The PBS
broadcast of Carl Sagan’s 13-part documentary, Cosmos:
A Personal Voyage, was one of the most watched series in the history of
American public television. The soon-to-be-released sequel, Cosmos:
A Space-Time Odyssey, written, executively produced and directed by
Ann Druyan, premieres Sunday, March 9, 2014. In light of the rebirth of this
stellar production, we present to you an interview with Ann Druyan conducted by
Michael Shermer in 2007, which appeared in Skeptic magazine issue
13.1—our tribute issue to Carl Sagan. There are several tribute
articles to Carl Sagan that you can read for free on skeptic.com, listed in the
table of
contents for that issue. Issue 13.1 is available in
digital format only via the Skeptic Magazine App.
A Voyager in the
Cosmos:
An
Interview with Ann Dryuan
BY MICHAEL SHERMER
For nearly
twenty years Ann Druyan was Carl Sagan’s collaborator, co-author, companion,
and wife. Together they worked on numerous projects, including: NASA’s Voyager
Interstellar Message of humanity that is hurdling out of the solar system
carrying a time-capsule of human culture; the highly acclaimed 13-hour
documentary series Cosmos now seen by over a billion people
worldwide; the bestselling companion volume to the documentary, also entitled Cosmos;
the book Comet
that traced the history, culture, and science behind those enigmatic wanderers
of our solar system; the book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a precursor that anticipated many of the
discoveries and theories developed by evolutionary psychologists a decade
later, founded on the presumption that we are a social primate species whose
evolutionary roots shape our modern behavior; in addition, she wrote an
introduction to The Cosmic Connection and the epilogue to Billions and Billions, both by Sagan; and most notably they worked together on
the film version of Contact, a major motion picture starring
Jodi Foster that tied together numerous threads of Sagan’s ideas into one
coherent visual narrative. Today she is the CEO and a co-founder of Cosmos
Studios, which in 2000 produced an updated edition of the documentary series Cosmos.
Druyan recently orchestrated the production and launching of the Cosmos 1
spacecraft, intended to demonstrate solar sail propulsion.
SKEPTIC: The impetus for this special issue
of Skeptic magazine about Carl Sagan is twofold: first, to examine his legacy
on the tenth anniversary of Carl’s death in December of 1996, and then of
course the book that you just edited on The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for
God, based
on Carl’s lectures on science and religion. To begin, what made you decide to
bring out this book now?
DRUYAN: I find that in the tremendous
volume of email that I receive from around the planet about Carl, the most
frequently asked question is, “What did Dr. Sagan think about god?” This
reminded me of the Gifford lectures, which were his definitive statement on the subject, given
in 1985 at the University of Glasgow. The Gifford lectures have such an
illustrious history, having been given by some of the greatest scientists and
philosophers and theologians since it was endowed in 1885. So when Carl was
invited to give these lectures on religion and science—what Lord Gifford called
“natural theology”—we gave it a lot of thought. We worked on it together for
over a year. Carl knew that it would be kind of a lasting testament of his
ideas on this subject. Recently when the creationism hydra reared its head
again in the form of Intelligent Design, I remembered that Carl had talked
about this idea and showed why it is so deeply flawed. He said “Oh, every five
or ten years someone rediscovers this idea and then we have to go and shoot it
down all over again.” So I thought it would be really good to have it out
there. Then finally, since there is a resurgence of fundamentalist extremism I
wanted to have Carl’s voice in the debate because I think he brings an unusual
degree of clarity to it.
SKEPTIC: You mentioned the inquiries from
all over the world, but do you get the sense that the desire to know what
scientists think about the god question is more of an American phenomenon?
DRUYAN: I think that the United States is
having a kind of religious revival, and our religiosity is different from that
in Europe. My knowledge of the rest of the world is quite limited, but from the
letters I receive it seems that a lot of people are thinking about the god
question, and thinking about it in different ways.
SKEPTIC: Why do you suppose that Americans
are so much more religious than Europeans?
DRUYAN: I think there is a constellation
of beliefs that go into a traditional religious view of the world. I think that
it is no accident that the more reactionary the government happens to be, the
more conventionally pious it will strive to appear. And I think that the constellation
of beliefs has to do with authoritarianism and the longing for a parent who
will tell us what to do; the absence of critical thinking, obviously, the
absence of independent thought, and the absence to a certain degree of
skepticism both about received wisdom from ancient texts as well as received
information from whoever happens to be in power. What makes me most proud to be
an American is the Bill of Rights, most notably the First Amendment and the
idea that church and state must be kept separate for everyone’s sake.
