Revisiting Carl Sagan

How frustrating! I’ve finished the reading of my marked paragraphs of both Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, both of which I had read in the 1990s. But when I tried to use my English copy of Cosmos to write this very entry (I reread my Spanish copy) I found that it’s no longer in my library. I have no choice but to use my translated copy of Cosmos and paraphrase back to English what Sagan wrote.

But first I must say that, before I became conscious of the West’s darkest hour, both popularizers of science, Bronowski (1908-1974) and Sagan (1934-1996), were my heroes. Although they are not my heroes anymore, I still believe that the TV series and the accompanying books of The Ascent of Man and Cosmos are must viewing and reading, but only for the Jew-wise adults with ethnic values firmly established. So here we go.

Bronowski was obviously Jewish. But I discovered today, in Wikipedia’s article of Carl Sagan, that Sagan was born in Brooklyn to a Ukrainian Jewish family!

Yesterday, and I mean before today’s discovery, when I finished the rereading of the printed version of both Cosmos and The Ascent of Man it surprised me that, for white people’s interests, some of Sagan’s personal views were even more noxious than Bronowski’s famous little speech at Auschwitz.

Kenneth Clark shows us that demoralizing a people is crucial for the eventual twilight of their civilization. In one of the thirteen programs Bronowski made a dramatic scene in Auschwitz, but only to defend his people: something very human that I can understand. In The Ascent of Man Bronowski didn’t mention what the Jews had done at the Holodomor, where more innocent people were killed than in Auschwitz. This omission is easily explainable taking into account that Bronowski’s main concern was what was good for the Jews. But in my opinion what Sagan wrote in Cosmos demoralize the white peoples in a more toxic, albeit subtle way.

For those who, like me, have reviewed the Spanish chroniclers of the 16th century together with the evidence provided by anthropology, it’s all too clear that the Aztecs were a society composed of serial killers. They even sacrificed and cannibalized their own children—see the chapter of my book Day of Wrath demonstrates the veracity this claim. Conversely, in chapter 12 of Cosmos Sagan painted a completely Manichean view about the Conquest of Mexico, praising the Aztecs for their amazing knowledge of astronomy and depicting the Spanish as brutal conquerors. Even worse: Sagan used the Conquest of Mexico as a paradigm of what the future conquest of space ought never be. Of course, Sagan omitted any mention of the extremely dark side of the Aztec culture.

But even worse for the white people’s self-confidence were Sagan’s pronouncements in the thirteenth, final chapter of Cosmos, “Who speaks for Earth?” I refer to the book, not to the TV series. Sagan almost puts sexual repression of our children in the same category of the crimes against humanity. (Again, it’s a pity that I only have the Spanish translation, even though it’s a deluxe, 20 x 25 cm. book.) He actually says that premarital sex for our adult children is healthy because it prevents society from becoming violent! (See the opposite axiological approach in a William Ventvogelp piece that I rebaptized as “Lycanthropy”.)

But the most offensive passage of the book version of Cosmos is that, when Sagan dared to mention diverse cultures and ethnic groups, he immediately said that we must amplify our sense of loyalty—and include all humanity in it! And Sagan added that rich nations are obliged to share their wealth with the poor ones! (I ignore the page number of these outrageous sentences in the English version, but in the Spanish translation it appears on pages 338-339.)

It is quite interesting to compare both Bronowski’s and Sagan’s TV series and books with Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, which I’ll assess in the next entries. Civilisation, aired in 1969 at the United Kingdom, was the mother series of both The Ascent of Man and Cosmos. Interesting, I say, because unlike Bronowski and Sagan, Lord Clark had no Jewish ancestry.