The New Dark Ages

Food for thought. "Modern" history is generally said the have begun with the Enlightenment, a time when it was discovered that there was great benefit to society as a whole in the use of the scientific method to separate myth and superstition from fact. This was a time of great optimism. And rightly so, for it led to the world we have today. Humans have thrived in a world where illnesses can be cured, food can be made safe, poisons can be identified and removed from our lives, and technologies never dreamed of by prior civilizations are common.

What to go back to the good old days? The days of plague, a 50% child mortality rate and a 45 year average life span? Lots of people do. In fact you have to hold them back from their own destruction. The fact is that "modern" history is only 3 or 4 hundred years long. We have lived through an aberration of times. The idiots will win. And our descendants will sit around their caves someday and tell tall tales of us.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/aug/15/endarkenment

"The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable. This matters when people delude themselves into believing that we could be endangered at 45 minutes' notice by non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

"It matters when reputable accountants delude themselves into thinking that Enron-style accounting is acceptable. It matters when people are deluded into thinking that they will be rewarded in paradise for killing themselves and others. It matters when bishops attribute floods to a deity whose evident vengefulness and malevolence leave one reeling. And it matters when science teachers start to believe that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago.

"A minor aspect of the endarkenment has been a resurgence in magical and superstitious ideas about medicine. The existence of homeopaths on the high street won't usually do too much harm.

....

"Homeopaths are a manifestation of a society in which wishful thinking matters more than truth; a society where what I say three times is true and never mind the facts."