Eminentoes/Carl Sagan in Space
Royal, Robert
EMINENTOES ............................................................................................................................................................................ CARL SAGAN...
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...20503, (202) 395-4522...
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...And as for behavior, why can't we figure out what's in our best interest as a species...
...Wells's vision, for all its flaws, seems more realistic: Sagan could do with a dose of hard-nosed Darwinism...
...Sagan has shown a certain force of style in all his books...
...The heavens declare the glory of God, says the Psalmist...
...This illuminates several of Sagan's public positions...
...A Catholic instructor, spotting the mag among my books, lashed out with amazing fury that it was a rag...
...I went into a phone booth and called the Nation editor, Carey McWilliams, holding my breath...
...This bloodless simplicity shows up in many ways...
...I ATTENTION ALL TAXPAYERS...
...If human beings are by nature insignificant, why should other creatures, however advanced and pleasant, be any more significant...
...By calling the number below, you can send a message directly to your Senator urging support for President Reagan's tax reform plan...
...William Sloane Coffin, former Daily Worker staffer A. B. Magil, former Guardian editor James Aronson, Marvin Gettleman, Martin Duberman, actor Edward Herrman (who played stuffy Alger in the TV special), Penn Kimball—all celebrating the 120th anniversary of the Nation at the seventh regiment armory in Manhattan on March 18...
...Brickner continued: "Ladies and gentlemen, a man with whom I now find myself more in synch than I find myself with many...
...All he had to do was embed some scientific statement in a religious tradition and order that it be handed down unchanged until some-one came along who could understand it: "How about `Two strands entwined is the secret of life...
...This is quite a vision...
...But from the little the reader can gather about them in the novel, the Guardians for all their powers lead meaningless lives, perhaps even worse than our own by several measures...
...Applications are accepted from June 1-November 15...
...By the end ' I ' of the course, you'll be learning and speaking entirely in Spanish...
...In the most revealing scene, Arroway argues how easy, even "trivial," it would have been for any god to make himself known unmistakably...
...According to Benda, the treason of the intellectuals was not that they were disinterested ivory-tower theorists, but that they were not disinterested enough...
...His view of science still breathes the confidence and hope of the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries...
...As a strong apostle of the benefits of science, he should be inclined toward a technological solution to a technological stalemate...
...The Time Traveller journeys into the future and finds that Victorian society has given rise to two human species...
...Seeing Jackson up close is interesting...
...Sagan's ETIs are just smarter: their lives may also be better, and Sagan clearly thinks so...
...The idea now seems silly, but it reveals how turn-of-the-century mechanistic biology, extrapolating from the social situation, saw the future of mankind...
...Department of State has spent thousands of dollars developing this course...
...As well as we can tell from the sketchy details, the Guardians are disembodied, near-eternal beings who have entirely transcended historical existence...
...The only current counterpart to this fundamentalist reading of the physical world is the fundamentalist reading of the Bible by the likes of Jimmy Swaggart...
...John's College in Annapolis for spending the semester reading Thomas Wolfe in the library, I was walking along 42nd Street by the Manhattan library, by the David Evanier's article on the World Muslim Congress also appears in this issue...
...The sad result is the transformation of Carl Sagan, popularizer, into Carl Sagan, moralist...
...Sim-ply follow the spoken and written instructions, listening and repeating...
...Additionally, Fellows participate in an extensive education program including seminars with top government officials, leading scholars, journalists and private sector leaders...
...Like Wells, Sagan has an outline of history...
...We inhabit a speck of dust in an immense cosmos...
...The normal rate is $9.75-this is a discount of over 50...
...The course consists of a series of cassettes and accompanying textbook...
...Robert Royal is a research associate at the Ethics and Public Policy Center...
...Men of honor such as Emile Capouya and M. L. Rosenthal were literary and poetry editors...
...Sagan is so far removed from historical and philosophical ways of thinking that he scarcely realizes that this is itself a philosophical position...
...President Reagan needs our help...
...People will die for a conception of the world...
...My earliest memories of the Nation are bound up with my own coming of age...
