 76 percent of them, or even 97 percent of such positions in some government departments. The rates of colored people without health insurance are higher than that of whites. The uninsured rate was 19.7 percent for blacks and 32.7 percent for Hispanics, that is to say nearly one of every three Hispanics in America had no health insurance. The black life expectancy was six years less than that of whites, and the mortality for black infants aging below one year doubled that for such white infants. According to the Washington Post, 76.3 out of every 200,000 blacks were found infected with HIV/AIDS, eight times higher than whites. Blacks account for more than half of all new HIV/AIDS infections in America and black women account for an astonishing 72 percent of all new cases among women. More than 80,000 American blacks die annually due to lack of health insurance, with the death rate of middle-aged black males twice that of the same white group. Racial discrimination in America's justice and law enforcement is serious. William J. Bennett, former U.S. Secretary of Education, once said that the only way to lower the crime rate in America was for all black women to have abortion. In America, black criminals tend to get heavier penalties than their white counterparts. According to the State of Black America 2005 issued by the National Urban League, blacks who are arrested are three times more likely to be imprisoned than whites once arrested, blacks are sentenced to death four times more often than whites, and a black person's average jail sentence is six months longer than a white's for the same crime. A December 2005 study by the University of Maryland indicated those who killed a white victim were 2 to 3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed a non-white; but black offenders who killed white victims were nearly 2.5 times more likely to be sentenced to death than white offenders who killed white victims and 3.5 times more likely to be sentenced to death than black offenders who killed black victims. Although blacks are just 12.2 percent of the American population, 41 percent of American prisoners detained for more than one year are blacks, and 8.4 percent of all black men between the ages of 25 and 29 are behind bars. According to reports issued by the Human Rights Watch and other organizations, following the Sept. 11 attacks, at least 70 people, all but one Muslim, were held as "material witnesses" under a narrow federal law that permits the arrest and brief detention of "material witnesses". One-third of the 70 confirmed material witnesses were incarcerated for at least two months, some were imprisoned for more than six months, and one actually spent more than a year behind bars. According to a report by the Washington Observer weekly in its 42nd issue in 2005, Chinese American Muslim chaplain James Yee was charged with crimes of espionage and mutiny, which potentially carry the death penalty. Because there were no evidence to support the allegations, the charges were later quietly dropped. The case was quoted by the media as one of the most serious judicial wrongs in American history. Violent crimes against ethnic minorities have been increasing in America. According to a FBI report issued in October 2005, of the 9,528 victims of hate crimes in 2004, 53.8 percent were victims of racial prejudice, and 67.9 percent were blacks. Among the hate crime offenders, 60.6 percent were whites. According to statistics, blacks are twenty times more likely than whites to be a victim of hate crimes. In Los Angeles, 56 percent of hate crimes were targeted at blacks. VI On Rights of Women and Children The United States does not have a good record in safeguarding the rights of women and children. Women in the United States do not share equal rights and opportunities with men in politics. Despite the fact that women account for 51.1 percent of the U.S. population, they hold only 81 or 15.1 percent of the 535 seats in the 109th U.S. Congress, including 14 or 14 percent of the 100 Senate seats and 67 or 15.4 percent of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. Only eight (16 percent) of governors of 50 U.S. states are women. No women of color have ever been governor of a U.S. state. Just 14 of the mayors of America's largest 100 cities are women, accounting for 14 percent of the total. By November 2005, there were only 81 women serving in statewide executive office, 25.7 percent of the total 315 working posts. Of the 7,382 people serving in the state legislatures, 1,668 are women, accounting for 22.6 percent. A research by the Inter-Parliamentary Union showed the United States ranked 61st in terms of women's representation in national legislature or parliaments out of over 180 directly electing countries, down from the 58th in December 2003. Women in the United States have a higher unemployment rate than men, and lower pay for the same work. A survey by the U.S. Census Bureau said the median earnings of women and men in 2004 were 31,223 and 40,798 U.S. dollars, respectively. The female-to-male earnings ratio was 77 percent. Yearly earnings of women business owners were only 49 percent of men counterparts. In 2004, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 24,249 charges of sex-based discrimination, and 4,512 charges of pregnancy-based discrimination. Poverty rates are highest for families headed by single women. In 2004, 28.4 percent of households headed by single women were in poverty. More and more women and children became homeless. In the city of Pasadena, Southern California, the number of homeless women and children reached 701 in 2005, increasing by 42.7 percent over 2003 and accounting for 57.6 percent of the homeless population in the city. Homeless women and children became the largest homeless population, surpassing that of single men for the first time. U.S. women often fall victim to domestic violence. Statistics from American Institute on Domestic Violence showed each year in the United States 5.3 million women are abused, and 1,232 women are killed by an intimate partner. A news report said one out of every three American women would fall under the influence of domestic violence in her life. American women face high risks of sexual offense. The FBI reported in October 2005 that during 2004, approximately 94,635 females nationwide were victims of forcible rape, which means that 63.5 out of every 100,000 women suffered from forcible rape. This figure also represents an increase of 0.8 percent from 2003. Women are sexually harassed while at work. In 2004 the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 13,136 charges of sexual harassment, with 84.9 percent of them filed by women. According to an investigation by the Pentagon released on Dec. 23, 2005, up to 6 percent of the women at the Army, Navy and Air Force academies said they experienced sexual assault during the 2004-2005 school year, and about half or more said they were sexually harassed. In the Reserve Forces and National Guard units, 60 percent of women and 27 percent of men were sexually assaulted or harassed during their service. And 11 percent of women were raped. The U.S. prisons saw a surging number of female prisoners who had received bad treatment. A report by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics on April 24, 2005 said by the end of June 30, 2004, the number of female prisoners reached 103,310, increasing by 2.9 percent from a year earlier. In 2004, female prisoners in federal and state prisons accounted for seven percent of the total, up 4 percent from 2003, or nearly twice the increase rate of male prisoners. Nearly 50 percent of female prisoners said they were sexually assaulted. A total of 8,210 allegations of sexual violence were reported in U.S. correctional facilities during 2004, and the correctional authorities substantiated nearly 2,100 incidents of sexual violence, with women accounting for the majority of victims. American children's living conditions are worrisome. In terms of the child poverty index, the United States ranked next to the last among 22 developed nations in the world. Statistics released by U.S. Census Bureau on Aug. 30, 2005 showed children accounted for nearly one third of the 37 million poverty population in the country. And 1.35 million U.S. children had experienced homelessness. Among the population aged under 18, those who lived in poverty accounted for 30 percent of the total in Washington D.C., 27 percent in Mississippi and Louisiana, 26 percent in New Mexico, and 24 percent in West Virginia. In New Orleans, 40 percent of children in urban areas lived in poverty. American children's health has seen a decline, and death rates of infants and juveniles are increasing. Nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many got neither checkups nor vaccinations. The China Press based in New York City said in a report on May 5, 2005 that over the past 20 years researchers funded by the U.S. government had tested anti-HIV/AIDS medicine on hundreds of children living in welfare homes with no basic protection or supervision by any independent organization. This practice brought great harm to the health of the children, and some of them died during the treatment. One third of children in the United States were born out of wedlock, and half of the children live in single-parent families. At present, four million U.S. children live with jobless parents, facing such problems as domestic violence, melancholia, and drug and alcoholic addiction. American juveniles often fall victim to violent crimes. More and more students go to school with knives or other weapons. In 2005, the number of students found with knives and other weapons in Maryland schools was 2,845, a jump of 63 percent over the past five years. Virginia schools also reported 2,278 cases of confiscated weapons in 2003 to 2004. And Washington D.C. reported 148 weapon incidents from 2004 to 2005. The Washington Post reported in a feature story in August 2005 that a survey of 325 Latino seventh- and eighth-graders from across Montgomery County discovered 12 percent of the 11-to-13-year-olds had carried a weapon such as a knife or a club (one percent had carried a gun); 38 percent had gotten into a physical fight; 27 percent had stayed home because they felt unsafe going outside; and 16 percent had been threatened or injured by someone with a weapon. Twenty percent had been involved in gang-related activities; 12 percent said they had been members of a gang. Frequent on-campus violence incidents threatened the safety of 26.4 million U.S. students aged between 12 and 16. Statistics showed 12 juveniles died of firearm-related crime everyday in the United States. A report by The Los Angeles Times on March 4, 2005 said more than 70 percent of sixth-graders in Los Angeles had experienced or witnessed violence incidents, and this proportion reached as high as 90 percent in some areas. The U.S. judicial protection for children's rights is far lower than international practice. A report released