Carl Sagan's groovy cosmos: public science and American counterculture in the 1970s

Sean Warren Gilleran

This thesis discusses the public science of Carl Sagan and its relationship with American counterculture in the 1970s. Historians have recently begun to rethink the seventies, emphasizing the lasting power of its turbulent politics. This is the decade in which Sagan published his most popular books and which he ended with Cosmos, his blockbuster documentary series. By infusing these pieces with a countercultural ethos, this thesis argues, Sagan helped create a demand for science that was socially accountable and intellectually democratic—a demand that helped bolster the resurgence of technocratic liberalism in the decades to come. For most Americans, the 1970s were years of powerful cultural and material unease. In the gloomy economic climate, the money that the government had been pouring into scientific research since the end of World War II for the purported purpose of peace, security, and progress seemed wasteful and grotesque. Not coincidentally, the 1970s also saw a boom of literature on metaphysical transcendence and spiritual escape. For Sagan, the very scientific establishment that had led to cultural enervation could also be a tool for personal fulfilment. Science could improve Americans' lives by giving them a "cosmic perspective" that would promote peace and unity. This project is significant for three reasons. First, it reveals a productive interchange between science and American life by demonstrating how Sagan, an important and influential scientist, used science to promote the transcendent ideal of the “cosmic perspective.” Second, it shows how the fringe-scientific ideas that so fascinated Americans during this era—particularly the question of aliens—were brought into establishment circles by Sagan and others who grounded these ideas as part of a fundamentally scientific quest. Finally, following developments in recent American history writing, it helps us complicate the division between culture and counterculture and to better understand the productive intellectual space between the two by showing how Sagan, in reaching out to a countercultural audience, was arguing that their values could be reconciled with the kinds of science that he hoped would shape the future of intellectual inquiry.

Carl Sagan's groovy cosmos: public science and American counterculture in the 1970s

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