From The Demon-Haunted World (Carl Sagan, 1997) p388- etc
The ink was barely dry on the Bill of Rights before politicians found a way to subvert it, by cashing in on fear and patriotic hysteria. In 1798, the ruling Federalist Party knew that the button to push was ethnic and cultural prejudice. Exploiting tensions between France and the US, and a widespread fear that French and Irish immigrants were somehow intrinsically unfit to be Americans, the Federalists passed a set of laws that have come to be known as the Alien and Sedition Acts.
One law upped the residency requirement for citizenship from five to fourteen years. (Citizens of French and Irish origin usually voted for the opposition, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party.) The Alien Act gave President John Adams the power to deport any foreigner who aroused his suspicions. Making the President nervous, said a member of Congress, ‘is the new crime’. Jefferson believed the Alien Act had been framed particularly to expel C.F. Volney,” the French historian and philosopher; Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, patriarch of the famous chemical family; and the British scientist Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen and an intellectual antecedent of James Clerk Maxwell. In Jefferson’s view, these were just the sort of people America needed.
The Sedition Act made it unlawful to publish ‘false or malicious’ criticism of the government or to inspire opposition to any of its acts. Some two dozen arrests were made, ten people were convicted, and many more were censored or intimidated into silence. The act attempted, Jefferson said, ‘to crush all political opposition by making criticism of Federalist officials or policies a crime’.
As soon as Jefferson was elected, indeed in the first week of his Presidency in 1801, he began pardoning every victim of the Sedition Act because, he said, it was as contrary to the spirit of American freedoms as if Congress had ordered us all to fall down and worship a golden calf. By 1802, none of the Alien and Sedition Acts remained on the books.
From across two centuries, it’s hard to recapture the frenzied mood that made the French and the ‘wild Irish’ seem so grave a threat that we were willing to surrender our most precious freedoms. Giving credit for French and Irish cultural triumphs, advocating equal rights for them, was in effect decried in conservative circles as sentimental unrealistic political correctness. But that’s how it always works. It always seems an aberration later. But by then we’re in the grip of the next hysteria.
Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. It could be ethnic differences, as it was then, perhaps different amounts of melanin in the skin; different philosophies or religions; or maybe it’s drug use, violent crime, economic crisis, school prayer, or “desecrating’ (literally, making unholy) the flag.
Whatever the problem, the quick fix is to shave a little freedom off the Bill of Rights. Yes, in 1942, Japanese-Americans were protected by the Bill of Rights, but we locked them up anyway after all, there was a war on. Yes, there are Constitutional prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure, but we have a war on drugs and violent crime is racing out of control. Yes, there’s freedom of speech, but we don’t want foreign authors here, spouting alien ideologies, do we? The pretexts change from year to year, but the result remains the same: concentrating more power in fewer hands and suppressing diversity of opinion – even though experience plainly shows the danger of such a course of action.
388
“It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion,” said Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the Big Brother state employs an army of bureaucrats whose only job is to alter the records of the past so they conform to the interests of those currently in power. 1984 was not just an engaging political fantasy; it was based on the Stalinist Soviet Union, where the re-writing of history was institutionalized. Soon after Stalin took power, pictures of his rival Leon Trotsky – a monumental figure in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions – began to disappear. Heroic and wholly anhistoric paintings of Stalin and Lenin together directing the Bolshevik Revolution took their place, with Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army, nowhere in evidence. These images became icons of the state. You could see them in every office building, on outdoor advertising signs sometimes ten storeys high, in museums, on postage stamps.
New generations grew up believing that was their history. Older generations began to feel that they remembered something of the sort, a kind of political false-memory syndrome. Those who made the accommodation between their real memories and what the leadership wished them to believe exercised what Orwell described as ‘doublethink’. Those who did not, those old Bolsheviks who could recall the peripheral role of Stalin in the Revolution and the central role of Trotsky, were denounced as traitors or unreconstructed bourgeoisie or “Trotskyites” or ‘Trotsky-fascists”, and were imprisoned, tortured, made to confess their treason in public, and then executed. It is possible given absolute control over the media and the police to rewrite the memories of hundreds of millions of people, if you have a generation to accomplish it in. Almost always, this is done to improve the hold that the powerful have on power, or to serve the narcissism or megalomania or paranoia of national leaders. It throws a monkeywrench into the error-correcting machinery. It works to erase public memory of profound political mistakes, and thus to guarantee their eventual repetition.