by the U.S. Department of Justice showed the number of juveniles behind bars in the United States reached 102,000 by the end of 2004. The United States is one of the few countries where a crime committed by a juvenile results in a life sentence without any possibility of parole. According to a Human Rights Watch report, 93 percent of youth offenders serving life without parole were convicted of murder, and an estimated 26 percent were convicted of "felony murder." This means that anyone involved in the commission of a serious crime during which someone is killed is also guilty of murder, even if he or she did not personally or directly cause the death. About 9,700 inmates were serving life sentences for crimes they committed before they turned 18. At least 2,225 child offenders are serving life without parole sentences in U.S prisons, compared with a combined total of 12 in other countries; 16 percent of the child offenders were between 13 and 15 years old at the time they committed their crimes, and an estimated 59 percent were sentenced to life without parole for their first-ever criminal conviction. At present, the number of child offenders serving life without parole sentences in the United States is three times of 15 years before. Child offenders often experienced abuse in prisons, and staff-on-inmate sexual assaults at correctional institutions for juveniles were almost 10 times more than in jails for adult offenders. The United States is one of the few countries that sentence child offenders to death. To date, six states in America still have no minimum age for death sentence. In 2004, a total of 63 juveniles aged 17 or under were sentenced to death. At present, there are around 3,500 prisoners on death row in the United States, with 72 of them sentenced for crimes they committed before they turned 18. VII. On the United States'Violation of Human Rights in Other Countries Pursuing unilateralism on the international arena, the U.S. government grossly violates the sovereignty and human rights of other countries in contempt of universally-recognized international norms. The U.S. government frequently commits wanton slaughters of innocents in its war efforts and military operations in other countries. The USA Today newspaper on Dec. 13, 2005 quoted a 2004 study published in the medical journal The Lancet as saying that it was estimated that about 100,000 Iraqis, mostly women and children, had died in the Iraqi war launched by the U.S. government in 2003. The year 2005 also witnessed frequent overseas military operations targeting at civilians by the U.S. forces, causing quite a number of deaths and injuries. On July 4, 2005, the U.S. forces killed 17 civilians, including women and children, in their air strikes in Konarha Province of Afghanistan. On Aug. 12, a U.S. military armored patrol vehicle fired at people coming out of a mosque in a town in the suburbs of the Iraqi city of Ramdi, killing 15 Iraqis, including eight children, and injuring 17 others. On Aug. 30, U.S. jet fighters launched several sorties of air raids against an area near the western Iraqi border town of Qaim, causing at least 56 deaths, including elderlies and children. On Nov. 21, U.S. troops fired at a civilian vehicle in northern Baghdad, killing a family of five, including three children. On Jan. 14, 2006, U.S. military aircraft struck a Pakistani village bordering Afghanistan, killing at least 18 civilians and triggering widespread anti-U.S. demonstrations in Pakistan. In 2005, news of prisoner abuse by the U.S. forces again hit headlines, following their 2004 prisoner abuse scandal that stunned the world. To extract information, the U.S. forces in Iraq employed various kinds of torture in their interrogations. They abused the Iraqi detainees systematically, including sleep deprivation, tying them to the wall, hitting them with baseball bats, denying their access to water and food, forcing them to listen to extremely loud music in completely dark places for days running, unleashing dogs to bite them for amusement and even scaring them by putting them in the same cage with lions (reports from The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Washington Weekly and other news media). A report by The Human Rights Watch in September 2005 said that U.S. soldiers regarded prisoner abuse as "amusement" and a way "to relieve stress." Due to the unbearable abuse, many detainees maimed themselves, went on hunger strikes and even rioted. According to a report issued by the South Command of the U.S. military, there occurred 350 self-maiming cases in the prison of Guantanamo, Cuba, in 2003, with 23 prisoners seeking to hang themselves in one week of August. In August 2005, 131 prisoners in Guantanamo went on a hunger strike to protest inhuman treatment. In April the same year, a riot broke out in Camp Bucca prison in south Iraq due to the U.S. warden's refusal to treat a sick prisoner. The United States has time and again rejected the requests of the UN Commission for Human Rights special mechanism to visit Guantanamo to investigate the incidents of prisoner abuse. And after yielding to pressure, the U.S. side made it a rule that the UN delegation should not have any contacts with the detainees there, incurring international condemnation. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States wantonly apprehended terrorism suspects worldwide, flaunting the banner of "anti-terrorism." An AP story on Nov. 16, 2005 said that since the start of the anti-terrorism war in 2001, the United States had detained more than 83,000 foreign nationals, with 82,400 of them under the custody of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq. And 700 captives were shipped to Guantanamo. Over the past four years, the U.S. has not brought any indictment against them or brought them to court hearing. By March 2005, 108 people had died in custody. Up to date, there are still 14,500 foreign nationals under U.S. custody. In 2005, the scandal of the "secret prisons" set up overseas by the U.S. government was revealed, causing an international uproar. The New York Times carried an article titled Secrets and Shame on Nov. 3, 2005, criticizing the overseas secret prison network concealed by the CIA. According to The Washington Post, after the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA set up covert prisons, only known to a handful of officials in the White House, Justice Department and the Congress, in Thailand, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and some Eastern European countries, detaining about 100 people believed to be terrorism suspects by the United States. Kept in dark and underground cells, the prisoners in the "black sites" have no legal rights and no one outside the CIA can talk with or even see them. Even officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross are forbidden to have any contacts with the captives. To obtain intelligence from the captives, the CIA employed various kinds of torture, such as forcefully grabbing the shirt front of the prisoner and shaking him, slapping and belly slapping. Prisoners were forced to stand, handcuffed and feet shackled, for more than 40 hours, and they were also left to stand naked in a cell kept at around 10 degrees Centigrade and constantly doused with cold water. The torture also included binding a prisoner to a board with plastic or paper wrapped over his face and water poured over him (the British newspaper The Independent, Dec.4, 2005). In November 2002, a CIA officer ordered guards of the Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan to strip naked a detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death (The Washington Post newspaper). The CIA frequently transfers terrorism suspects to other countries for torture and interrogation aboard a secret aircraft. The British, German and French media reported that the CIA plane carrying terrorism suspects had landed in a British military airfield at least 210 times, and crossed German airspace or landed in German airports at least 473 times. The CIA aircraft which took off and landed near Paris also landed and took off in the Guantanamo naval base for six times. The U.S. government's violations of internationally-recognized norms and human rights incurred strong international condemnation. At a press conference, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louis Arbour sharply criticized the United States for infringing human rights by setting up secret prisons and transferring terrorism suspects without going through legal procedures under the pretext of fighting terrorism, noting that such acts were eroding the global ban on torture. On Dec. 20, 2005, the European Union, through a local court in Milan, Italy, issued warrants for the arrest of 22 CIA agents suspected of kidnapping in Italy. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter described the prisoner abuse by the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo as "embarrassing," and going against the rudimentary American commitment to peace, social justice, civil liberties and human rights. The facts listed above show a poor human rights record of the United States, which forms not only a sharp contrast with its image of a self-claimed "advocate of human rights," but also disaccord with its level of economic and social development and international status. The U.S. government ought to first clean up its own record of human rights before qualifying itself to comment on human rights situations in other countries, let alone arrogantly telling them what to do. To respect for and protect human rights is a necessity and indicator of human civilization, and to promote human rights is the common responsibility of all countries and a major theme of international cooperation. No country in the world can claim to have a perfect state of human rights, nor can any country stay outside the course of human rights development. The issue of human rights should become a theme of social development in all countries and of international cooperation, rather than a slogan for exporting ideologies or even a tool of diplomacy to fix others out of one's own political needs. For years, the U.S. government has ignored and deliberately concealed serious violations of human rights in its own country for fear of criticism. Yet it has issued annual reports making unwarranted charges on human rights practices of other countries, an act that fully exposes its hypocrisy and double standard on human rights issues, which has naturally met with strong resistance and opposition from other countries. We urge the U.S. government to look squarely at its own human rights problems, reflect what it has done in the human rights field and take concrete measures to improve its own human rights status. The U.S. government should stop provoking international confrontation on the issue of human rights, and make a fresh start to contribute more to international human rights cooperation and to the healthy development of international human rights cause.

