So if we take the Wayback Machine to the year 1995, you will find me out of college, working as an operations manager in retail despite my lofty aspirations to anthropology and later, nursing, as career choices. But I had a family to support, and the money was good even if the hours really sucked. What the hell does that have to do with this review? Well, I was involved in an awful lot of hiring and firing decisions when I worked for Foley’s (later Macy’s), and I noticed something interesting. M

So if we take the Wayback Machine to the year 1995, you will find me out of college, working as an operations manager in retail despite my lofty aspirations to anthropology and later, nursing, as career choices. But I had a family to support, and the money was good even if the hours really sucked. What the hell does that have to do with this review? Well, I was involved in an awful lot of hiring and firing decisions when I worked for Foley’s (later Macy’s), and I noticed something interesting. Most of the people that I was interviewing were not particularly well educated. Their math skills were lacking, their ability to write above a fourth-grade level was compromised, and they were woefully short of critical thinking skills. Not all of the employees that I dealt with were like that, of course, there were many who were perfectly well qualified for the jobs which they were hired for, but it did spark an internal conversation within me. Later on in my career I found myself correcting essays for an MBA candidate who worked for me, because the man just could not communicate effectively in a written format.Furthermore, I had found myself arguing for years with people who espoused what I thought were strange religious beliefs. I remembered the “Satanic Panic” in the mid-1980s. I could turn on the television and find a plethora of different 24-7-365 religious channels with self-styled “preachers” all clamoring for various amounts of adulation and cash, and I wondered how anyone could be suckered into believing things which were clearly not true in the objective sense. The more I thought about it the more it all began to connect inside my head. The internet as we know it didn’t exist yet so there wasn’t a big proliferation of Flat Earthers or moon landing deniers, but it was obvious that the seeds for such a thing had already been planted.Now I was brought up in a relatively progressive household. My mother was very curious, my older brother worked in biochemistry, and my father was very tolerant of my need to read and was always ready to answer questions for me even though he had no formal schooling to speak of, though he was extensively well-traveled and experienced in the ways of the world. And yeah, all of this sounds judgmental and kind of assholish of me when you get right down to it. And yet it’s now 2019 and this quote from “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” resonates more clearly than ever:“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”With this singular quote, Carl Sagan defines the cognitive dissonance that appears to affect a significant percentage of the U.S. population. Now you have to realize that Carl Sagan was often considered judgmental and kind of assholish too in his day. He was very intolerant of pseudoscience and was a huge proponent of reforming the educational system in the U.S. to be more geared towards the teaching of the sciences along with critical and rational thinking. “The Demon-Haunted” world boils down to Sagan debunking the world of ghosts and demons, cryptids and little grey men, and religious charlatans of all stripes. And the man can write about this stuff, through 450 plus pages of sometimes dense text.DISCLAIMER: I am assuming that you know perfectly well who Carl Sagan is. From a personal perspective, he was/is one of my heroes, along with James Randi. Sagan was one of those rare scientists who could popularize science for the masses without talking down to the lowest common denominator. If you are NOT familiar with Sagan, then you should spend some time with his Wiki page:Now, I have to throw this out there to gum up the works a bit. I am and always will be a seeker of the higher truth. I’m convinced that the scientific method is the greatest reasoning tool ever invented in the history of mankind, and yet there are still phenomena that seem to fall outside of the realm of ready explanation. And Sagan himself seems to acknowledge this with this quote:“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”What I think Sagan is saying here is that there is a mental space where reason and the search for meaning meet, bringing together the “how” with the “why” of conscious existence. Carl Jung had a lot to say on this subject as well, and you can find similar ideas in the lucid and beautiful interpretations of Eastern mysticism that Alan Watts popularized back in the 1960s and 1970s. We may NEVER be equipped as a species to comprehend the true Tao, yet we are still cognizant of the fact that there IS a true Tao to be contemplated.But I’m getting off track here. “The Demon Haunted World” is as important a book today as it was back in 1995 when it was first released. Perhaps more so, as the internet has led to the viral spread of false information and a more profound split between those who respect the idea of reasoned thinking and those who choose to bunker themselves in to a world of “alternative facts” and “fake news.” This is especially important in terms of climate science. We are at a tipping point in human existence, in the beginning phases of the sixth great extinction event in the history of the planet. We can choose to act on the information that we have, or we can choose the path of ignorance and then stand by as the inevitable happens and the human race is either wiped out or severely reduced in size and scope.Here is the most famous and widely circulated quote from the book. If you have an internet connection and use any type of social media then you have probably seen it in some form or another:“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”Let me tell you, gang, we as a society are there now. Sagan saw it, but he certainly wasn’t the only one to elucidate this thought. Orwell saw it, too. Margaret Atwood saw it. Aldous Huxley saw it. Sinclair Lewis saw it. Hell, even I saw it and I’m certainly no genius. If I could wish for one thing and one thing only, it would be that every person in America should be required to read this book. I think that it should be in every school, every library, every home. And I know that it won’t reach a lot of people. One can only look at the literacy rates in the U.S. to understand that we as a society no longer read books. Those of us on Goodreads and other book oriented websites are a distinct minority. But even if it just reached a FEW people it would be worth the effort.I’ll get off of my soapbox now. I have had my say. I’m angry and disappointed in the direction that the country and world have taken during my lifetime. And yet “The Demon-Haunted World” still gives me hope, and I pull it down from the shelf every so often to remind myself that there are still works like this out there that can open minds and stimulate ideas. There is still a chance for this race of territorial primates to make the great leap into cooperative action buoyed by reason and science, and I have to hang on to that. It’s the only thing that I can do. That and to tell you that if you haven’t already read the book, then you need to. Please.