SKEPTIC: Of course that wall can come under
assault under Democratic as well as Republican administrations.
DRUYAN: I have to say although I would
much prefer a Democratic administration to any Republican administration—with
the exception of maybe Lincoln—I would have to say that a lot of this infusion
of religiosity into public life began in the previous administration under
President Clinton, and that the invoking of god’s intentions in prayers
predates the Bush administration.
SKEPTIC: I want to get down to where the
rubber meets the road in the ontological question of god’s existence. What did
Carl call himself— atheist, agnostic, non-theist…?
DRUYAN: Carl really was an agnostic,
truly. He felt that people who say that they know how the universe came to be,
who made it or didn’t make it, are kind of foolish in a way, whether they are
believers or atheists. Carl believed that in a universe that is so vast, and
for a species as young and ignorant as we are, the only reasonable position to
take on these ultimate questions is agnosticism.
SKEPTIC:What most people mean by “atheist”
is “belief that there is no God,” whereas agnostic means that we just don’t
know?
DRUYAN: Literally yes, we do not know. Not
that we can’t know, but at the moment in the present state we know so little
about the universe. We’ve only been at this exploration of the universe in any
sort of systematic way for what, four centuries? That’s such a tiny fraction of
history. Carl would say “we just don’t know,” and the more we acknowledge how
much we don’t know, the less chance we have of assuming things that turn out
not to be true.
SKEPTIC: You’re an agnostic?
DRUYAN: I am a complete agnostic. I feel
that I know absolutely nothing about god. I think I know something about awe
and reverence, and I think I have a sense of piety, which is perfectly
consonant with the values and methods of science. Personally, I don’t prefer
Darwin’s theory simply because it is a better reflection of natural reality,
although it is; I like it because it is spiritually so much more satisfying
than any other explanation of how life came to be.
SKEPTIC: In what way?
DRUYAN: In the idea of the oneness of
life, that we are part of a cosmic continuity that stretches back 13 and a half
billion years—and on this planet four and a half billion years—and that through
natural selection and the chance of random mutation that we are able to become
conscious and to recognize our relatedness to all other life on earth. To me,
this is way more spiritually satisfying than the notion of a god who creates us
separately and gives us the kind of middle management role over nature as in
the Genesis version.
SKEPTIC: In this sense science is a great
narrative story, a mythic tale. But there are critics who respond, “Well that’s
scientism. You are going beyond the data, beyond the scientific theories and
you are constructing a metaphysics around it, almost a theology around
science.” Is that a legitimate criticism?
DRUYAN: There was a time when religion and
science were virtually the same. Before Copernicus, when religion made
pronouncements about natural reality, people didn’t go around saying “Oh that’s
just religionism.” They said that religion was the description of the sum total
of human existence, and that if you wanted to know where the planets would be
or why there were so many different kinds of beetles and things like that, you
just had to look into the sacred texts to find those answers. So those people
only stopped objecting to science’s pronouncements about the ineffable and the
sacred when science left religious pronouncements about nature far behind. Then
there arose a treaty between science and religion, in which religion said
“okay, we will stop burning people at the stake” (as they did Giordano Bruno for
his statements about nature that did not jibe with religious doctrines), “if
you promise not to say anything about the sacred and about why we have that
soaring feelings about being alive in the cosmos— leave that to us.” To me, the
idea of scientism is a total misperception, because science is a form of
spiritual discipline. It’s the only thing that could shake us from believing in
our childlike self-delusion that we are the center of the universe. It was
science that weaned us from that almost infantile need to be central, which is
in my opinion a form of spiritual narcissism, and by doing this we entered a
new epoch of spiritual understanding that wasn’t possible before science.
SKEPTIC: How do you respond to atheists who
say, “I understand technically why you are agnostic, but aren’t you an atheist
about fairies or the teapot in orbit around the earth?”
DRUYAN: Well, of course I do not believe
in the version of god that is an oversized white male who sits in the sky and
tallies the fall of every sparrow. I see absolutely no evidence for that god.
Moreover, I see more than enough evidence to explain our belief in such a god
in terms of the therapeutic and social needs that it fulfills, to understand it
clearly as a projection. I am completely fine with saying, “I do not believe that
particular god exists.” It’s just that to say “there is no god” is to say more
than that.