People's Daily Online --- http://english.people.com.cn/

Carl Sagan takes questions more from his 'Wonder and Skepticism' CSICOP 1994 keynote. Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 2005

Carl Sagan takes questions more from his 'Wonder and Skepticism' CSICOP 1994 keynote

Kendrick Frazier

FindArticles > Skeptical Inquirer > July-August, 2005 > Article > Print friendly


When Carl Sagan delivered his keynote address "Wonder and Skepticism" before a large audience at the CSICOP Conference in Seattle, Washington, June 23-26, 1994, a lively question-and-answer session followed. We published Sagan's adaption of his talk as the cover article in the first bimonthly, magazine-format issue of the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, January/February 1995. (We republished it after Sagan's December 1996 death as the lead chapter in the last of four general SI anthologies I edited, Encounters with the Paranormal: Science, Knowledge, and Belief, Prometheus 1998, with my two-page epilogue.) The Q/A session had been transcribed at the time along with the talk but put away and never published. A few months ago it was relocated, and Carl's wife and collaborator, Ann Druyan, readily agreed that it should be published in the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. It appears here, with omission of only a few nonsubstantive exchanges. If some of the specifics discussed seem dated, others are as topical as today's news. And the general themes remain current. We then publish on page 37 a passionately felt postscript, "The Great Turning Away," written specially for this issue by Ann Druyan.
QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, you mentioned in your talk that one of the most important functions in science is to reward those who disprove our most closely held beliefs. Sir, if you were to look ahead two or three or four generations, which of our most closely held beliefs today do you think are the most likely candidates for disproof?
SAGAN: Maybe the belief that challenges our most closely held beliefs. Prophecy is a lost art. I have no way of doing that. If I could do that, think of the enormous effort we could save. The question flies in the very face of what I was just saying about how the most obvious points, the things we're absolutely sure of, may turn out to be wrong. So I am not immune to that fallibility and frailty. Let me give another example. It's the middle of the nineteenth century. The leading futurologist--although the word didn't exist then; it's a terrible word--was Jules Verne. He was asked to project a century ahead. What would be the means of transportation, the most exotic means of transportation, in the middle of the twentieth century? He then did whatever he did, looked into his crystal ball metaphorically speaking, and then gave the following conclusion: by 1950 there would be Victorian living rooms with lots of red velvet plush, I imagine, in the gondolas of great airships (they were called, but essentially dirigibles) which would cross the Atlantic Ocean in no more than a week. And people said, "Whew! That Jules Verne, he sure is farseeing. Who could have thought of that?" And he was grossly off. Why was he off?. Was he stupid? Was he not a good futurologist? No. He didn't foresee heavier-than-air aircraft, nor did anybody else. The view in the middle of the nineteenth century was that it was impossible. And in just the same way, whatever I would tell you, where we would be in space or something like that, is bound to be, unless we destroy ourselves, overtaken by scientific ideas and technological developments that I haven't a ghost of a chance of foreseeing. So forgive me for not being able to answer your question.
QUESTION: Thank you for your talk. I just wanted to challenge the idea that the reward system in science is essentially different from any other system. A person who successfully challenges the emperor gets the greatest rewards. An entrepreneur who successfully displaces some other technology or some other entrepreneur gets the greatest rewards. And a scientist who fails to successfully challenge the head of his discipline can see his head rolling, professionally, just as quickly, I think, as the unsuccessful coup d'etat. Thank you.
SAGAN: Thank you. I think you raise a good point; permit me to disagree. There are certainly similarities along the lines that you say and, for example, maybe you remember the novel and television series, Shogun, in which the English sailor, washed ashore in Japan, is brought to meet Tokanaga, the future Shogun, who is very autocratic and authoritarian, hierarchical, as of course all military leaders are. And when he discovers that the Dutch were revolting from their Spanish overlords, he immediately identifies with the Spanish. He never met a Spaniard in his life, but they were in charge, and anybody challenging them must be doing something wrong. The hero then says, "The only mitigating condition is that the upstarts win." And Tokanaga says "Yes, yes, very true," and then they are friends. That's the point you just made. But that doesn't mean that there's a reward structure that encouraged the Dutch to revolt against the Spanish. It just means that if they succeed, then they succeed. It's a tautology. Whereas in science, there is a reward structure from the beginning. It doesn't mean that if somebody challenges Newton he is immediately rewarded. Einstein had some difficulties with special relativity. His Nobel prize was not even for relativity, it was for the photoelectric effect, because relativity was considered to be worrisome. Nevertheless, there were many scientists who recognized the value of what Einstein said. He was not challenging Isaac Newton; Isaac Newton was dead. The value of what Einstein said was there plain for anyone to see; nobody had thought of it before. As soon as people had worked through the arguments on the idea that simultaneity was a nonsensical idea, many were converted on the spot. I don't say that everybody was; I don't say that there weren't some problems with it, but there is a reward structure built in. And Einstein, just a few years after his 1905 relativity paper, was Full Professor and at the top of his profession.
QUESTION: Did you really say billions and billions of--(Laughter)
SAGAN: Never. Johnny Carson said it. I once saw him put on a wig and a corduroy jacket and pretend to be me, but I no more said it than Sherlock Holmes, in any of the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, said "Elementary, my dear Watson."
QUESTION: I find it a little surprising that you use the words "science" and "truth" together in the same sentence. You said that science doesn't seek absolute truths, but asympomatically tries to approach truth. I find truth is something that is very anthropocentric, relative to human being at a given time and a given place. I usually think of science more as seeking asymptomatically a better understanding of reality, not of truth.
SAGAN: I won't quibble on words. There are as many people who argue about the existence of reality as about the existence of truth. I encourage them to debate each other. (Laughter)
QUESTION: If I understand the theory of relativity, the space/time viewpoint, a causal violation should not be able to create a paradox. Do you think we may ever have as much control over space/time geometry as we do over electricity?
SAGAN: That's an awfully good question and I don't know the answer. But yes, a topic that is being hotly debated these days in the gravitational physics community is whether producing a paradox is a contradiction, or whether a paradox of the sort you referred to is just something we are going to have to live with. Can effects precede causes, for example. We have a tendency just to throw up our hands in amazement and despair: "What are you talking about? It's nonsense!" But there are certain sciences that seem to be in a funny way internally consistent with what else we know about physics and which may say effect can precede causes. I don't guarantee it's true, but if it is true it's just another one of those cases where our common sense doesn't apply everywhere.
QUESTION: Richard Hoagland has recently got hold of some pictures, Hasselblad pictures from NASA, which were taken some twenty years ago of the moon, and he has been describing those in great detail. He gave a talk at Ohio State University a couple of weeks ago and he had video cameras on and they were supposed to have videos available. I wonder if you've heard about this and had previous knowledge of....
SAGAN: You forgot to mention what is on those videos.
QUESTION: Structures on the moon.
