Comment by cmrx64

and once again I question: what decline of superstition? expert- commission-worship and committee-worship, its own form of superstition, supplanted older forms of irrationalism but with no increase in actual purchase on reality. mesmerism, psychical, criminological, and race anthropological forensic “science” has been participating in the same fads of epistemology as the rest of it. you read a report by the library of congress and you read what lawmakers do in response and the eventual judicial impact, and you have a hard time locating that decline, unless you are also under the superstition of prestige.