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

Antiscience
Russian stooges; Belgian histories tend to gloss over the atrocities
committed when the Congo was a private fiefdom of the King of
Belgium; Chinese historians are strangely oblivious of the tens of
millions of deaths caused by Mao Zedong's 'Great Leap Forward';
that God condones and even advocates slavery was repeatedly
argued from the pulpit and in the schools in Christian slaveholding
societies, but Christian polities that have freed their slaves
are mostly silent on the matter; as brilliant, widely read and sober
a historian as Edward Gibbon would not meet with Benjamin
Franklin when they found themselves at the same English country
inn, because of the late unpleasantness of the American Revolution.
(Franklin then volunteered source material to Gibbon when
he turned, as Franklin was sure he soon would, from the decline
and fall of the Roman Empire to the decline and fall of the British
Empire. Franklin was right about the British Empire, but his
timetable was about two centuries early.)
These histories have traditionally been written by admired
academic historians, often pillars of the establishment. Local
dissent is given short shrift. Objectivity is sacrificed in the service
of higher goals. From this doleful fact, some have gone so far as to
conclude that there is no such thing as history, no possibility of
reconstructing the actual events; that all we have are biased
self-justifications; and that this conclusion stretches from history
to all of knowledge, science included.
And yet who would deny that there were actual sequences of
historical events, with real causal threads, even if our ability to
reconstruct them in their full weave is limited, even if the signal is
awash in an ocean of self-congratulatory noise? The danger of
subjectivity and prejudice has been apparent from the beginning
of history. Thucydides warned against it. Cicero wrote
The first law is that the historian shall never dare to set down
what is false; the second, that he shall never dare to conceal
the truth; the third, that there shall be no suspicion in his
work of either favouritism or prejudice.
Lucian of Samosata, in How History Should Be Written, published
in the year 170, urged 'The historian should be fearless and
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