SAGAN: Richard Hoagland is a fabulist. By the way, it's not difficult getting hold of the hand-held Hasselblad camera pictures; NASA freely releases them to everybody. These are in the public domain, they're available to anybody. You don't have to do something remarkable to get the pictures. The aspect of this story I know best has to do with the so-called Face on Mars. There is a place on Mars called Sidonia, which was photographed in a mission I was deeply involved in, the Viking mission to Mars in 1976. And there is one picture in which along a range of hulking mesas and hillocks, there is what looks very much like a face, about three kilometers across at the base and a kilometer high. It's flat on the ground, looking up. It has a helmet or a hair-do, depending on how you look at it, it has a nose, a forehead, one eye--the other half is in shadow--pretty eerie looking. You could almost imagine it was done by Praxiteles on a monumental scale. And this gentleman deduces from this that there was a race of ancient Martians. He has dated them, he purports to have deduced when they were around, and it was 500,000 years ago or something like that, when our ancestors were certainly not able to do space flights, and then all sorts of wonderful conclusions are deduced and "we came from Mars" or "guys from other star systems came here and left a statue on Mars and left some of them on Earth." By the way, all of which fails to explain how it is that humans share 99.6 percent of their active genes with chimpanzees. If we were just dropped here, how come we're so closely related to them? What is the basis of the argument? How good is it? My standard way of approaching this is to point out that there is an eggplant that looks exactly like former President Richard Nixon. The eggplant has this ski nose and, "that's Richard Nixon, I'd know him anywhere."
What shall we deduce from this eggplant phenomenon? Extraterrestrials messing with our eggplants? A miracle? God is talking to us through the eggplant? Or, that there have been tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of eggplants in history, and they all have funny little knobs, and every now and then there is going to be one that by accident looks like a human face. Humans are very good at recognizing human faces. I think clearly the latter. Now let's go to Mars. Thousands of low, hilly mesas have all sorts of features. Here's one that looks a little like a human face. When you bring out the contrast in the shadowed area it doesn't look as good. Now, we're very good at picking out human faces. We have so many of these blocky mesas. Is it really a compelling sign of extraterrestrial intelligence that there's one that looks a little like a human face? I think not. But I don't blame people who are going into the NASA archives and trying to find things there; that is in the scientific spirit. I don't blame people who are trying to find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence--I think it's a good idea, in fact. But I do object to people who consider shoddy and insufficient evidence as compelling.
QUESTION: May we hear your opinion on the canceling of the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas?
SAGAN: Yes. There are many physicists who think that that latter was a great tragedy. My own view is that it was not nearly explained well enough. We're talking about eight, ten, twelve, fourteen billion dollars to do very arcane experiments--and I don't think physicists did a good job at all in explaining to Congress why at a time of many pressures on the discretionary federal budget so much money should go to this. It doesn't build weapons, it doesn't cure diseases, it isn't generally known or understood. What is it about and why should we spend money on it? I think the physicists have, not altogether but to a significant degree, themselves to blame.
QUESTION: A question concerning the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It seems that we as skeptics, there's an argument that seems very disappointing and maybe a bit persuasive in the Fermi paradox, the idea that if civilizations were to arise at ally significant level, that even given a very extremely slow rate of expansion in the galaxy, that there's been more than enough time for them to have populated the galaxy several times over. What's your view on the Fermi paradox?
SAGAN: The Fermi paradox essentially says, as you said, that if there's extraterrestrial high technology intelligence anywhere they should have been here because if they travel at tile speed of light, the galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, it takes you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. The galaxy is 10 billion years old, they should be here. And if you say you can't travel at the speed of light, take a tenth of the speed of light, a hundredth of the speed of light, still much less than the age of the galaxy. William Newman and I published a paper on this very point, in which we point out: Imagine there is a civilization that has capable interstellar spacecraft and now they start exploring. What are we talking about? That they're sending out 400 billion spacecraft, all at once, simultaneously, to every star in the galaxy? Not at all. Interstellar space flight is going to be hard, you're going to go slow, you're going to go to the nearest star systems first, you're going to explore those stars. It is not a straight line but a diffusion question. And when you do the diffusion physics with the appropriate diffusivity, that is, the time to random walk, there are many cases in which the time for an advanced civilization to fully explore the galaxy in the sense of visiting every star system is considerably longer than the age of the galaxy. It's just a bad model, we claim, the straight line, dedicated exploration of every star in the galaxy.
QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, you've spoken about the need to, as you say, be defenders of science, or to spread the wonders of science and the value of science among those who are perhaps less well educated or have less of an appreciation of it. It seems to be quite a challenge, and I was wondering, in particular, there are many people, of course, plus the people in this room, perhaps a fairly large portion have some background in science. Amongst people who have what is called a liberal education, who may be in the arts or in the humanities, science has among many of them something of a bad name. I wonder if you have any thought on what path might be taken to remedy that situation.
SAGAN: I think one, perhaps, is to present science as it is, as something dazzling, as something tremendously exciting, as something eliciting feelings of reverence and awe, as something that our lives depend on. If it isn't presented that way, if it's presented in very dull textbook fashion, then of course people will be turned off: If the chemistry teacher is the basketball coach, if the school boards are unable to get support for the new school bond issue, if teachers' salaries, especially in science, are very low, if very little is demanded of our students in terms of homework and original class time, if virtually every newspaper in the country has a daily astrology column and hardly any of them has a weekly science column, if the Sunday morning pundit shows never discuss science, if every one of the commercial television networks has somebody designated as a science reporter but he (it's always he) never presents any science, it's all technology and medicine, if an intelligent remark on science has never been uttered in living memory by a President of the United States, if in all of television there are no action-adventure series in which the hero or heroine is someone devoted to finding out how the universe works, if spiffy jackets attractive to the opposite sex are given to students who do well in football, basketball, and baseball but none in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, if we do all of that, then it is not surprising that a lot of people come out of the American educational system turned off, or having never experienced, science. That was a very long sentence.
QUESTION: Good evening, Dr. Sagan. Just one point first. Both the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the CTV private network have female science reporters.
SAGAN: Excellent. I was only talking about the U.S. and I recognize that you are within range of Canadian broadcasting here in Seattle.
SAME QUESTIONER: I'm a Canadian myself.
SAGAN: I'm very glad to hear it. David Suzuki has done for many years an excellent job on Canadian television.
SAME QUESTIONER: Absolutely. With the debacle of cold fusion, which may be said to be the ultimate proof of the scientific method with its peer review and its replicability or lack of same, if you were a person who is interested in the question of developing energy sources that would be both safer than the ones we use now and less expensive, would you continue to work in the area of fusion, and if not where would you work?
SAGAN: Cold fusion or hot fusion?
SAME QUESTION: I understand that hot fusion takes up a lot more energy than it ultimately produces.
SAGAN: But the margin is shrinking. If it were up to me, there's nothing in the way of compelling evidence for cold fusion, but if there were such a thing as cold fusion--you know, desktop conversion into enormous energy--we need that. So I can understand why there are companies, especially abroad, that are devoting small resources to it. I don't think that's cause for apoplexy. It'll probably come to nothing, but if there are scientists who want to spend their time on that, let them do it. Maybe they'll find something else that's interesting. On hot fusion, the margin, as I said, is shrinking, but the predicted, even optimistic estimates when commercial, large-scale, worldwide hot fusion would be available is too far into the twenty-first century to solve the energy problems we have today.
The energy problems I'm talking about are in particular global warming, the burning of fossil fuels. So what I would encourage is first of all, much greater emphasis on efficient use of fossil fuels--fluorescent rather than incandescent bulbs, you save a factor of several, or to put it another way, with the same amount of photons you put three or four or five times fewer carbon dioxide molecules into the atmosphere from the coal-burning power plant that provides the electricity. And I would put the money into forcing the automobile companies to produce cars that get 75, 85, 95 miles a gallon. Why are we satisfied with 25 miles a gallon when it is commercially perfectly possible to have safe, quick acceleration, spunky-looking cars that are efficient in their burning of petroleum? And then the other area where I would put emphasis is in non-nuclear alternatives to fossil fuel, of which I would stress biomass conversion, solar-electric power, and wind turbines, all of which are technologies that are coming along very swiftly despite, until recently, real hostility in the U.S. government. Let me give you just one political story. There was once a president of the United States recently in the news named Jimmy Carter. He thought that there was an energy problem and he gave, in effect, talks to the nation in his cardigan sweater saying about how you should save electricity. He put into the roof of the White House a solar thermal converter which circulated cold water to the roof, and on sunny days in Washington sunlight heated this water and in repeated passes it made it very hot, and when it was time for a Presidential shower, here was hot water that did not rely on a power plant. He was succeeded by a President named Ronald Reagan. One of the first acts in office of President Reagan was to rip out the solar thermal converter from the roof of the White House at considerable cost--after all, it was in there and working--because he was ideologically opposed to alternatives to fossil fuels. We lost twelve years in research into these alternatives during the Reagan-Bush administration.
