Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
to accumulate a pharmacopoeia that works. Absolutely essential,
life-saving information can be acquired from folk medicine
and in no other way. We should be doing much more than we
are to mine the treasures in such folk knowledge worldwide.
Likewise for, say, predicting the weather in a valley near the
Orinoco: it is perfectly possible that pre-industrial peoples have
noted over the millennia regularities, premonitory indications,
cause-and-effect relationships at a particular geographic locale of
which professors of meteorology and climatology in some distant
university are wholly ignorant. But it does not follow that the
shamans of such cultures are able to predict the weather in Paris
or Tokyo, much less the global climate.
Certain kinds of folk knowledge are valid and priceless. Others
are at best metaphors and codifiers. Ethnomedicine, yes; astrophysics,
no. It is certainly true that all beliefs and all myths are
worthy of a respectful hearing. It is not true that all folk beliefs are
equally valid if we're talking not about an internal mindset, but
about understanding the external reality.
For centuries, science has been under a line of attack that, rather
than pseudoscience, can be called antiscience. Science, and academic
scholarship in general, the contention these days goes, is
too subjective. Some even allege it's entirely subjective, as is, they
say, history. History generally is written by the victors to justify
their actions, to arouse patriotic fervour, and to suppress the
legitimate claims of the vanquished. When no overwhelming
victory takes place, each side writes self-promotional accounts of
what really happened. English histories castigated the French, and
vice versa; US histories until very recently ignored the de facto
policies of lebensraum and genocide toward Native Americans;
Japanese histories of the events leading to World War II minimize
Japanese atrocities, and suggest that their chief purpose was
altruistically to free East Asia from European and American
colonialism; Poland was invaded in 1939, Nazi historians asserted,
because Poland, ruthless and unprovoked, attacked Germany;
Soviet historians pretended that the Soviet troops that put down
the Hungarian (1956) and Czech (1968) Revolutions were invited
in by general acclamation in the invaded nations rather than by
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