Last Straw

Amy Wal­lace writ­ing for Wired: An Epi­demic of Fear: How Pan­icked Par­ents Skip­ping Shots Endangers Us All:

The rejec­tion of hard-won know­ledge is by no means a new phe­nomenon. In 1905, French math­em­atician and sci­ent­ist Henri Poin­caré said that the will­ing­ness to embrace pseudo-science flour­ished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we won­der whether illu­sion is not more con­sol­ing.” Dec­ades later, the astro­nomer Carl Sagan reached a sim­ilar con­clu­sion: Sci­ence loses ground to pseudo-science because the lat­ter seems to offer more com­fort. “A great many of these belief sys­tems address real human needs that are not being met by our soci­ety,” Sagan wrote of cer­tain Amer­ic­ans’ embrace of rein­carn­a­tion, chan­nel­ing, and extra­ter­restri­als. “There are unsat­is­fied med­ical needs, spir­itual needs, and needs for com­mu­nion with the rest of the human community.”

Look­ing back over human his­tory, ration­al­ity has been the anom­aly. Being rational takes work, edu­ca­tion, and a sober determ­in­a­tion to avoid mak­ing hasty infer­ences, even when they appear to make per­fect sense. Much like infec­tious dis­eases them­selves — beaten back by dec­ades of effort to vac­cin­ate the popu­lace — the irra­tional lingers just below the sur­face, wait­ing for us to let down our guard.

And an anec­dote from Brent Simmon’s in response.

Via Dar­ing Fire­ball.