QUESTION: The dapper gentleman there, Bill Nye, his work on television bodes well for science education; he's to be applauded. I also want to thank you for answering all my questions about Richard Nixon; it explains a lot. You expressed some encouragement about the age mixture represented here in this audience. I wonder if you would comment on the conspicuous lack of racial diversity and the implications for science education in general.
SAGAN: Thank you. We also might ask how it is that of the first ten or twelve questioners only one was a woman in an audience in which women are much more strongly represented. These are wide-ranging, difficult questions. I don't claim to have the answers except to say that I know of no evidence that women and what in the United States are called racial minorities are not as competent as anybody else in doing science. It has to do, I think, entirely, or almost entirely, with the built-in biases and prejudices of the educational system and the way the society trains people. Nothing more than that. Women, for example, who are told that they're too stupid for science, that science isn't for them, that science is a male thing, are turned off. And women who despite that try to go into science and then find hostility from the high school math teacher--"What are you doing in my class?"--find hostility from the 95 percent male science classes, with the kind of raucous male culture in which they find themselves excluded, those are powerful social pressures to leave science. It is amazing that there are any women in science as a result of this. I wrote a novel once, Contact, in which I tried to describe what women dedicated to science have to face, that men don't, in order to make a career in science.
QUESTIONER: I would like to challenge you to answer the questions without ridicule....
SAGAN: Fire away.
SAME QUESTIONER: ... whether they be about crop circles, Richard Hoagland, or the abductees.
SAGAN: I didn't think I had any ridicule there.
SAME QUESTIONER: I think you had quite a lot. I was quite offended.
SAGAN: Which one particularly?
SAME QUESTIONER: The crop circles, the jokes you started with, the answer about Richard Hoagland offended me.
SAGAN: Okay, let's take one. Let's take Richard Hoagland--
SAME QUESTIONER: I would like to ask you in general to watch the ridicule. There are so many people here that think such ideas are worthy of ridicule. You have spoken about the need for compassion. I would like to see you model that here.
SAGAN: I appreciate that remark, and if I had not done what I preached I apologize. However, you must recognize--
SAME QUESTIONER: I accept your apology.
SAGAN: There was an "if" in front of the apology: However, you must recognize that vigorous debate is an essential aspect of getting to the truth, and the fact that Mr. Hoagland, for example, is not here--unless he is somewhere--I had nothing to do with it. Someone asked me a question about Richard Hoagland; I said what I thought. I happen to know that when Mr. Hoagland is asked questions and I'm not present, he says things about me, that I sometimes wish I had a chance to--
SAME QUESTIONER (interrupting): Are you capable of modeling him?
SAGAN: I don't understand the question. What do you mean "modeling?"
SAME QUESTIONER: Modeling. Modeling compassion.
SAGAN: I've known Richard Hoagland for many, many years. I think I have just the right measure of compassion. (Laughter)
QUESTIONER: After the lady's question I don't know if mine is appropriate. I was going to ask you: We have Scott Peck, psychiatrist, Dr. [Brian] Weiss, he wrote Many Lives, Many Masters, Dr. [John] Mack [the Harvard psychiatrist who contended patients who say they were abducted by aliens are describing real events, and who spoke at the conference], we saw him yesterday, Dr. [Raymond] Moody--they're all mighty good thinkers. How do you think they went wrong?
SAGAN: I'm being asked to speculate offering psychiatric matters--hard to do. Some of those people I know very well, some I have never met. I don't think it would be right for me to guess why it is that they don't agree with me. I think that's all I want to say about it. I tried to stress before that it doesn't matter what the character of the debater is, it doesn't matter what reservations we have about him or her, what matters is the quality of the argument presented. For each of these people, I think the issue is: is there evidence? Yes, Dr. Moody has an M.D. but he uses, as I said, my own memories of my parents speaking to me as evidence of life after death. I know that's not a good argument. I know better than he what those voices are about, and so, by extrapolation, I think maybe the rest of his argument isn't so good. To the extent that I have some way of hooking onto the arguments I try to use what I know and see if there's a good case or not. I want to stress that there are some claims in the areas of parascience or pseudoscience that may well turn out to be right. And I don't think that is a reason for us not to demand the highest standards of argument about it.
For example, one thing I didn't mention to the last questioner: when Mars Observer was on its way to Mars with the high-resolution camera that might photograph things about the size of this, I thought that among the many other targets, it ought to take a look at the so-called face and settle the issue. If it's just some odd aspect of eolian abrasion on Mars, let's find that out. If it's something else, let's find that out. The fact that I think I understand, via the Richard Nixon eggplant, what the face on Mars is, doesn't mean that I don't want anyone to check it out. I could be wrong. If we have the tool to, with a few pictures, find out what the answer is, for heaven's sake let's do it. So each of these cases. In Johnny Mack's case I would say: "Never mind anecdotes, let's ask about physical evidence."
The claim is that many abductees have probes inserted up their nostrils, into their sinuses, which are, who knows, monitoring devices telling about where they've been and what's happening to their bodies. I say--and I've said to Mack a number of times--you give me one of those and we'll give it a really close scrutiny, and let's see if can we find evidence of alien manufacture. Are there principles of physical laws we don't understand? Are there isotopic ratios or the immiscibility of metals that we don't know about on Earth? Are there elements from the so-called island of stability, heavy elements, transuranic elements that are thought to be stable but we don't have any of them on Earth? There are many possibilities and you've certainly guessed that in some way an object of manufacture by aliens of extremely advanced capability--they travel from interstellar space, they effortlessly slither through walls, those guys really have powerful technology. Let's look at this. Never has there been one made available. There's always one about to be made available, there's always one that is going to be given to a laboratory, but it never happens.
What is that standard story that I get from Mack and others about the implants? It's that the abductees, going about his or her everyday life, and in many cases like this it is alleged the implant dropped out, clunk. The abductee picks it up, looks at it incuriously, and throws it in the garbage. Never once--and as a rule, this may prove my case--does he give it to some chemist or physicist, a chemist or physicist who could demonstrate the existence of alien technology. They'd give their eye teeth for that. They would be crawling all over each other to be able to examine the artifact. How come we've never had one case like that which really works out? I think that is a telling counterargument to all the anecdotal claims.
QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, we are fourteen years into the AIDS epidemic, HIV epidemic right now in this country, and apparently scientifically we are not coming any closer to finding a cure, creating a vaccine, even though there's lots of money being expended. And apparently also now there are new superbugs or new strains of bacteria that are becoming resistant to many of the antibiotics. You spoke about a concern for your children and your grandchildren in terms of what's happening. I'm just curious; what implications you see with these newfound illnesses, viruses, that are all of a sudden coming to us who believe that we were conquering everything in this day and age.
