Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 728 of Gordon Wood’s excellent 2009 volume, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (footnote deleted):

The result was an odd mixture of credulity and skepticism among many middling Americans. Where everything was believable, everything could be doubted. Since all claims to expert knowledge were suspect, people tended to mistrust anything outside of the immediate impact of their senses. They picked up the Lockean sensationalist epistemology and ran with it. They were a democratic people who judged by their senses only and who doubted everything that they had not seen, felt, heard, tasted, or smelled. Yet because people prided themselves on their shrewdness and believed that they were now capable of understanding so much from their senses, they could be easily impressed by what they sensed but could not comprehend. A few strange words spoken by a preacher, or hieroglyphics displayed on a document, or anything written in highfalutin language could carry great credibility. In such an atmosphere hoaxes of various kinds and charlatanism and quackery in all fields flourished.

DBx: Wood here describes the ascent, in early 19th-century America, of populism. Not much has changed with the current ascent, in early 21st-century America, of populism, except that one source of seeming immediate sensory perception now is electronic (especially social) media.

Pictured above is a modern U.S. president peddling snake oil by displaying randomly scattered hieroglyphs.