Date:         Sun, 22 Dec 96 05:22:53 EST
From: "T R. Young" <34LPF6T@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU>
Organization: Central Michigan University
Subject:      Ave Atque vale, frater: Essay in Honor of Carl Sagan
To: GRADUATE STUDENTS IN SOCIOLOGY <SOCGRAD@CSF.COLORADO.EDU>
Message-Id:   <961222.062112.EST.34LPF6T@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU>
Carl Sagan died Friday.  Saturday evening, A&E presented his biography.

It had, obviously, been in production for some time...Carl Sagan was
and will remain a milestone in the sociology of science.  It was his
13-part series on PBS which marked both the apogee and the transform-
ation of the knowledge process.  For the first time in human history,
the man and the series brought the arcane knowledge of the universe
out of the dusty files of academia into the living minds of millions
who had neither degree nor honorific role in the production of science.

Sagan's life is tribute to the transformation of the knowledge process
from the province of remote scholars to the provenance of public
discussion and debate.  This essay is one effort in explication of the
impact of this new way to do the knowledge process; in the public
media as much as in the specialized Institute.

More than that, the life of Sagan marks a major step in the integration
and evaluation of science in the public interest.

Let us begin this tribute by a brief look at Sagan's life...again from
the A&E Biography:

**Sagan was born in 1934; he was 62 when he died.
**Sagan graduated with honors from his high school where the Year Book
  held that he would win fame for his study of the stars.
**Sagan taught at Harvard for a while; until his role in the politicizing
  of science worked to his disadvantage.  He had been very visible in
  the media working on behalf of Space Exploration and, to the dismay
  of more modest astro-physicists, on behalf of a lobby for exploration
  of deep space.
**Sagan went to Cornell to direct its new center for the study of
  astro-physics.  It was there that he came to national prominence.
**Sagan became deeply involved in the politics of science in several
  ways most interesting to the sociology of science:
  ***He insisted that we didn't know for sure whether there was intell-
     igent life on Mars or indeed, anywhere in the Universe other than
     the Earth...that neither faith nor logic could answer such question;
     only research and that meant exploration of other planets and other
     galaxies.
  ***Sagan said that not only where we not at the end of the knowledge
     process but that we were only ankle-deep in a vast sea of knowledge
     yet to be explored.  This view brought into question the finality
     of the truth claims made by the current crop of scientists who, in
     turn held that both method and mission of the knowledge process
     was in its last, final stage of completion.  If Sagan was gently
     arrogant in his views; those who saw the end of science are mad.
     'Tis better to be a bit arrogant than fundamentally stupid.
  ***Sagan held that science should be framed by and within the public
     sphere; that while experts could do basic work, science had a
     politics which must be oriented to human interests and humane
     politics.
  ***To that end, Sagan worked assiduously for a nuclear policy re-
     oriented from the ends of war to the ends of justice.  He joined
     those who protested and picketed.  Not an act well calculated to
     endear him to the American Academy of Science....an institution
     whose fame and fortune depended upon the twinned sponsorship of
     the State and private corporations...making billions and billions
     from the militarization of the knowledge process in America.
**Sagan was married three times.  He had five children by the three
  unions.  Parenthood brought a personal transformation.  As his
  children grew in number and age, Sagan turned his attention from
  deep space and the quest for intelligent life in other regions of
  the Cosmos to the quest for humane policy in the USA and the public
  sphere.
**Sagan was diagnosed with a rare form of luekemia some four years
  ago.  He needed bone marrow transplant.  His only sibling, a sister,
  proved a perfect match.  He underwent two such procedures...with
  every chance of recovery.
**Sagan died at age 62 of pneumonia in hospital.  About 1 of four
  people who enter hospital contact a disease there not present at
  admission.  Hospitals are most convenient to physicians since they
  can practice mass medicine and profit greatly from the concentration
  of ill-health in one location.
                              ***************

In tribute to Sagan, I will finish continue this Series with several
essays on the knowledge process as its weaves and warps through time
and space.  Next week, I will send along: Structurally Stupid
Societies: Exploration in Artificial Stupidity, a lecture I gave some
years ago to the grad students at the Fielding Institute in California.

Then I will offer you a lecture entitled, A Brief History of Stephen
Hawking.  Then I will pick up this Series from the University of Vermont
where I will teach the Spring Semester.  The first in the new semester
and the third in this Homage to Sagan is entitled, A Brief History of
Steve Pfohl...who is a leading architect in the transformation of
criminology and social problems theory from a modernist to a post-
modernist perspective.

And now, I will end this tribute to Carl Sagan by giving you the full
text of the quotation in the Subject Line above.  It could have come
from a voyager from deep space who had recovered and deciphered the
message written by Sagan and his wife which went along with Voyager,
the deep space capsule sent by NASA in the hope that there was, indeed,
intelligent life somewhere in the Universe.  But the quotation, Ave
Atque Vale, Frater, comes from Catullus who lived 21 centuries ago.
                                ************

            Atque in Perpetuum, Frater

   From far away and over many a wave
I come my brother to your early grave,
to bring you one last offering in death
and o'er your final rest, expend this idle breath;
for Fate has turned your living mind to dust
and snatched you, cruelly, brother, from us.

Yet take this gift, brought as a brother bade,
  in sorrow...to your passing shade;
A brother's tears has wet them o'er and o'er;
And so, our brother, Hail and Farewell, evermore.

                    ...apology to the translator, Wm. Marris.


                                                           TR Young