SAGAN: This is natural selection in action. If we overdose ourselves with antibiotics, we wipe out all the microorganisms not resistant to antibiotics and preferentially amplify the ones that are resistant. Eventually we arrange things, very cleverly, so that the entire population of microorganisms inside our bodies--including the disease-causing ones--are resistant to antibiotics. So overdosing antibiotics, which physicians have done routinely for reasons that are not hard to understand, is a mistake. Part of the answer is of course not to overdose anymore, and also to develop new strains of antibiotics. There ought to be major efforts to do that. On AIDS, my impression is that while there is nothing like a vaccine or a cure, there are substantial advances in the molecular biology of the HIV virus, and I take that to be a sign of significant hope, but of course not on the time scale of someone who is dying of AIDS. It's very slow in that respect. I don't think this is a money-driven situation. I don't think there just isn't enough money. I think there is enough money and some things maybe are not supported well enough, but in general there is, and it's a matter of not enough wisdom, not the right experiments, not having progressed far enough, not having done it swiftly enough. There's nothing magical about the HIV virus. It will succumb eventually to the ministrations of molecular biology. And I hope, for the reasons you mentioned, that that time will come soon.
QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, my question is in regard to the future of the skeptical movement.
SAGAN: Thank you. That's a good thing to end on.
SAME QUESTIONER: The responsibility that we have now, I feel, is as great as ever. The skeptical movement has been around for a number of years, perhaps thousands. First of all, I'd like to applaud the leadership of the skeptical movement we have here with you and the panel of speakers we have this weekend. But also important is the grassroots movements, the consensus of opinion of those that do adhere to the tenet, logic, reason, skeptical inquiry. We're at a point in time now that it's very important, and after having read the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER over a number of years and other articles and books and so forth, I find it somewhat amusing to see some of the investigations on a number of subjects like Paul Kurtz mentioned, we have hundreds of them--crystal power, pyramid power, a Loch Ness monster, whatever, I could go on and on. To be most effective in the long run I would think that would be something we would need to look at.
SAGAN: What would be?
SAME QUESTIONER: To be effective in fostering the logic and reason in skeptical thinking. I have found these various subject matters to be interesting and yet probably a greater area we could look at is the investigation into the major religions of the world.
SAGAN: Now we're to it. Okay.
SAME QUESTIONER: There are billions and billions of people that adhere to the tenets of these religions and I would imagine that we could spend more time in the skeptical movement--
SAGAN: In essence your question is: Should the skeptical movement devote some of its attention to religion?
SAME QUESTIONER: Well said.
SAGAN: This is a really good question, and I know that Richard Dawkins talked about this a year or so ago, and drew the conclusion that many religious beliefs were not noticeably different from any of the parascienccs or pseudosciences beliefs, and why one of them is the object of our attention and the other is off-limits, and he urged that we be, if I may use the expression, more ecumenical in our hostility. I will answer in the following way: first, that there is no human culture without religion. That being the case, that immediately says that religion provides some essential meat, and if that's the case shouldn't we be a little careful about condemning something that it desperately needed? For example, if I am with someone who has just lost a loved one, I do not think it is appropriate for me to say, "You know, there's no scientific evidence for life after death." If that person is gaining some degree of support, stability, from the thought that the loved one has gone to heaven and that they will be joined after the person I'm talking to, himself or herself; dies. That would be uncompassionate and foolish. Science provides a great deal, but there are some things that it doesn't provide. Religion is an attempt to provide, whether truly or falsely, some solutions to those problems. Human mortality is one of those where there isn't a smidgeon of help from science. Yes, it's a grand and glorious universe, yes it's amazing to be part of it, yes we weren't alive before we were born (not much before we were born) so we hope we're alive after we're dead. We won't know about it. It's a big deal. But that's not too reassuring, at least to many people.
Take the issue of the Bible. The Bible is in my view a magnificent work of poetry, has some good history in it, has some good ethical and moral scriptures--but by no means everywhere, the book of Joshua is a horror, for example--and on those grounds is well worth our respect. But on the other hand, the Book of Genesis was written in the sixth century B.C. during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. The Babylonians were the chief scientists of the time. The Jews picked up the best science available and put it in the book of Genesis, but we have learned something in the intervening two and a half millennia, and to believe in the literal truth of the attempted science in the Bible, is to believe too much. I know there are Biblical literalists who believe that every jot and tittle in the Bible is the direct word of God, given to a scrupulous and flawless stenographer, and with no attempt to use the understanding of the time, or metaphor or allegory, but just straight-out truth. I know there are people who think that. That seems to me highly unlikely, I think the way to approach the Bible is with some critical wits about us, but not dismissing it out of hand. There's a lot of good stuff in the Bible. Case-by-case basis is what I'm saying. Where religion does not pretend to do science, I think we should be open within the boundaries of good sense. I think that you cannot extract an "ought" from an "is," and therefore science per se does not tell us how we should behave, although it can certainly shed considerable light on the consequences of alternative kinds of behavior. From that we can decide how to arrange our legal codes and what to do. So the idea of an all-out attack on religion I think on many grounds would be foolish, but the idea of treating Biblical literalism, for example, with some skeptical scrutiny is an excellent idea. But it is being done, has been done for the last century by Biblical scholars themselves. I don't think there's any particular expertise in this movement for a critical examination of the Bible. There are other people who are doing it just fine.
I hope that sort of middle ground is not too different from what you were asking about, but I certainly don't think that religion should be off-limits. I don't think anything should be off limits. We should feel free to discuss and debate everything. That's what the Bill of Rights is about. And in that sense, and many other senses, the constitution of the United States, particularly the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment, and the scientific method are very mutually supportive approaches to knowledge. Both of them recognize the extreme dangers of having to pay attention to and do whatever the authority says.

Ann Druyan talks about science, religion, wonder, awe … and Carl Sagan. Skeptical Inquirer, Nov-Dec, 2003

Ann Druyan talks about science, religion, wonder, awe … and Carl Sagan: it is great tragedy that science, this wonderful process for finding out what is true, has ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life, and life's preciousness on our tiny planet - Transcript
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I've been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I've been wondering about this, because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are alienated from science. We are estranged from its methods, its values, and its language. Who is the scientist in our culture? He is Dr. Faustus, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Strangelove. He's the maker of the Faustian bargain that is bound to end badly. Where does that come from? We've had a long period of unprecedented success in scientific discovery. We can do things that even our recent ancestors would consider magic, and yet our self-esteem as a species seems low. We hate and fear science. We fear science and we fear the scientist. A common theme of popular movies is some crazed scientist somewhere setting about ruining what is most precious to all of us.
I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep. They're ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this founding myth of ours, in which the first humans are doomed and cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
It's puzzling that Eden is synonymous with paradise when, if you think about it at all, it's more like a maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance. It's a horrible place. Adam and Eve have no childhood. They awaken full-grown. What is a human being without a childhood? Our long childhood is a critical feature of our species. It differentiates us, to a degree, from most other species. We take a longer time to mature. We depend upon these formative years and the social fabric to learn many of the things we need to know.
So here are Adam and Eve, who have awakened full grown, without the tenderness and memory of childhood. They have no mother, nor did they ever have one. The idea of a mammal without a mother is, by definition, tragic. It's the deepest kind of wound for our species; antithetical to our flourishing, to who we are.
Their father is a terrifying, disembodied voice who is furious with them from the moment they first awaken. He doesn't say, "Welcome to the planet Earth, my beautiful children! Welcome to this paradise. Billions of years of evolution have shaped you to be happier here than anywhere else in the vast universe. This is your paradise." No, instead God places Adam and Eve in a place where there can be no love; only fear, and fear-based behavior, obedience. God threatens to kill Adam and Eve if they disobey his wishes. God tells them that the worst crime, a capital offense, is to ask a question; to partake of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. What kind of father is this? As Diderot observed, the God of Genesis "loved his apples more than he did his children."
This imperative not to be curious is probably the most self-hating aspect of all, because what is our selective advantage as a species? We're not the fastest. We're not the strongest. We're not the biggest. However, we do have one selective advantage that has enabled us to survive and prosper and endure: A fairly large brain relative to our body size. This has made it possible for us to ask questions and to recognize patterns. And slowly over the generations we've turned this aptitude into an ability to reconstruct our distant past, to question the very origins of the universe and life itself. It's our only advantage, and yet this is the one thing that God does not want us to have: consciousness, self-awareness.
