Isn't the staying power of religious-based fear remarkable? I couldn't help thinking that, reading about the millennial fears in NOTR, and the conviction among the cranky monks that this old whorish world was going to implode any day now from the weight of its sin. Then you turn on the TV and here are all these conservative politicians and teabaggers 700 years later saying essentially the same thing: that we have to chase the Evil One from the Oval Office and bring religion to the fore of public life before God smites us.
I mean, there's old Alinardo who's telling William the millennium has arrived and the Antichrist is going to show up any second now, and William says, um, the millennium was 300 years ago, dude. Undaunted, Alinardo employs some self-serving math and says, no, the millennium doesn't date from the birth of Christ but from 300 years later, when Constantine ceded control of Rome to the pope. Tricky, huh? Our public life is rife with this kind of junk, with spinning the facts and math when they don't work out the way you want!
Do you think Eco is tapping into some fundamental, timeless truth about people and how susceptible they are to being controlled by fear and misinformation? And it's sort of sadly humorous that at least in the Middle Ages the populace had illiteracy to blame for their ignorance and herd mentality. Jorge believed you controlled people through controlling access to knowledge. I wonder what he would make of a world where access was completely unfettered, was available with the click of the mouse, and yet a large segment of the population still chose fear and misinformation and explanations based on demonology not reason.
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1 comment:
I think you're exactly right. Twisting reality to manipulate people into buying into a worldview and agenda is obviously nothing new. It is sad that the only excuse nowadays is laziness or willful ignorance.
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