SKEPTIC: Do you mean in terms of the
origins of matter—why there is something rather than nothing— and those kinds
of ultimate questions?
DRUYAN: Correct, I don’t think we know
those answers. Today we have string theory, twenty years from now it will be
something else, just like it was something else 30 years ago. We have to
acknowledge that there is so much that we still do not know.
SKEPTIC: It seemed like Carl—and you as his
collaborator—make a point of being extra polite and thoughtful with those who
are religious. Is this conciliatory approach just a political strategy, just
making nice so that we can all get along?
DRUYAN: No, it is respect. It is
remembering how many times all of us have been wrong. I think that attitude is
at the heart of the methodology of science. There is nothing patronizing at all
in this approach; it is simply respect. And this approach comes from life
experience. I am 57, and I have been wrong plenty of times. Every time I think
that I know everything, somebody demonstrates how completely deluded I am. And
this is what is so great about the scientific method: it has that built-in
error correcting mechanism that is always reminding you, “You could be wrong.”
SKEPTIC: But is it also, in a more positive
way, an approach that keeps in mind other, larger goals— such as saving the
environment or preventing global nuclear war—and we need everybody, religious
and nonreligious, to achieve those higher goals?
DRUYAN: Yes, of course, we need everybody
to work together on these bigger issues, and we will get further if we are
mutually respectful.
SKEPTIC: It has been ten years since Carl’s
death, and although one never really gets over these deep losses, perhaps you
are past the initial stages of grieving such that you can take a reflective
view on Carl’s impact. What are the two or three most important legacies of
Carl?
DRUYAN: As a scientist, it was his
fearlessness in pursuing questions that interested him the most, and not being
afraid to try to answer them. When he was a young scientist, for example, it
was somewhat disreputable to be interested in the search for extraterrestrial
life and intelligence, which of course has changed radically, largely because
of Carl’s courage to address the topic scientifically. I think his work on
understanding planetary atmospheres in terms of insight into what is happening
to our own atmosphere is critical in many ways. I think Carl was one of the
half dozen scientists who had the biggest influence in making us more aware of
what we are doing to our climate and to our environment.
Most of all
I think Carl is truly a figure of democracy: he was the child of working class
parents, and this led him to believe that science should belong to everyone.
Science is not just a collection of interesting facts, but a way of looking at
everything. I think Carl’s greatest legacy is the fact that he was able to
communicate a way of looking at the world that was equal parts of skepticism
and wonder. Carl delineated how these two ultra-potent human capabilities work:
the ability to be skeptical and at the same time to have a soaring sense of
wonder about the universe. This is Carl’s ultimate legacy: a way of speaking
clearly, without jargon and without mystification, about the wonder of life in
the cosmos.
SKEPTIC: Shortly following Carl’s death
there were two biographies published. Do you wish that they had allowed a
little more time to pass in order to put things in perspective?
DRUYAN: I feel that they really did Carl a
disservice. They uncritically passed on some of the resentments and false
witness of others, couching them in terms that “This is what happened.” I don’t
think they really captured who Carl was. Although there was one line in one of
the books that I really liked, which was that of all the people that the author
interviewed, he could not find a single person who didn’t love Carl. Even the
people who didn’t understand him, or who resented him, or who were jealous of
him; they all loved him.
SKEPTIC: Do you mean in an inspirational
way, or as a person?
DRUYAN: Both. Carl was authentic, he was
generous, he had a fantastic sense of humor, he was modest, and he was
courageous, especially the way he dealt with the illness that killed him, along
with the three bone marrow transplants that he had to endure before he
succumbed to it. He was a heroic figure who had the courage to live completely
and express his convictions. To me he was the exemplar of citizen and his
identification horizon was as large as the cosmos itself. To know him deeply
was to know that he was completely real and incapable of pretending or feigning
anything.
SKEPTIC: Do you miss him?
DRUYAN: I miss him every single minute. My
daughter characterizes this as a kind of family party line, but it is true
nevertheless: I feel so lucky to have known Carl, and to have spent nearly 20
years with him.
SKEPTIC: How have your children dealt with
the loss of their father over the past decade?
