Perspective

Both Carl Sagan and his god son Neil deGrasse Tyson had “cosmic perspectives.”  That is, they thought about the cosmos, the universe, everything.  Although they both were professional astronomers/astrophysicists, their cosmic perspective forced them to include physics, chemistry, biology, zoology, botany, and a host of human sciences in their quiver of useful knowledge.  As scientists in the public eye, who never ceased to enjoy teaching us stuff we didn’t know, their true roles were as advocates for scientific literacy.

 

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs suggests that the lower we are on the economic totem pole, the less chance that we will ever learn anything that will not support our survival.  No one needs to know what the Solar System is, how many planets it has in its orbit, what the Milky Way is and how many star systems it contains – in order to survive, or for that matter in order to have a good life, at least in financial terms.  Indeed, the perspective of most of us is our neighborhood, either where we now live or where we were raised.  That is our spatial perspective.  If we take elaborate vacations or if we are addicts of travel, we have a broader perspective.  For some, Paris is a real thing (we have visited, we loved our brief time there, and we can’t wait for the next time we visit, and for a longer time); for most of us, it is a city in France, or Europe.  The temporal perspective of most of us is our own lifetimes; it’s not that we were asleep in high school history class, it’s just that the 19th century has no meaning for us in our lives.  Everything we need to know, ever, is in our hands, or more specifically, our smartphones.

 

But God (or Evolution by Natural Selection) gave us brains.  We feed our brains, or we don’t.  You have heard the expression, “use it or lose it,” as it applies to our muscles.  Our brains are muscles, use it or lose it.  There is something emotionally satisfying knowing stuff that we don’t have to know.  In high school, history class for me was just meaningless names and dates; for the last twenty-five years I have been a sponge for history.  I wish I had started earlier.  Everything that I have learned from history, no matter how ancient, informs how I think about the present, and the future.

 

What kind of perspective do you bring to your role as citizen?  Are your political concerns limited to what you imagine concerns you and your family?  The state of your roads and bridges, the jobs in your community, crime and the local police force, your local school system.  Or are you concerned about the National Debt, military spending, what NASA is up to, equality for all people?  What you think about, what you care about, defines your perspective.  The narrower it is, the less of a life you will lead; the broader your perspective, the richer a life you will lead.

 

A final note: from the start, I mentioned that both Sagan and Tyson were advocates of scientific literacy.  Scientific literacy is not just knowing a lot of unrelated scientific facts, good for Jeopardy or trivia contests.  Scientific literacy is a way of thinking.  It demands facts and logic and reasoning.  It is about imagining a hypothesis (how does that happen?  How does A relate to B?), demonstrating its validity and, after decades of others trying to prove you wrong, winning its place as a scientific theory (to us mortals, a fact) that benefits mankind, that is taught in science class.

 

Scientific literacy begins with being interested in everything and, in addition, knowing where to put it all, and how to fit it all together, tending with a singular unconscious purpose of making the world a better place. The genius you have in your pocket – or keep in your hand – was the handiwork of centuries of men who were scientifically literate.  If you were scientifically literate, what could you invent, how could you make the world a better place?

 

Open your mind to being an open mind.

 

“OK, but how does all this relate to politics?”

 

Every thought that you have that is about making the world a better place, your country a better place, your state a better place, your community a better place; every thought that you have that is aimed at a larger sphere than you and your own family -- is a political thought.  We need to spend more of our time making the world a better place, we need to have more political thoughts, followed by political actions.  We need to grab a broader – perspective.