...But his book is worth examining for the wares he is peddling to a wide audience beneath the story's scientific facade...
...Many religions teach that we may enjoy the beatific vision in the next life...
...PARTY TIME Alger Hiss was there...
...But for those who have lost faith, who cannot accept the consolations of philosophy, or who will not learn the lessons of history, the promise of delivery through a transcendent science seems to be the only hope left...
...We're simply a bunch of underprivileged ghetto kids who won't believe what we see when we get uptown...
...Wells too accepted this basic view, but with much greater sophistication...
...manual, and 464-p...
...For the most part it is based on the vulgar simplification that science is all knowledge and philosophy and religion are all error...
...Jackson stands there...
...When I was 13, I spent a summer at a military academy in upstate New York...
...My first publication...
...This kind is a favorite among front groups...
...that if I read it I didn't understand it, and he doubted I read it anyway...
...AMERICANS FOR TAX REFORM 1800 "M" STREET, N.W., SUITE 475 WASHINGTON, D.C...
...And he does: "Maybe some don't know that when Reagan was tramping around on Nazi graves, Jesse Jackson was visiting the graves of my kin" At this point right near me a young lady actually spoke up in a crisp British voice: "I don't think they'd appreciate having him there" by David Evanier An old lady snapped, "Shut up," to the young lady...
...THE NATION'S PULSE...
...Happened to be right (which enraged me at the moment more than anything...
...thus to give them a little heft, he hints that the extraterrestrials are involved in a kind of search for the creator...
...The upper classes, relieved more and more by the TO ORDER BY PHONE, PLEASE CALL TOLL-FREE NUMBER: 1-800-243-1234...
...In a way, Sagan's is a permutation of the old view...
...Our 12th year...
...For the greater part of these data should be the human situation itself...
...There's plenty of order in my universe," Dr...
...Sagan's role in the modern trahison des clercs is similar to the phenomenon described by Julien Benda...
...He says in Cosmos, "Astronomically, the United States and the Soviet Union are the same place...
...For years the American people have paid higher taxes as a result of special interest loopholes...
...But the old view had the advantage of hierarchy: the higher beings were higher than we are by nature...
...20036 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 31...
...Any right-thinking person, presumably, would want to transcend the limitations of both dark superpowers...
...Why does he oppose SDI...
...If you're not convinced it's the fastest, easiest, most painless way to learn Spanish, return it and we'll refund every penny you paid...
...but his real accomplishment has been to drape the prestige of science over less savory purposes...
...The astronomy was mistaken, but the idea gave the human being a humble dignity...
...Order either, or save 10% by ordering both: ^ Volume I: Basic...
...Brickner is understanding...
...But there are problems with Sagan's paradise...
...Because they control whole galaxies while we only build canals and White House Fellowships the fellowship program The White House Fellowship program is beginning its twenty-second year and is designed to provide gifted and highly motivated Americans firsthand experience in the process of personal involvement in the leadership of their society...
...Not only are there no wars among them, there aren't even any disagreements...
...Russell and Einstein were utter innocents in their understanding of history, but they were at least familiar with parts of our ethical and philosophical heritage...
...Philosophy, ethics, and history cannot enter into this sort of scientism either...
...magazine kiosks where I eagerly followed the literary world...
...If we look for the answer simply in his liberal politics, we will mistake an effect for the cause...
...But Great Books maxims cannot hide the flatness of the world portrayed in Contact...
...The latest fruit of his varied career is Contact,' a science fiction novel for which he received a multi-million dollar advance...
...An affluent crowd, some in punk hairdos, cowboy boots, earrings (for men), granny glasses...
...Volume II: Intermediate...
...how to apply Application forms and additional information can be obtained from: President's Commission on White House Fellowships, 712 Jackson Place N.W., Washington, D.C...
...Whole areas of human life find no place in Sagan's fiction...
...The commission seeks candidates of demonstrated excellence in their professional roles as well as significant breadth of interests and community involvement...
...As a scientist, he must know that developments in technology can and will make such a defense possible...
