Obscurantism

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Obscurantism (French, obscurantisme, from the Latin obscurans, “darkening”) is the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known. There are two, common, historical and intellectual, denotations: (i) restricting knowledge — opposition to the spread of knowledge, a policy of withholding knowledge from the public; and (ii) deliberate obscurity — an abstruse style (as in literature and art) characterized by deliberate vagueness.

The term obscurantism derives from the title of the 16th-century satire Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum (Letters of Obscure Men), based upon the intellectual dispute between the German humanist Johann Reuchlin and Dominican monks, such as Johannes Pfefferkorn, about whether or not all Jewish books should be burned as un-Christian. Earlier, in 1509, the monk Pfefferkorn had obtained permission from Maximilian I (1486–1519), the Holy Roman Emperor, to incinerate all copies of the Talmud (Jewish law and Jewish ethics) known to be in the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806); the Letters of Obscure Men satirized the Dominican monks' arguments for burning “un-Christian” works.

In the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers used the term "obscurantism" to denote the conservative enemies, especially the religious enemies, of progressive Enlightenment and its concept of the liberal diffusion of knowledge. Moreover, in the 19th century, in distinguishing the varieties of obscurantism found in metaphysics and theology from the “more subtle” obscurantism of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy, and of modern philosophical skepticism, Friedrich Nietzsche said: “The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.”

Restricting knowledge

In restricting knowledge to an élite ruling class of “the few”, obscurantism is fundamentally anti-democratic, because its component anti-intellectualism and elitism exclude the people as intellectually unworthy of knowing the facts and truth about the government of their City-State. In 18th-century monarchic France, the Marquis de Condorcet, as a political scientist, documented the aristocracy’s obscurantism about the social problems that provoked the French Revolution (1789–99) that deposed them and their King, Louis XVI of France.

In the 19th century, the mathematician William Kingdon Clifford, an early proponent of Darwinism, devoted some writings to uprooting obscurantism in England, after hearing clerics — who privately agreed with him about evolution — publicly denounce evolution as un–Christian. Moreover, in the realm of organized religion, obscurantism usually is associated with religious fundamentalism, but is a distinct strain of thought independent of theologic allegiance. The distinction is that fundamentalism presupposes sincere religious belief, whereas Obscurantism is based upon minority manipulation of the popular faith as political praxis, (cf. Censorship).

The obscurantist can be religious, atheist, and agnostic, but, in service to his and her cause, believes that religion (superstition) among the populace is necessary to social stability. To that effect, the obscurant limits the publication, extension, and dissemination of knowledge, of evidence countering the common-belief status quo with which the nation are ruled — the local variety of the necessary Noble Lie, introduced to political discourse by the Classical Greek philosopher Plato in 380 BC. Hence the “stable-status quo restriction of knowledge” denotation of obscurantism applied by pro-science reformers within religious movements,[4] and by contemporary skeptics, such as H.L. Mencken, in critiquing religion.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscurantism