Right-wing Republican Extremism as Rooted in a Medievalist Epistemology
The attitude toward knowledge exhibited by the extremist supporters of
right-wing Republicans seems to be a reversion to the kind of thought
that pervaded medieval Europe. It's an anti-modernism. The modernist
attitude toward knowledge, which developed
in the Enlightenment of the 15th to 17th centuries, with the growth of
technology and the emergence of science, relies on reason and empirical
evidence developed and tested by a community of independently thinking
individuals. The medieval attitude toward
knowledge, which had been locked in place for at least a millennium and
a half, was that knowledge was only created by the Deity and only
revealed in the Bible; thus, no new knowledge could ever be created or
found outside the official interpretations of
the Bible. Medievalist knowledge is strictly authoritarian and a priori, while modernist knowledge is anti-authoritarian and empirical.
Authoritarian knowledge tends to be extremely prejudiced, rigidly unchanging, and rooted in stereotypes, while modernist knowledge tends toward flexibility, openness to new information, and critical thinking.
{There is an authoritarian psychopathology at work here, based on a family structure that tends toward the gratification of pathological parental needs, in contrast with a family structure that tends toward meeting the developmental needs of children. Several books by George Lakoff discuss this. The website, psychohistory.com, does so as well. Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson's The Whole-Brain Child focuses on how to raise a child to realize hir full mental and emotional potential, showing how to facilitate the satisfaction of those needs.}
I draw the medievalist-modernist epistemologies distinction from a fascinating book in the Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory series, Walden Browne's Sahagún and the Transition to Modernity, University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Browne, in turn, bases that distinction on Michel Foucault's discussion of Kant in Les Mots et Les Choses.
Authoritarian knowledge tends to be extremely prejudiced, rigidly unchanging, and rooted in stereotypes, while modernist knowledge tends toward flexibility, openness to new information, and critical thinking.
{There is an authoritarian psychopathology at work here, based on a family structure that tends toward the gratification of pathological parental needs, in contrast with a family structure that tends toward meeting the developmental needs of children. Several books by George Lakoff discuss this. The website, psychohistory.com, does so as well. Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson's The Whole-Brain Child focuses on how to raise a child to realize hir full mental and emotional potential, showing how to facilitate the satisfaction of those needs.}
I draw the medievalist-modernist epistemologies distinction from a fascinating book in the Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory series, Walden Browne's Sahagún and the Transition to Modernity, University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Browne, in turn, bases that distinction on Michel Foucault's discussion of Kant in Les Mots et Les Choses.
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