We All Should’ve Listened to Carl Sagan

 

      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 America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—   Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995

 

     You need to be a certain age to remember how influential a figure Carl Sagan was, back when science was something that could be revered and, indeed, popularized. But you don’t have to be any particular age to understand what he was getting at in this quote, because what he was describing — and warning us about — is now everyday reality.

The “dumbing down of America” is a coinage credited to Sagan. But I think it’s fair to say that in 1995, he had no idea how far down America could be dumbed.

Exhibit A would be the so-called “youth vote,” especially the young men who so recklessly voted for Trump, only to develop buyers’ remorse a few months later. It has amounted to an electoral mood swing of over 20 points, and there has been considerable handwringing among Democrats about how they lost so many Gen-Z men to Trump in the first place.

An article in Vox seeks to examine these voters, splitting them into pre- and post-Covid cohorts, trying to decide which group is more “conservative.” The article doesn’t even try to convince us that words like “conservative” — or “progressive” or “liberal” or “moderate” — actually mean anything. So what they’re really talking about is who would, or would not, vote for Trump.

The article concludes, in essence, that it can’t conclude anything from this swing, because, duh:

It turns out that, like other subsets, young voters — and young men specifically — aren’t a monolith.

Even so, the electoral fickleness is real, and begs to be explained. You’d think the article would at least speculate about that. Like maybe young men were hoodwinked into voting for Trump because they got all their news and views from TikTok, or some similar swamp. Or like maybe they got sucked into a social media echo chamber, where politics and hormones get confused with each other, and where all critical thinking is strangled in its infancy. Or like maybe they were swayed by the simpleminded racism/misogyny/xenophobia of a Charlie Kirk or Nick Fuentes.

But whatever these young men think they saw in Trump, once he took office they could see almost immediately they’d made a huge mistake, one that could cost them their futures. That’s enough to swing anyone’s mood, including parents wondering how long they’ll have unemployed adults living in their basement. Of course, a lot of those parents voted for Trump as well.

To me, though, much of it comes down to what Sagan predicted. The electorate in general — and young people in particular — have been so dumbed down they can’t distinguish a responsible public servant from a mob boss.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for such collective stupidity, and Republicans certainly come to mind. But it turns out the biggest driver of this dumbing-down, not just of America, but of the entire world, is none other than that smartphone in your pocket.

Rachel Bitecofer, sociologist and election whisperer, draws this conclusion from a major 2022 study of standardized test scores of 15-year-old students worldwide.

Apparently, most nations have been dumbing down quite precipitously since roughly 2012, the year that social media, driven by the spread of 4G smartphones, became an almost universal haven for teenagers, much to the detriment of both themselves and society.

Scroll down to the graph on this page and you'll see that it couldn’t be more graphic. Reading, Math, and Science scores all started sliding downhill as soon as smartphones met social media, and they’ve been sliding ever since.

Teachers saw it almost immediately, and they’re still screaming about it. As Bitecofer, who saw the phenomenon firsthand, puts it:

The human brain simply cannot learn if it is constantly interrupted, multi-tasking, or in a state of divided attention. And since 2012, divided attention has become the default operating system of childhood.

What we’ve long suspected has turned out to be true: smartphones and related technologies are indeed rotting our brains, young brains especially. Again, from Bitecofer:

We created a tool humans were not evolved to handle, and it’s eating us alive.

And just as we’re coming to terms — or not — with the many ways it’s eating us alive, here comes AI, promising to make the situation exponentially worse. Again, it’s the teachers on the front lines of this, watching artificial intelligence shove aside human reasoning, stripping whatever remains of critical thinking from the classroom.

The political implications are, of course, massive. We’ve seen how gullible and prone to manipulation the American voter is to begin with. Even in Sagan’s time, people had, as he said, “lost the ability to…knowledgeably question those in authority.” And that was before smartphones, before social media, before AI.

It would be ludicrous to suggest that we do without these technologies, even if there were some practical way to make that happen. But they do present a real danger to society, and we need to stay alert to the unintended consequences.

Especially since it keeps getting harder to tell the unintended consequences from the intended ones.