DRUYAN: They are very much like their
father—they are also very heroic. My daughter Sasha is one of the happiest
people I know. She is a successful 23-year old writer-producer for a cable
network. She hosted, directed, wrote and produced a documentary called Liberty,
about her trip to Liberty, Kentucky—a politically right wing traditionally
religious community— to find out why the people there believe things that are
so completely different from her beliefs. It’s a terrific film done with
respect and not a trace of disdain. My son Sam is 15 years old, a sophomore,
writing for the high school paper; he looks a lot like Carl, and he is a lot
like Carl, and yet they both have their own completely original personalities.
So my kids are doing great, thank you.
SKEPTIC: Do you ever hear from Carl’s kids
from his previous marriages, or from Lynn or Linda?
DRUYAN: Linda Salzman, Carl’s second wife,
is one of my closest friends; she lives here in Ithaca, and we are in constant
communication. I adore her son, Nick Sagan, a successful screenwriter and
novelist. Nick is one of the people dearest to me, as is his wife Clinnette. We
all live in Ithaca, NY, and we are together every week, and it is not too
idealizing to say that we couldn’t be closer. I have much less contact with
Jeremy and none with Dorion, but I am in touch with their mother Lynn Margulis
from time to time.
SKEPTIC: Considering how nasty some
divorces can be, how has it worked out so well for you all?
DRUYAN: It is largely, or completely, a
testament to the grace of Linda Salzman. On the night of Carl’s death she
called me, and we have been very close every since.
SKEPTIC: During that final stretch, did
Carl know he probably was not going to make it?
DRUYAN: Yes, just two to three days before
he died in the hospital in Seattle, he told me that he was dying, and I very
much regret that I found it so hard to deal with that I tried to convince him
he wasn’t dying. Part of me really thought that he wouldn’t because he had been
through so many life-threatening experiences already, that I really thought
that he somehow was going to manage to survive this one as well. But he looked
at me with this wonderful, amazing look on his face, and said, “We’ll, we will
see who is right about this one.” Carl was so brave. One of his doctors told me
that he had never had a patient who was able to even finish reading a book
during one bone marrow transplant, and Carl wrote two books during those three
bone marrow transplants.
SKEPTIC: Where did that strength and
determination come from?
DRUYAN: Carl was off the scale in terms of
his courage and strength. That always amazed me. About the same time that he
told me he was going to die, he drafted a statement about the United States’
future in space. He was suppose to be the keynote speaker at a White House
conference on the future in space, but when it became clear that he was dying
and that he would not be able to be at the conference, he dictated his
statement for the conference, which was read as the keynote address by Vice
President Al Gore. So that is what Carl did with his very last energy. And it
was such a stirring statement—I remember weeping while I was reading it.
SKEPTIC: Carl’s long-term vision for humans
in space was, ultimately, colonization of the galaxy?
DRUYAN: Ultimately, yes, Carl dreamed that
we would come to know the rest of the cosmos. He was, however, not a major
proponent of human space flight because he believed that for the science,
robotic spacecraft were preferable, and of course did not require the jeopardizing
of human life. But he also recognized that as a species we need humans to be
there to become emotionally involved and invested in exploration. So he was
realistic about that, and understood that this probably had to be part of the
bargain. Also, he had some reservations about us being colonizers, because he
was painfully aware of human frailty and the tragic history of colonization on
this planet. But he did dream that eventually we would come to travel into the
cosmos, and we would build on the remarkable first 40 years of the space age of
which he was so much a part.
SKEPTIC: Given the exceptionally
tribalistic politics of the last decade, in light of the book you and Carl
co-authored, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, which predated all of the evolutionary psychology
work of the late 90s, how has that collaborative worked fared?
DRUYAN: That book was Carl’s favorite of
all the books we wrote individually and together. I think it’s held up quite
well and, as you say, has been a major influence. The last six years have been
one of those moments of history dominated by fearbased religion and politics.
It is my hope that this is one of those short perturbations, and that we are
about to shift gears and change course.
SKEPTIC: If you and Carl are correct about
how tribalistic we are—how it is in our nature to be so xenophobic and
tribal—then isn’t the ultimate political solution to see everyone as a member
of the in-group and nobody as a member of an out-group?
DRUYAN: Yes, that’s it. And that’s where
the “Pale Blue Dot” comes in. That may be an even greater contribution of
Carl’s—to turn those Voyager cameras back at our planet, and find not the
Apollo frame-filling earth, which was also a tremendous watershed moment in our
self-awareness, but instead to find that from the distance of Neptune the earth
is a one-pixel world. That perspective gives the lie to every ideology that
justifies murder and mayhem. To see that dot is to realize we are a bunch of
fruit flies bickering over a grape. This is why science is spiritually so
important— if you have that perspective of the world— the idea that everything
in the universe was not created for the benefit of one tiny group on one tiny
Pale Blue Dot—then you can’t bring yourself to be a suicide bomber or a
terrorist, or to make war against poor people and the defenseless.
