Pop Culture

Cosmos: Sagan vs Tyson

I have been thinking about this on-and-off, recently. What is the difference between the Sagan Cosmos, and the Tyson Cosmos? There are lots of fairly uncharitable things to say about both of these men, but if we were forced to provide an actual explanation, I think three things could be said:

  1. Era / Audience. The original Cosmos was released in 1980. Not since the early eighties, have I felt the same sense of optimism and yearning for the promise of the future. I think the 1980 Cosmos nicely captures both that sense of hope and the sense of “wonder” often talked about by folks like E. O. Wilson and Sagan himself. The Tyson Cosmos was released in 2014. Post Gulf War(s), Post 9/11, and deep into the “disappointment phase” of the Obama era. The culture was much more cynical and exhausted in 2014, compared to 1980.

Neo and Aristotle

All the pop philosophers will tell you that The Matrix is an allegory of Platonic Dualism. They are all wrong.

Platonic dualism asserts that the soul and the body are distinct, and that the body is wholly dependent upon a transcendent form imposed upon it, when the soul (an instance of that transcendent form) enters it. But if we take the “real world” Neo was initially ignorant of to be the allegory for the body, and the “matrix world” into which Neo was born (and in which he was initially living out a kind of dream) to be the allegory of the soul, then it is not proper Platonism.