FULL SPEED TO THE DARK AGES

This essay by John Atcheson provides one more well considered confirmation that arrant and vicious stupidity has to be halted if any of us are to survive.


“We are witnessing an epochal shift in our socio-political world.  We are de-evolving, hurtling headlong into a past that was defined by serfs and lords; by necromancy and superstition; by policies based on fiat, not facts. Much of what has made the modern world in general, and the United States in particular, a free and prosperous society comes directly from insights that arose during the Enlightenment. Too bad we’re chucking it all out and returning to the Dark Ages. Literally. Two main things distinguished the post Enlightenment world from the pre Enlightenment Dark Ages. First, Francis Bacon’s Novo Organum Scientiarum (The New Instrument of Science)introduced a new way of  understanding the world, in which empiricism, facts and … well … reality … defined what was real. It essentially outlined the scientific method:  observation and data collection, formulation of hypotheses, experiments designed to test hypotheses and elevation of these hypotheses to theories when data consistently supported them.  It was and is a system based on skepticism, and a relentless and methodical search for truth. 

It brought us advances and untold wealth and health.  From one-horse carts to automobiles to airplanes. From leaches and phrenology to penicillin and monoclonal antibodies.

Until recently. 

Now, we seek to operate by revealed truths, not reality.  Decrees from on high – often issued by an unholy alliance of religious fundamentalists, self-interested corporations, and greedy fat cats – are offered up as reality by rightwing politicians. For example, North Carolina law-makers recently passed legislation against sea level rise. A day later, the Virginia legislature required that references to global warming, climate change and sea level rise be excised from a proposed study on sea level rise. Last year, the Texas Department of Environmental Quality, which had commissioned a study on Galveston Bay, cut all references to sea level rise – the main point of the study. As Stephen Colbert so aptly put it: “If your science gives you results you don’t like, pass a law saying that the result is illegal Problem solved.”Click here for more

  

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The secret word is Dementia