Column: Facts and Beliefs, by George Fiala

One of the great TV shows was Public TV’s Cosmos. Originally broadcast in the 1980’s, produced by scientist, astronomer and writer Carl Sagan, younger people know the successor shows, Cosmos—A Personal Voyage and Cosmos—A Spacetime Odyssey,   both created by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a Sagan devotee and astrophysicist, author and science communicator in his own right.

Sagan is described in Wikipedia as a “scientific skeptic.” I never heard that term before, but after reading the definition, I think I must be one as well:

“Scientific skeptics maintain that empirical investigation of reality leads to the most reliable empirical knowledge, and suggest that the scientific method is best suited to verifying results.

Scientific skeptics attempt to evaluate claims based on verifiability and falsifiability; they discourage accepting claims which rely on faith or anecdotal evidence.”

To me this is an apt description of a good journalist, looking for facts and then verifying them.

In his book “Demon Haunted World” written a year before his early death in 1996, Sagan wrote:

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…

It’s almost twenty years later and I’m not seeing anything there that doesn’t ring true. One place to start could be the number of Americans in 2003 who believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the World Trade Center attacks. It’s not something I ever gave credence to, but 70% of Americans were sure of it. A lot of innocent Iraqis died as a result. According to the Washington Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, that number is likely more than 300,000. Those people are not coming back.

Another place could be something that a friend told me back in the 1990’s. He lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where we both went to college. His father was a card carrying socialist who worked in a staple factory. He told me that when he would go to family get-togethers, he could not hold any meaningful conversations because almost everyone was a devout listener of Rush Limbaugh. Anything counter to what Rush said was not countenanced, even to the point of a discussion. So while he could talk about family and friends, most everything else was met with “Well, that’s not what Rush says. Are you going against Rush?” So he shut up.

Something very similar to that happened to me around that same time.

I was running my mailing company from a print shop on Flatbush Avenue, and once a week a Hasidic Jew would come around with his younger brother asking if I were a Jew. After I while I told him yes, and from then on he became determined to get me to put on some kind of religious paraphernalia and pray right there at the counter.

I resisted that for many months, but I did find him very interesting to talk to about all sorts of things. But when the subject turned to something that could be in the Bible, like earth’s history, he would tell me what the Bible says, insisting that since God wrote the Bible, how could anything else be possibly true.

A conversation ender.

During the Obama administration, I was told by someone who, in most all other respects was someone just like me, except younger, that Obama was the Antichrist. For him that was a given.

Then, a few years later, just after Trump won the presidency, I was in Tennessee and was curious to find out the kind of people who voted for him. I started to ask a guy behind the counter at the motel, and he immediately told me to lower my voice as he looked around. Then he told me that it was dangerous to say anything negative about Trump in the state. Then there’s QAnon.

What Sagan was worried about was a return to an unenlightened world. I often do think that we are in some future’s dark ages.

What is most worrying to me though, is that I find little difference between people on one end of the spectrum who believe Obama is the Antichrist, and people on the other who believe Trump is the devil (some people, otherwise seemingly progressive, told me Hillary was the devil.)

My suggestion in all of this is to live  true to your beliefs, while always remaining open to facts.

George Fiala

Founder and editor of the Red Hook Star-Revue. George is also a musician and one-time progressive rock disk jockey, in York, Pennsylvania, also birthplace of Mrs. Don Imus.