Irrationalism.

I am more and more persuaded that Collingwood was right when he said that the English world was being overrun by an irrationalist epidemic.

People are more and more hostile to thought. From the Texas GOPs explicit rejection of higher order thinking to anti-vaccination movements to the purposeful attack of the university system: America is hostile to thought.

The irrationalist epidemic has created "in the body politic a demand that scientific thinking should be put down by force.... Academically, by creating in the specialized organs though which society endeavours to further science and learning a feeling of hostility to that furtherance. This feeling of hostility to science as such may be 'rationalized' through an obscurantist philosophy which by sophistical arguments pretends to prove that that advances which are actually being made are in fact no advances. Sophistical, because reactionary: based on the assumption that the superseded views are true, and thence proceeding to argue that the views which have superseded them must be false because they do not agree with the view they have superseded. The partistans of such an obscurantist philosophy are traitors to their academic calling."