Mick Hartley

James Marriott in the Times on the return of superstition, and the end of the enlightenment:

It is becoming clear we have drastically undervalued the rare and precious achievement of a civilisation founded on rational thought. Ironically, as the Dark Ages return, the Enlightenment philosophers and scientists who campaigned against zealotry and ignorance — and to whom we ultimately owe the entire miracle of scientific modernity — are patronisingly downgraded by revisionist historians. They are altogether too male, too stale and too western for present academic tastes. Voltaire was a misogynist. John Locke was a racist. Ditto David Hume whose name was recently stripped from an Edinburgh University building. The Middle Ages, according to fashionable theories, were not really as unscientific as all that. After all, they had astrolabes.

We are, I suppose, the victims of our own success. Three hundred years of technological civilisation have led many modern westerners into complacency about how rational our species really is. The darker truth is that ignorance and superstition are never far from the surface of human affairs. The ease with which we in the oh-so-sophisticated and politically correct 21st century have slipped back into superstition should give pause to those apt to sneer at the Enlightenment.

Readers hardly need telling that the recent spate of demon attacks are but a colourful symptom of a world losing its reason. Significant portions of the US government are virtually at war with science. The adoption of Maori “ways of knowing” (ie indigenous folklore) by universities in New Zealand is only one bizarre efflorescence of campaigns against “western science”.

We cannot underestimate the magnitude of this anti-rational shift. The expectation that a world filled with demons, anti-vaccine conspiracies and “ways of knowing” will be able to sustain the levels of scientific, medical and technological achievement to which we have become accustomed is deeply naive.

He’s quite right to be concerned. Perhaps a nod to postmodern philosophy would have been in order here, providing as it does a supposedly intellectual backing to the destruction of enlightenment reasoning with its attacks on the notion of the idea of objective truth. The rot comes direct from the academy.

Also not mentioned: gender ideology – surely the clearest indication today of the breakdown of scientific rational thinking, as the whole western world is suddenly seized by this absurd belief that people can change sex, and children can be born in the wrong body. Social contagions are a familiar phenomenon historically – but on this scale, and with this high-level political and academic backing?