These are refutations of excerpts I have taken from Carl Sagan's books:
This suggests to me a need for radical population reduction, as opposed to a preparatory statement for the need to "work with what we have" in order to instigate a Utopic Disneyland. The presuppositions underlying this and the entire statement as a whole are only applicable to a modern, economic, and anthrocentric worldview. It tries to take itself out of its own natural environmental context with the incumbent influential factors present upon it, and renders itself dysfunctional based on this myopic viewpoint. Such a narrow focus as "pan-humanism" can only ever hope to have very limited and narrow success.
Doomsday predictions. Why is human variation and difference such a problem in this worldview? I guess multiculturalism does not work quite well enough for Carl Sagan's purposes? What about the rest of the world and all the other billions of species which seem to be functioning just fine (and have been for longer than humanity's tenure on the planet) without needing to draw themselves into large undifferentiated collectives of no individual or inter-species variance? Why do away with all the achievements which have been created by creatures of the humankind throughout their history, so that a modern society in its infinitely short-sighted wisdom can have free reign and havoc with the world? First, you must define where humanity is going, before you can assert the best path for getting there. Pan-humanism does not do this.
So we must obliterate these tiny differences in order to do -- what? For what purpose? The reasons and ulterior motives behind the so-called "necessity of pan-humanism" have not been defined. Until they are, this is nothing more than grand-standing rhetorical blather.
Aside from this, grand-standing upon one single philosophical issue (in this case, pan-humanism) inevitably leaves out and conveniently forgets about the multitude of extraneous issues which are not solved by adopting this point of view. Ecocide? Global warming? National debt and deficits? Political corruption? Widespread deforestation of irreplaceable natural ecosystems? Overpopulation? Destruction of coral reefs? Rampant crime? Resource depletion? The water wars we will soon begin fighting? What about the people who refuse to adopt this belief? Do you actually think that wars will stop being fought upon economic grounds, which is the only factor this ideology seems to concern itself with, beyond trying to stamp out the incidence of violence based upon ethnic and religious discrimination? Have you even thought about the effects this would have upon religion itself?
The illusion of "progress" is a sham.
This totalitarianism of Carl Sagan's, based on wiping out historical differences among variant human populations in order for purely sociological issues to dominate human discourse at the expense of countless exterior issues of arguably greater import than how humans choose to mate, is hilariously short-sighted, and doomed to utter failure.
Carl Sagan said:
This suggests to me a need for radical population reduction, as opposed to a preparatory statement for the need to "work with what we have" in order to instigate a Utopic Disneyland. The presuppositions underlying this and the entire statement as a whole are only applicable to a modern, economic, and anthrocentric worldview. It tries to take itself out of its own natural environmental context with the incumbent influential factors present upon it, and renders itself dysfunctional based on this myopic viewpoint. Such a narrow focus as "pan-humanism" can only ever hope to have very limited and narrow success.
Carl Sagan said:
Doomsday predictions. Why is human variation and difference such a problem in this worldview? I guess multiculturalism does not work quite well enough for Carl Sagan's purposes? What about the rest of the world and all the other billions of species which seem to be functioning just fine (and have been for longer than humanity's tenure on the planet) without needing to draw themselves into large undifferentiated collectives of no individual or inter-species variance? Why do away with all the achievements which have been created by creatures of the humankind throughout their history, so that a modern society in its infinitely short-sighted wisdom can have free reign and havoc with the world? First, you must define where humanity is going, before you can assert the best path for getting there. Pan-humanism does not do this.
Carl Sagan said:
So we must obliterate these tiny differences in order to do -- what? For what purpose? The reasons and ulterior motives behind the so-called "necessity of pan-humanism" have not been defined. Until they are, this is nothing more than grand-standing rhetorical blather.
Aside from this, grand-standing upon one single philosophical issue (in this case, pan-humanism) inevitably leaves out and conveniently forgets about the multitude of extraneous issues which are not solved by adopting this point of view. Ecocide? Global warming? National debt and deficits? Political corruption? Widespread deforestation of irreplaceable natural ecosystems? Overpopulation? Destruction of coral reefs? Rampant crime? Resource depletion? The water wars we will soon begin fighting? What about the people who refuse to adopt this belief? Do you actually think that wars will stop being fought upon economic grounds, which is the only factor this ideology seems to concern itself with, beyond trying to stamp out the incidence of violence based upon ethnic and religious discrimination? Have you even thought about the effects this would have upon religion itself?
The illusion of "progress" is a sham.
This totalitarianism of Carl Sagan's, based on wiping out historical differences among variant human populations in order for purely sociological issues to dominate human discourse at the expense of countless exterior issues of arguably greater import than how humans choose to mate, is hilariously short-sighted, and doomed to utter failure.
