On Sep 14, 2018, at 4:28 PM, nysa71 <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hmmmm,

Is America getting more stupid? Or is it getting smarter, and the stupid is just more noticeable? 

~ Jason

On Friday, September 14, 2018, 10:42:30 AM EDT, Mark Stahlman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Gregg:

Three cheers for good old "billions-and-billions" Carl!  Jodie Foster 
was pretty good in his 1997 novel-adapted movie "Contact," as I recall 
. . . <g>

Excellent description of the now-obsolete TELEVISION *paradigm* -- 
which is not the world in which we live today but rather what Marshall 
McLuhan described as "We see the world through the rear-view mirror. 
We march backwards into the future."

For people like Sagan (i.e. academics of the old-school before 
"post-modernism" took over, including most involved in the 
"humanities"), there was a sentimentality for the PRINT paradigm that 
was pushed aside in the 19th-century (but persisted until the 
1950s/60s) -- remembered nostalgically (but not accurately) as period 
of "rationality," which had banished "superstition" (as he calls it 
out, giving away his sympathies.)

This was what McLuhan called the "Gutenberg Galaxy" (the name of his 
1961 work on the topic, which Sagan likely read.) That paradigm 
disappeared with the telegraph and Samuel Morse's 1844 "What Hath God 
Wrought . . . " (taken from Numbers 23:23) . . . !!

Another who took this approach was Neil Postman -- who took the phrase 
"media ecology" from McLuhan and built a career on it.  His version of 
Sagan's complaint was "Amusing Ourselves to Death" but the point was 
the same.

Another nostalgic view is the recent Steven Pinker "Enlightenment 
Now!" book, which tries to recount all the advances we made since the 
17th-century and then makes the obvious mistake of "projecting" even 
more to come.  No, that's not how it works.

As best I can tell, Sagan, Postman, Pinker (and thousands of others) 
haven't figured out why *any* of this happened (which requires 
Aristotle's "formal cause," as interpreted by McLuhan) -- so they have 
no capability to "anticipate" what will come next or, more to the 
point, even understand where we are today . . . <g>

Mark

Quoting "Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx" <[log in to unmask]>:

> Saw this clipped out and posted from Carl Sagan...seems apropos to 
> today's world even more!
>
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