In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I’m imagining here is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather that small numbers of people will have so much control over new stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes.
We saw a pale echo of what is now possible in 1990-91, when Saddam Hussein, the autocrat of Iraq, made a sudden transition in the American consciousness from an obscure near-ally granted commodities, high technology, weaponry, and even satellite intelligence data to a slavering monster menacing the world. I am not myself an admirer of Mr Hussein, but it was striking how quickly he could be brought from someone almost no American had heard of into the incarnation of evil. These days the apparatus for generating indignation is busy elsewhere. How confident are we that the power to drive and determine. public opinion will always reside in responsible hands?
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397
Even a casual scrutiny of history reveals that we humans have a sad tendency to make the same mistakes again and again. We’re afraid of strangers or anybody who’s a little different from us. When we get scared, we start pushing people around. We have readily accessible buttons that release powerful emotions when pressed. We can be manipulated into utter senselessness by clever politicians. Give us the right kind of leader and, like the most suggestible subjects of the hypnotherapists, we’ll gladly do just about anything he wants even things we know to be wrong. The framers of the Constitution were students of history. In recognition of the human condition, they sought to invent a means that would keep us free in spite of ourselves.
Some of the opponents of the US Constitution insisted that it would never work; that a republican form of government spanning a land with ‘such dissimilar climates, economies, morals, politics, and peoples,’ as Governor George Clinton of New York said, was impossible; that such a government and such a Constitution, as Patrick Henry of Virginia declared, ‘contradicts all the experience of the world’. The experiment was tried anyway.
Scientific findings and attitudes were common in those who invented the United States. The supreme authority, outranking any personal opinion, any book, any revelation, was as the Declaration of Independence puts it ‘the laws of nature and of nature’s GOD’. Dr Benjamin Franklin was revered in Europe and America as the founder of the new field of electrical physics. At the Constitutional Convention of 1789 John Adams repeatedly appealed to the analogy of mechanical balance in machines; others to William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. Late in life Adams wrote, ‘All mankind are chemists from their cradles to their graves… The Material Universe is a chemical experiment.’ James Madison used chemical and biological metaphors in The Federalist Papers. The American revolutionaries were creatures of the European Enlightenment which provides an essential background for understanding the origins and purpose of the United States.
‘Science and its philosophical corollaries,’ wrote the American historian Clinton Rossiter
were perhaps the most important intellectual force shaping the destiny of eighteenth-century America. . . Franklin was only one of a number of forward-looking colonists who recognized the kinship of scientific method and democratic procedure. Free inquiry, free exchange of information, optimism, self-criticism, pragmatism, objectivity all these ingredients of the coming republic were already active in the republic of science that flourished in the eighteenth century.
Thomas Jefferson was a scientist. That’s how he described himself. When you visit his home at Monticello, Virginia, the moment you enter its portals you find ample evidence of his scientific interests not just in his immense and varied library, but in copying machines, automatic doors, telescopes and other instruments, some at the cutting edge of early nineteenth-century technology. Some he invented, some he copied, some he purchased. He compared the plants and animals in America with Europe’s, uncovered fossils, used the calculus in the design of a new plough. He mastered Newtonian physics. Nature destined him, he said, to be a scientist, but there were no opportunities for scientists in prerevolutionary Virginia. Other, more urgent, needs took precedence. He threw himself into the historic events that were transpiring around him. Once independence was won, he said, later generations could devote themselves to science and scholarship.
Jefferson was an early hero of mine, not because of his scientific interests (although they very much helped to mould his political philosophy), but because he, almost more than anyone else, was responsible for the spread of democracy throughout the world. The idea breathtaking, radical and revolutionary at the time (in many places in the world, it still is) is that not kings, not priests, not big city bosses, not dictators, not a military cabal, not a de facto conspiracy of the wealthy, but ordinary people, working together, are to rule the nations. Not only was Jefferson a leading theoretician of this cause; he was also involved in the most practical way, helping to bring about the great American political experiment that has, all over the world, been admired and emulated since.
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