...Science is represented by astrophysicist and protagonist Elizabeth Arroway, and 'Simon and Schuster, $18.95...
...that its politics did not reach into the back of the book and determine so many of its book reviews and literary projects...
...Sagan is blind to the potential consequences of the current crisis of values, even though science's failed attempt to answer the questions of history is one of the principal causes of that crisis...
...Senate, and the lobbyists and special interest groups have launched an expensive campaign to continue their free ride (a ride we pay for...
...A chic crowd, wandering back and forth between the two bandstands (one for music, the other for heavy stuff: Jesse Jackson, Bella Abzug, George McGovern), munching cotton candy, popcorn, chili, plenty of booze...
...but meaning and method for guiding human action, not at all...
...Louis Farrakhan is simply an anti-Semitic `blip' on the screen of our lives put there by the media, some overreactive Jews and Mayor Koch . . ." You can see this guy's whipped himself into readiness to love Jesse Jackson...
...The Foreign Service Institute's Spanish course is unconditionally guaranteed...
...Sound like a fair fight...
...what fellows do During their one year assignments in -Washington, Fellows serve as special assistants to Cabinet secretaries, or senior members of the White House staff...
...Why then the opposition...
...When Elizabeth Arroway and her Soviet counterpart meet at various conferences, each entertains the other by denouncing the foreign policies of his own country...
...At 18, bounced out of St...
...You'll learn Latin American Spanish recorded by I ' ' native speakers...
...They too must go by the board, and with them the most characteristically human activities...
...How does Sagan see the future...
...12 cassettes (17 hr...
...Since our quarrel with the Soviet Union would have no importance to an ETI, it should have no importance to us either...
...Earth, says one character in Contact, is a ghetto...
...Karl Marx transposed some of that beatitude to this world, but even he only thought the state would wither away...
...Sagan made it clear in Cosmos that some good might be found in religious or even mythological traditions, provided they were not of the West...
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...manual, and 614-p...
...While Sagan and Elizabeth Arroway are figuring out what's good for us, lots of other folks—those who have spouses to choose, children to raise, far-reaching decisions to make—have already been at work on the question...
...citizens are eligible to apply during the early and formative years of their careers...
...The story begins when signals are received from Extraterrestrial Intelligences (these conjectural beings already have their own acronym—ETIs) and set off confused reactions around the world...
...The left's current idols...
...In the ailing publishing industry, advances like that are only paid for a sure thing...
...Compared with ourselves, the abode of advanced beings working at monumental projects is where the real action is...
...Members of America's diplomatic corps are assigned to U.S...
...but Carl Sagan will only believe him if an ETI tells him so...
...A colleague, an ally, in tough causes and against formidable foes in and out of government, a dear personal friend...
...It's by far the most effective way to learn Spanish at your own convenience and at your own pace...
...He said, "Yes, we've accepted your piece...
...Please call today 1-800-325-6000 Operator # 56 You may send an up-to-50-word message of your own ($4.95) or the text already on file at Western Union ($4.00...
...s ea anus n n like a diplomat!® shipped in a handsome library binder...
...The U.S...
...Gravitation, electromagnet-ism, quantum mechanics, superunification, they all involve laws...
...The disco radicals and limousine liberals wander in the direction of the noise...
...If we have to fall back and regroup we'll meet at the Dairy Queen in the Delray shopping center...
...Try it for three weeks...
...embassies abroad, where they must be able to converse fluently in every situation...
...Billing is direct to your phone or credit card...
...We ain't gonna fire till we see the whites of their eyes...
...they are to be abolished...
...A frigidaire is the only image that comes to mind...
...Thus are we blithely invited to wave goodbye to the Old and New Testaments, to Socrates, the Buddha, Confucius...
...Man was the lowest of the intellects...
...All three become clouded by the simple accumulation of facts...
...But any appeal to the specifically human in Contact is con-fronted with "courageous thinking," that is, thinly rationalistic solutions to all questions of morality and values...
...Rather, the dogmatic limitations of his worldview preclude human depths: no strong personal affections, no pro-found connections with nature or with history...