Perhaps Genesis should be read as an ironic story. Here's a god who does not give us the knowledge of good and evil. He knows we don't know right from wrong. Yet he tells us not to do something anyway. How can someone who doesn't know right from wrong be expected to do the right thing? By disobeying god, we escape from his totalitarian prison where you cannot ask any questions, where you must never question authority. We become our human selves.
Our nation was founded on a heroic act of disobedience to a king who was presumed to rule by divine right. We created social and legal mechanisms to institutionalize the questioning of authority and the participation of every person in the decision-making process. It's the most original thing about us, our greatest contribution to global civilization. Today, our not-exactly-elected officials try to make it seem as if questioning this ancient story is wrong.... That the teaching of our evolving understanding of nature, which is a product of what we have been able to discover over generations, is somehow un-American or disrespectful of strongly held beliefs. As if we should not teach our children what we've learned about our origins, but rather we should continue to teach them this story which demonizes the best qualities of our founding fathers.
This makes no sense and it leads me to a question: Why do we separate the scientific, which is just a way of searching for truth, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe? Science is nothing more than a never-ending search for truth. What could be more profoundly sacred than that? I'm sure most of what we all hold dearest and cherish most, believing at this very moment, will be revealed at some future time to be merely a product of our age and our history and our understanding of reality. So here's this process, this way, this mechanism for finding bits of reality. No single bit is sacred. But the search is.
And so we pursue knowledge by using the scientific method to constantly ferret out all the mistakes that human beings chronically make, all of the lies we tell ourselves to combat our feats, all of the lies we tell each other. Here's science, just working like a tireless machine. It's a phenomenally successful one, but its work will never be finished.
In four hundred years, we evolved from a planet of people who are absolutely convinced that the universe revolves around us. No inkling that the Sun doesn't revolve around us, let alone that we are but a minuscule part of a galaxy that contains roughly a hundred billion stars. If scientists are correct, if recent findings of planets that revolve around other stars are correct, there are perhaps five hundred billion worlds in this galaxy, in a universe of perhaps another hundred billion galaxies. And it is conceivable, even possible, that this universe might one day be revealed to be nothing more than an electron in a much greater universe. And here's a civilization that was absolutely clueless four or five hundred years ago about its own tiny world and the impossibly greater vastness surrounding it. We were like a little bunch of fruit flies going around a grape, and thinking this grape is the center of everything that is. To our ancestors the universe was created for one particular gender of one particular species of one particular group among all the stunning variety of life to be found on this tiny little world.
There was only one problem. These very special beings for whom the universe was created had a holiday called Easter and they wanted to be able to celebrate it on the same day at the same time. But in this geocentric universe that they blissfully inhabited, there was no way to create a workable calendar that was coherent. At this time, there was a phrase to describe what science was. It is suffused with disarming candor and not a bit of self-consciousness at all. It was called saving the appearances. That was the task of science: To save the appearances. Figure out a way to take the reported appearances of the stars and the planets in the sky and predict with some reliability where they would be in the future. It's almost as if they knew they were living a cosmic lie. To call it saving the appearances is wonderful.
So the Lateran Council of 1514 was convened, and one of its main goals was to figure out a calendar that everybody could use so that they won't be celebrating Easter on different days. A man named Nicolas Copernicus, who was a very religious guy, whose lifelong career was in the church, had already figured out what the problem was. He was invited to present this information at the Council, but he declined because he knew how dangerous it would be to puncture this cosmological illusion. Even though the pope at that moment was not actually terribly exercised about this idea, Copernicus's fears were not baseless. Even sixty years later, a man named Giordano Bruno was burned alive for one reason: be would not utter the phrase, "There are no other worlds."
I've thought about this a lot. How could you have the guts to be willing to be burned alive? Bruno had no community of peers to egg him on. He wasn't even a scientist, he didn't really have any scientific evidence, but he chose this horrible death because he refused to say this phrase: "There are no other worlds." It's a magnificent thing, it's a wondrous mystery to me, and I don't think I completely understand how it was possible.
Copernicus did find the courage to publish his idea when he was comfortably near a natural death. When in 1543, On The Revolutions of Celestial Spheres was published, something unprecedented happened: a trauma from which we have never recovered. Up until that time, the sacred and the scientific had been one. Priests and scientists had been one in the same. It is true that two millennia before Copernicus there had been the pre-Socratic philosophers, who really were the inventors of science and the democratic values of our society. These ancient Greeks could imagine a universe and a world without God. But they were very much the exception, flourishing too briefly before being almost completely extirpated philosophically by the Platonists. Many of their books were destroyed. Plato loathed their materialism and egalitarian ideals. So there really wasn't a vibrant school of thought with a continuous tradition that survived down through the ages, daring to explain the wonder of nature without resorting to the God hypothesis.
It was actually initiated by a group of uncommonly religious men like Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, and (much later) even Darwin, who catalyzed that separation between our knowledge of nature and what we held in our hearts. All four of them either had religious careers or were contemplating such a profession. They were brilliant questioners, and they used the sharpest tools they had to search for what was holy. They had enough confidence in the reality of the sacred to be willing to look at it as deeply as humanly possible. This unflinching search led to our greatest spiritual awakening--the modern scientific revolution. It was a spiritual breakthrough, and I think that it is our failure to recognize it as such that explains so much of the loneliness and madness in our civilization, so much of the conflict and self-hatred. At that time, the public and their religious institutions, of course, rejected out of hand their most profound insights into nature. It was several hundred years before the public really thought about this, and took seriously what Copernicus was saying. The last four centuries of disconnect between what our elders told us and what we knew was true has been costly for our civilization.
I think we still have an acute case of post-Copernican-stress syndrome. We have not resolved the trauma of losing our infantile sense of centrality in the universe. And so as a society we lie to our children. We tell them a palliative story, almost to ensure that they will be infantile for all of their lives. Why? Is the notion that we die so unacceptable? Is the notion that we are tiny and the universe is vast too much of a blow to our shaky self-esteem?
It has only been through science that we have been able to pierce this infantile, dysfunctional need to be the center of the universe, the only love object of its creator. Science has made it possible to reconstruct our distant past without the need to idealize it, like some adult unable to deal with the abuse of childhood. We've been able to view our tiny little home as it is. Our conception of our surroundings need not remain the disproportionate view of the still-small child. Science has brought us to the threshold of acceptance of the vastness. It has carried us to the gateway of the universe. However, we are spiritually and culturally paralyzed and unable to move forward; to embrace the vastness, to embrace our lack of centrality and find our actual place in the fabric of nature. That we even do science is hopeful evidence for our mental health. It's a breakthrough. However, it's not enough to allow these insights; we must take them to heart.
What happened four or five hundred years ago? During this period there was a great bifurcation. We made a kind of settlement with ourselves. We said, okay, so much of what we believed and what our parents and our ancestors taught us has been rendered untenable. The Bible says that the Earth is flat. The Bible says that we were created separately from the rest of life. If you look at it honestly, you have to give up these basic ideas, you have to admit that the Bible is not infallible, it's not the gospel truth of the creator of the universe. So what did we do? We made a corrupt treaty that resulted in a troubled peace: We built a wall inside ourselves.
It made us sick. In our souls we cherished a myth that was rootless in nature. What we actually knew of nature we compartmentalized into a place that could not touch our souls. The churches agreed to stop torturing and murdering scientists. The scientists pretended that knowledge of the universe has no spiritual implications.
It's a catastrophic tragedy that science ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life and it's preciousness on this tiny world.
When I say "spiritual," it's a complicated word that has some unpleasant associations. Still, there has to be a word for that soaring feeling that we experience when we contemplate 13 billion years of cosmic evolution and four and a half billion years of the story of life on this planet. Why should we give that up? Why do we not give this to our children? Why is it that in a city like Los Angeles, a city of so many churches and temples and mosques, there's only one place like this Center for Inquiry? And that it's only us here today? Fewer than a hundred people in a city of millions? Why is that? Why does the message of science not grab people in their souls and give them the kind of emotional gratification that religion has given to so many?