SKEPTIC: Assuming that “this too shall
pass,” and new administrations will come and go, in the long run, how do we get
from here to there: where everybody sees the Pale Blue Dot and realizes we are
one tribe?
DRUYAN: To begin, we need to stop lying to
our children and start speaking honestly about the things we don’t know, and
the things that remain a mystery to us. I think we need to be honest with our
children that we die, that life is finite not infinite, and that this is it and
it is really precious. If we did that maybe people would treat life as being
something prized instead of as something that can be taken without concern.
Also, we need a new curriculum for science and it should be like this: when
children first come to school, in preschool or kindergarten, I think the
teachers should take them aside and welcome them to join the generations of
searchers, to induct them into the great wonders and mysteries of science as a
way of seeing everything. Not 20 or 40 minutes of boredom a few times a week,
but as a way of seeing everything. They should teach critical thinking to the
smallest children as a type of keys to the kingdom. We should teach the story
of the history of science— of the courageous men and women who have given us
this precious knowledge—in a way that gives full expression to the romance and
valor and imagination that was involved. And I think if we were to do that, I
think it would be possible that we would not be a schizophrenic society:
completely dependent on science and high technology, yet completely fearful and
mistrusting of it.
SKEPTIC: On your first point about lying to
our children, are you talking about religion?
DRUYAN: No, I am talking about everything.
Children want to know about death, and I think we lie about death, and I think
that is a very damaging thing in the long run. It dooms them to a perpetual
infantilism. I think our present attitude is an expression of a lack of
confidence in our children: that this reality is too unbearable for them to be
able to deal with. Actually, I think it is all the more unbearable because we
lie so much about it. If we were truthful about it, then not only might it be
less unbearable, but also it might be possible to live more fully than I think
we are able to do with this burden of dishonesty.
SKEPTIC: Isn’t that a secular humanist
perspective?
DRUYAN: I think it is the perspective of
someone who believes we should give our kids a chance to have a sense of
reality, and then see what happens. Because I think this lying has a kind of
magnifier effect in that it undermines the bond of the child-parent
relationship, and it requires us to say that no one could be President of the
United States unless they are willing to subscribe to this agreed-upon fiction.
That’s not good for a society that needs to be reality-based. All of our ancestors,
going back to our huntergatherer ancestors, although they may have had all
kinds of mythologies to explain the things they couldn’t understand, there were
things that they did understand and were firmly realitybased. That was
necessary for them because their survival depended upon it, and I think our
survival depends on it today.
SKEPTIC: A reality-based approach.
DRUYAN: Yes, I think that’s one of the big
differences between science and religion—science is expressing and affirming a
confidence in reality and a respect for reality. Whereas religion often says,
“No, we once had a perception of reality a long time ago and that’s the one we
are sticking with no matter what other evidence comes in.” I think that’s part
of the problem.
SKEPTIC: In general you sound—as Carl
usually did to me—optimistic about the future. It sometimes seems if you watch
the daily news that there is not a lot of cause for celebration these days. But
if we take the long view, say from the Enlightenment on, it seems that things have
gotten better: more rights and more freedom for more people in more places. Are
you optimistic that the trend will continue?
DRUYAN: I am optimistic for several
reasons. One is that the Internet is a remarkable way of completing the process
of our planet becoming an interconnecting, intercommunicating organism. I
remember that the Russian poet Yevtushenko once said to me, “There really are
enough good people in the world, it’s just that we don’t have each other’s
phone numbers.” When the Internet came along I thought to myself, “Well, that’s
a solution to the problem he was talking about.” I am really excited about the
possibilities and the fact that the hope of communicating with each other is
very strong. I am also excited about the coalescing global community of people
who care about the planet who have this kind of perspective of space and time
that science brings, and who really want to do whatever they can to alleviate
the dangers of long-term climate modification and of the violence and brutality
that plagues this world. Yes, I do have a lot of hope, and I feel like even
though we may take a few steps back once in awhile, it is a short-term problem
that we will ultimately set right again.
SKEPTIC: Well,
let’s hope you are right.