...With its unique "programmatic" learning method, you set your own pace — testing yourself, correcting errors, reinforcing accurate ' responses...
...The DNA double-helix is the secret of life...
...Arroway has little trouble tying the hapless preachers in knots, but in the process reveals a fundamentalist streak of another kind in herself and the author...
...Foreign service per-sonnet, that's who...
...The Western Union operator can look up the names of your Senators for you...
...This is not merely an instance of the quarrel between C. P. Snow's two cultures...
...text, $135...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 dams...
...A lady from the South, Mollie Ivins of the Dallas Times-Herald...
...In other words, I cannot connect the Nation of old, with all its political faults, with the Stalinized journal it is today...
...The most pathetic of her stunted human reactions come in the love scenes, which are so inept that I can only conclude Sagan meant them to say something other than they do...
...Please call now...
...He seems to think that the Western view of man was based on the belief that man is the center of the universe...
...religion by fundamentalist preachers...
...At one point, he is plain in his contempt for Western culture...
...Occasionally, the Soviet scientist suffers from some darkpolitical forces at home, but Arroway delicately refrains from inquiring about them...
...The most curious feature of Sagan's outline of history is how pre-modern it is...
...Notice that all of a sudden, whatever the relation of primitive cultures to the West back on Earth, "privileged frames of reference" seem to be operating again...
...He said of Louis Farrakhan in 1985: "Basically, Rev...
...Sagan's visibility came initially from his considerable abilities as a popularizer of science...
...who is eligible U.S...
...The line is open 24 hours a day and your message will be delivered the very next day...
...But here we are in 1986, and in the grand old dank and lonely armory some 3,000 people are wandering back and forth in the noise, between Joan Baez or a noisy band on one stage, and on the other...
...As she travels the globe, Dr...
...After his outburst, I dipped into it and found to my embarrassment that I was in over my head...
...text, $120.' (CT residents add sales tax...
...To Carl Sagan, the tangled actualities of human life are not merely deplorable...
...Sagan, on the other hand, is so en-slaved by 1'esprit de geometrie that he deliberately strives to eliminate from his work almost all non-scientific modes of thought—the very tools needed to understand history and apply its lessons to the present...
...Where Wells saw potential dangers lurking in the very heart of human progress, Sagan sees nothing but light...
...Apparently he believes we will be better off as pure intellects, bereft of consequential choices...
...Employees of the Federal Government are not eligible, with the exception of career military personnel of the Armed Services...
...Sagan tells us repeatedly how insignificant we are in the universe...
...It is a central part of our tradition that mere knowledge must be guided by understanding, and both by wisdom...
...Later, in fact, I actually did read the Nation along with the New Statesman, and while I don't recall the Nation ever having the unalloyed brilliance of such New Statesman writers as Conor Cruise O'Brien, Paul Johnson, Kingsley Mar-tin, or Malcolm Muggeridge, nevertheless I still think it's true that under Carey McWilliams the Nation had a certain quality...
...President Reagan thinks that this is wrong, so in 1985 he proposed a major overhaul of the tax code, eliminating loopholes and lowering rates for the rest of us Americans...
...Sagan's success as a popularizer is unquestioned...
...Arroway journeys to somewhere in space where she meets the Guardians who, though they are advanced beings on another world, are clearly meant to suggest a possible human future...
...We expect them to come up Commerce Avenue in down-town Dallas any day...
...The modem crisis of values, the anomie, angst, absurdity—the cultural chaos and all the characteristically modern maladies—form no part of Sagan's consciousness...
...One controversy Sagan takes particular pains to emphasize is the age-old debate between science and religion, revivified by the knowledge that earthlings are not alone...
...But more than religion is lost...
...Order today...
...They wanted togive up their true calling for public influence...
...As is clear in all of Sagan's work, he opposes nuclear weapons and technical attempts to de-fend against them because he wishes to abolish the categories of politics and history tout court...
...Arroway is so abstracted by her concentration on contacting the ETIs that Puerto Rico, New Mexico, even Paris all breathe the same atmosphere for her, and she knows it...