This is something that I think we have to come to grips with. There's a confusion generally in our society. There is a great wall that separates what we know from what we feel.
Medicine has had an oath that goes back to Hippocrates. Hippocrates is an amazing figure, both a father of scientific ethics and first articulator of the insight that frees humankind to discover the universe. He's one of those pre-Socratic philosophers I was talking about earlier, and he said something that resonated for me at a moment in my life when I realized what my path would be. His words inspired me to try as hard as I could in my own life to make it matter what is true. Hippocrates was writing in an essay called Sacred Disease 2,500 years ago. He was writing about the sacred disease that is now called epilepsy, and very matter-of-factly he said something that struck me like a lightning bolt. I'll paraphrase: "People believe that this disease is sacred simply because they don't know what causes it? But some day I believe they will, and the moment they figure out why people have epilepsy, it will cease to be considered divine." Why don't we have schools everywhere that teach children about Hippocrates, about the power of asking questions, rather than cautionary tales about the punishment for doing so. Our kids are not taught in school about Hippocrates, not taught about this multigenerational process of divesting ourselves of superstitions, false pattern recognition, and all the things that go with it, racism, sexism, xenophobia, all that constellation of baggage that we carry with us. We live in a society now where our leadership is all about promoting superstition, promoting xenophobia. It seems to me that the biggest challenge we face is to evolve a language that couples the cold-eyed skepticism and rigor of science with a sense of community, a sense of belonging that religion provides. We have to make it matter what is true. If instead we say that what really matters is to have faith, what really matters is to believe, we'll never get there. It's not enough to have forty minutes of science in the daily school program, because science shouldn't be compartmentalized that way. Science is a way of looking at absolutely everything.
What I find disappointing about most religious beliefs is that they are a kind of statement of contempt for nature and reality. It's absurdly hubristic. It holds the myths of a few thousand years above nature's many billion-yeared journey. It says reality is inferior and less satisfying than the stories we make up.
We need to create a community of skepticism for people of all ages. We desperately need some good music. We don't have to cut any corners on our ethos of skepticism. We do have to learn how to instill a sense of community, a rational experience of communion with nature and each other.
I would love to see, actually, not so much building more Centers for Inquiry, which would be great, but why don't we take over the planetaria of the country, of which there are hundreds, and turn them into places of worship. Not worship of the science that we know of this moment. Always give the message, over and over again, that our understanding could be wrong, this is what we think at this moment. The wonder of science is that we may find out that all of this is untrue. Why don't we take over these places and have services in the planetaria. We can connect. We can find inspiration in the revelations of science. We can have skepticism and wonder, both.
To me, faith is antithetical to the values of science. Not hope, which is very different from faith. I have a lot of hope. Faith is saying that you can know the outcome of things based on what you hope is true. And science is saying in the absence of evidence, we must withhold judgment. It's so hard to do. It's so tempting to believe in the lie detector or in heaven or that you know who you are based on the day of the month that you were born. It's a sort of unearned self-esteem. It's an identity that you can slip right into, and it's tremendously reassuring. So, I don't have any faith, but I have a lot of hope, and I have a lot of dreams of what we could do with our intelligence if we had the will and the leadership and the understanding of how we could take all of our intelligence and our resources and create a world for our kids that is hopeful.
I had a wonderful experience writing for the relatively new Rose Center at the Hayden Planetarium in New York. It's the greatest virtual reality theatre on Earth; completely immersive in the experience of travelling through the universe. I was honored to cowrite, with our Cosmos cowriter Steve Sorer, the first two shows that inaugurated the planetarium center. And this is what got me thinking about how we might offer something that would be at least as compelling as whatever anyone else in the religion business is offering. We get to take you through the universe, and through the history of not only the Milky Way Galaxy but also the larger universe, and to tell something--the second one's called The Search for Life, Are We Alone?--something about the nature of life. It's a very uncompromising message about evolution and I think very directly promotes the kind of values and ideas that I think we share. Every kid who goes to a city public school gets taken to these shows. It was eye-opening to me, first of all, how far you could go in this direction, and what you could do with music and a fantastic technical capability that lets you tour that part of the universe we have come to know something about. You really hold on to your chair. You feel like you're traveling through the galaxies. It's uplifting. I constantly get mail about this and everyone is saying the same thing: you made me feel a part of something. You made me feel, even though I'm really small, that I'm a part of this greater fabric of life, which is so beautiful. And that's the kind of stuff that Cosmos Studios is working on, all of our projects. If they don't combine rigorous science with that soaring, uplifting feeling, then they don't qualify as a project for us. So I would say that that there's a lot in the entertainment world that we could be doing that I think has the power to really reach people.
Since we founded Cosmos Studios in the spring of 2000, we have accomplished the following: We are launching Cosmos 1, the first solar sailing spacecraft later this year. Our partners are The Planetary Society and the Babakin Space Research Center of Russia. We are actually launching the spacecraft from an intercontinental ballistic missile based on a Russian submarine. We have taken this weapon of mass destruction and converted it to a means of advancing the dream of space exploration. Solar sailing is an idea that has been around in science since the 1920s, but it's never been tried before. If we succeed, we will have demonstrated a practical means of literally riding light all the way to the stars. We liken our solar sail to what the Wright brothers did at Kitty Hawk, because although they were aloft for only twelve seconds and went 165 feet, they demonstrated that powered flight in a heavier than air vehicle was possible. What we're trying to demonstrate is that solar sailing is possible, and solar sailing is the only physically sound way of which we know to travel so quickly that it begins to be feasible to do interstellar flight on human time scales--two thousand years to the nearest star instead of twenty thousand years.
Cosmos Studios has funded research that has resulted in two papers published in the journal Science. We have produced a spiffed-up version of the thirteen-hour Cosmos TV series on DVD. We have produced three full-length documentaries. Perhaps our most promising project is an ambitious new way of teaching science from pre-kindergarten through high school. This involves a whole new approach to curricula. We hope to engage people from early childhood in science as a way of thinking.
I'm also at work on a book dealing with the themes I've tried to cover here.
[In answer to a question about Carl Sagan's role in garnering support for the legitimate scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and taking on the creationists]:
Congress cut off federal funding for SETI years ago. I was with Carl when he went into Senator William Proxmire's office after Proxmire had given the Golden Fleece Award to the SETI program. Carl sat down with him. I didn't say a word. I was just a witness. And I just watched Carl. I was inspired by him, by not only the breadth of his knowledge, but his patience, his lack of arrogance, his willingness to hear the other person out. Senator Proxmire did a complete turnabout as a result of that meeting.
And there were other instances of Carl's remarkable persuasiveness. One was a great story of a so-called "creation scientist" who watched Carl testify at a hearing about creationism in schools. Carl testified for about four hours. It was somewhere in the South, I can't remember where. And six months later a letter came from the "creation scientist" expert who had also testified that day, saying that he had given up his daytime job and realized the error of what he was doing. It was only because Carl was so patient and so willing to hear the other person out. He did it with such kindness and then, very gently but without compromising, laid out all of the things that were wrong with what this guy thought was true. That is a lesson that I wish that all of us in our effort to promote skepticism could learn, because I know that very often the anger I feel when confronting this kind of thinking makes me want to start cutting off the other person. But to do so is to abandon all hope of changing minds.
When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me--it still sometimes happens--and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous--not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance.... That pure chance could be so generous and so kind.... That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time.... That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it's much more meaningful.... The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.
Ann Druyan is a cowriter with the late Carl Sagan of the Emmy and Peabody award-winning series Cosmos. Their twenty-year professional collaboration included NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message and many speeches, articles, and books, including Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and Comet. She was co-creator with Sagan of the motion picture Contact, and a credited contributor to his Pale Blue Dot, The Demon-Haunted World, and Billions and Billions. She is co-founder and CEO of Cosmos Studios, as well as Program Director of Cosmos 1, the first solar sailing spacecraft mission. She and Carl Sagan were married until his death in 1996. They have two children.