I suppose it is normal for people of my advanced age (68) to look at the world and think it is going mad. Nevertheless, I think that this might actually be the case.
Perhaps ‘mad’ isn’t the right word. Before the Enlightenment - which included the discovery of the scientific method and the advancement of the faculty of reason over custom or superstion - the world was not mad. People were just as intelligent and sane as they are today - which may not be saying very much.
However, given there was relatively little reliable objctive information about the way the world was, we had to rely on collectively generated stories to make sense of the world. In the West, the primary story was Christianity, but every culture had some form of sense-making mechanism that held chaos at bay. Whether it was witches, gods, myths, spirits or fairies, superstition and blind belief held sway.
The Enlightenment seemed to be the antidote to all this, and it resulted in a remakrable change in the human condition at least in the West - not least of all, the rise of industrialisation, capitalism, scientific inquiry and medical knowledge. Objective truth was to be held to be the hightest value and that objective truth could be discovered through cold, hard rationalism. Facts, as theschoolteacher Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times suggested, give me facts. To quote the opening sentences of Dickens’ masterful 1854 satire, , ‘Now what I want is facts, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are what is wanted in life.You can only form the mind of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of service to them.”
Facts we got. Rather too many of them as it turned out. With the spirit of rartional inquiry that finally led to the rise of the World Wide Web, we were and are drowning in facts. The perverse result of this is - since you can find online a counter narrative to any narrative you find unattractive - that people are going back to believing in whatever they feel like believing in. What, in fact, they want to believe in, rather than whatever happens to be the case.
In the past this formidabloe glitch in the human brain that chooses irrationality over rationlity was tempered to some extent by vast collective forces - those of the state, of society, of religion, of common culture. But the Internet , in contrast to its early hopes, has led to a Great Atomisation. We are all locked into our own private worlds, creating our own private narratives, often through what we find online, much of it plausible rubbish.
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