...Here's Mollie: "Y'all know they been tellin' us for a long time that the Red Tide would come lappin' at our borders...
...Translated back into current terms, they are cosmic ecologists, imbued with a surrealistic sense of mystery...
...There was a time when, however you disagreed, a disinterested and passionate commitment to art and culture could exist alongside loony hopes that the Soviet Union's next five-year plan would not involve torturing millions of innocent people...
...120 courses in 41 other languages available...
...And what do they hear...
...Arroway tells a fundamentalist...
...They mildly go about their business conserving enoughmatter for the universe to continue and speculating about its maker or makers...
...The FSI's Programmatic Spanish Course comes in two volumes, each auCIIa^FaRUM a e...
...Even more ironic is that every chapter in the novel is festooned with weighty epigraphs drawn from a wide variety of times and cultures...
...Simultaneously, the lower classes have been hardened into cannibalistic dwellers in the Earth, the Morlocks...
...Rabbi Balfour Brickner gets up to introduce Jesse Jackson...
...in Sagan's future, history itself will have a scientific end, with the species content to putter around the cosmic garden examining specimens (very sophisticated specimens, to be sure) and ruminating in an agnostic mode...
...Today our astronomy is better, but our view of the human being is not...
...His characters are two-dimensional, although not from his lack of skill as a writer...
...H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, for example, projected a then-current Darwinian view forward in time...
...No one will ever mistake Carl Sagan for a novelist...
...Now you can learn to speak Spanish just as these diplomatic personnel do — with the Foreign Service Institute's Pro-, grammatic Spanish Course...
...That sort of thing...
...Westerners looked down on primitive cultures, he says, because we had not yet applied Einstein's concept of "no privileged frames of reference" to social and political matters...
...the Nation at that age was a badge of defiance...
...That's a neat formula...
...Con-tact is a case in point...
...A scientific approach like Sagan's counsels us to lay aside all human differences not strictly based on a narrow, materialistic epistemology...
...Benda objected to intellectuals who engaged in politics instead of following the truth unswervingly...
...We've all been synchronizin' our Rolexes...
...For there is no getting around the old problem of•intrinsic value...
...Sagan senses the problem...
...Michael Novak recently wrote: "Once a liberal journal, the Nation in recent years has become to journalism what Lyndon LaRouche has become to politics: extremist, hateful, slanderous and reckless of the dignity of others...
...But in the world that most of us in-habit, the quintessentially human questions—the questions not readily answerable by material means—are crucial...
...There are no basic educational requirements and no special career or professional categories...
...Science fiction, of course, is not really about the future, but the present...
...Indeed, Contact became one of the ten best-selling novels in 1985, and at this writing is still at the top of the charts...
...In the grand tradition of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, the prototypes of twentieth-century scientific moralists, Sagan is breaking new ground as an idiot-savant...
...Audio-Forum Room 333 On-The-Green, Guilford, CT 06437 (203) 453-9794 What sort of people need to learn 'I ' ' foreign language as quickly and effectively as possible...
...Studs Terkel: "Truth spoken to power . . ." George McGovern: "the veteran angels of our nation...
...I leapt into the air...
...In the old view, Earth was not the center of the universe, but at the bottom of a hierarchy with an absolute up and down...
...The President's proposal is now in the U.S...
...they seem to be merely comparable to the incomprehension American scientists customarily find in Washington...
...CARL SAGAN IN SPACE by Robert Royal While many able science popularizers come and go, Carl Sagan shows remarkable staying power...
...There is no time to wait for Sagan's in-conclusive data...
...Order, yes...
...This is a common misconception about Aristotelian and medieval thought, often refuted but alive nonetheless...
...1 -I r' THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 also 29 industrial revolution from the challenges of the physical world, have become soft and decadent children, the Eloi...
...This course turns your cassette player into a "teaching machine...
...This may be evenhandedness from a scientific point of view, but in human terms something else is going on...
Vol. 19 • June 1986 • No. 6
