Fabricated through the process of colonizing terrains of truth previously held by religion, science in the West used claims of skepticism to distinguish its approach to the real. Some scientists today collapse the distinction between a skeptical approach and the institutionalized practices of science. Carl Sagan, for example, writes as if the scientific orientation to the world were by definition skeptical. Moreover, he presumes that this orientation constitutes scientists as defenders of democracy. This presumption leads him to articulate belief in abduction, magic, or God with threats to democratic decision-making. For Sagan, all nonscientific belief is infused with the vestiges of traditionalism. Consequently, all nonscientific belief has to be understood as reinforcing traditional relationships to power.
In a society where scientists are in fact quite influential, where their research is funded by corporations, where their opinions can sway juries, where the applied results of their findings can level cities, Sagan’s implication that scientists occupy a progressive, even populist, political position seems nostalgic, even naive. Ironically warning that “skepticism challenges established institutions,” Sagan writes: “If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees. Maybe they’ll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they’ll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?” Of course, he doesn’t worry that students might start asking awkward questions about scientific institutions. He doesn’t worry that they could challenge the opinions of scientists. Sagan isn’t as skeptical as [Budd] Hopkins because he, Sagan, works within a worldview that he doesn’t question. He works within a worldview that he accepts as already proven, as already valid. Consequently, Sagan’s last question is disingenuous. He doesn’t even know where we are now, when people are skeptical to the point of paranoia. Sagan’s scientific skepticism relies on mediations that have already collapsed.
Sagan supposes that abduction represents a threat to democratic decision-making. He is right, but for the wrong reasons. Abduction is not a threat because it’s traditional, but because it exposes the limits of a democracy based on a unitary conception of reality. Abduction reveals that contemporary practices of liberal democracy fail to remain neutral before competing conceptions of the real.
– Aliens in America (1998), pp. 169-70