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Title: Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge by Bruce S. Thornton ISBN: 1-882926-89-7 Publisher: ISI Books Pub. Date: April, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.79 (19 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A plethora of pet peeves
Comment: This meandering and convoluted litany of discontent is a good read for anyone feeling left behind by the pace of today's social change. For anyone else it's a glimpse into outdated and strictly confined mind-set. Thornton's subtitle is an unfulfilled promise. We never really find out what "false knowledge" means - other than the catalogue of the author's dislikes. Most of his attention is focussed on "revisionists" of one sort or another. A favourite target is academics who too easily disseminate "false knowledge." As a Classics professor, he has a strong background in social commentators through the ages. Thornton calls up nearly all of them, starting with 17th Century critic Thomas Browne, in his attempt to disparage nearly every social issue from the environment through native peoples to women's issues. It's a formidable arsenal, but of doubtful relevance in a modern environment.
If you manage to plow through the opening chapter in which he establishes the superior values of the powers of Western knowledge, the remainder of the book is almost entertaining. He places terms like "scientist" and "knowledge" in scare quotes, alerting you to his disdain. Attributing many modern concepts to a holdover from the Romantic Era, Thornton finds critics of Western society as living self-indulgently in a mythical past. The obscurity of his sources suggest it would take another classical scholar to assess how well he's cited them. Their commonalty is their inappropriateness to bear witness on today's environment.
Thornton notes how society has developed an "adversarial stance toward nature and a need to dominate and control its forces [although he exonerates Christianity for generating that attitude, blaming the small-farm society of ancient Greece instead]. The Romantic era regenerated a "nature-love," on a false foundation carried forward to today's environmental movement. He characterizes the "Deep Ecology movement," for example, as a "farrago of old myths" rife with the "rhetoric of New Age narcissism." While he deplores the human impact on our world [particularly his home in California's San Joaquin Valley], Thornton falls well short of offering meaningful solutions. His only cure for the pollution permeating his valley and the spread of urbanization is to call for "clear-headed discriminations between human needs and nature's" and to figure out "how we can rationally manage technology and growth." Hardly a novel idea, but Thornton fails to offer any specifics in fulfilling this ambition. One can only wonder why Thornton has never read E. O. Wilson [there's no mention of America's leading environmentalist in the book]. It would have meant an major rewrite of several segments of this wearying tome.
After environmentalists, Thornton addresses the "Noble Savage" image in Native American writing and films. Later, it's the Goddess philosophy of Marija Gimbusta and her followers that he condemns. Gimbusta's contention that the Golden Age of the Mother Goddess was peaceful and bound by a reverence for "Mother Earth" isn't substantiated by any evidence. He shows how the mythical egalitarian societies envisioned by Gimbusta and her supporters is clearly unrealistic. An organized hunting community is prone to hierarchies almost by definition. To Thornton, the current widespread application of this "evidence by intuition" in university courses degrades scientific standards.
Finally, he finds that "Multiculturism is perhaps the most dangerous false knowledge circulating among us." This section exposes the narrowness of Thornton's outlook. While praising Western technology throughout the book, he is apparently ignorant of the Eastern contributions to that technology. He castigates the hypocrisy of multiculturalism in its anti-Western manifestos, contending that the concepts of ethnic uniqueness are themselves a Western invention. Multiculturism, in his view, erodes the foundation of Western ethics and morality, although we aren't provided with much in the way of definition of these terms. In
his use of the terms, the strong emphasis is on "individualism" and "freedom." Thornton's response to social critics is to urge their emigration. It smacks of the favourite phrase of the Nixon era, "America, love it or leave it."
Thornton's constant use of stock phrases: "empty rhetoric," "hysterical attack," "gratifying fantasy, "sentimentalized thinking" and other idioms belie his own rhetoric, hysteria and sentimental formulae. The book is a paean to fantasized cultural ideal that never existed and likely never will. The greatest surprise in this book is that after over 200 pages of lashing out at America's social critics we expect to find some realistic solutions to the issues he addresses. After disparaging the expressed opinions of those commentators seeking solutions to the problems of racism, environmental degradation and reaction to America's plan for globalization, Thornton simply throws up his hands in despair. He offers neither plans, campaigns or any means of addressing issues that confront us and our children. He can only deplore "retreating into obscurantism, mysticism or quietism." This inability to deal with society's problems at any level simply renders the whole exercise a telling example of "empty rhetoric," to use his own overworked phrase.
Rating: 5
Summary: Contagion of the Mind in the 21st Century
Comment: Any book which explores "the new epidemic of false knowledge" reminds us that the human race has been afflicted with intellectual pestilence throughout its history. From my own perspective, there are at least three major reasons for false knowledge such as misinformation, half-truths, gratifying superstitions, and pleasant myths as well as outright lies: insufficient and/or incorrect information; man's inability and/or unwillingness to accept a reality which is redundantly verifiable; and third, it serves the self-interests of those who affirm it. In this volume, Thornton examines an "epidemic of false knowledge" which is potentially more destructive than any predecessors because of technology which makes it now possible to exchange more false knowledge faster and to a much greater extent than ever before. In the Preface, Thornton explains that his aim "is not so much to assert a positive, true doctrine that should replace the false one, but rather to incite the reader's own critical eye to examine more carefully the many received truths and elements of public wisdom circulating in our collective mind. If this means that my own ideas are subjected to the same scrutiny, then this book has achieved its aim."
Following a brilliant Introduction, Thornton carefully organizes his material within Two Parts: Of the Causes of Error and Of Three Popular and Received Ideas. He then provides a Conclusion in which he correctly suggests that the threat of other plagues in years to come requires of all thoughtful persons that "with that ability to "detect and expose error and cant and [what Sir Thomas Browne once characterized as] 'Prejudice and Prescription,' we will possess the most important freedom of all -- the freedom of our minds, out intellectual autonomy that allows us to confront the hard choices and make the hard decisions that are the responsibility of every citizen in a democracy."
Thornton briefly examines many of the usual suspects (e.g. logical fallacies first identified by Aristotle, such as begging the question ) and then shifts his attention, in Part II, to what he calls "three versions of history as therapeutic drama."
Romantic Environmentalism: Thornton asserts that "Humans, in sum, are not natural; nature is a necessary, but not sufficient, part of human identity. Nor is the natural world with which we are most intimate completely 'natural." Thousands of years of human culture and agricultural technology have altered nature's raw material into an artificial 'nature' more conducive to human survival."
The White Man's Golden Age Red Man: Thornton observes that "The tragic view of history...with all its contradictions and failed good intentions and messy complexity, is anathema to the idealizer, who finds it easier (and more profitable) to pander to the gratifying preconceptions and cheap guilt and smug compassion of contemporary whites."
The False Goddess and Her Lost Paradise: According to Thornton, "Goddess history offers a gratifying myth in the guise of empirical fact -- precisely the combination of scientism and debased Romanticism we have already repeatedly encountered. Indeed, the origins of Goddess religions can be found, not in the new discoveries of archeological science, but in the nineteenth-century's anti-Enlightenment pique."
Romantic environmentalism, Noble Savage Indianism, and Goddess "religions" are but three of several dozen inherently false but remarkably durable "versions of history as therapeutic drama." No doubt many other new 'versions" will be formulated, perhaps in strategic alliance with one or more predecessors. Some of their advocates will simply not be willing and/or able to subject them to requisite scrutiny; other advocates will exploit false knowledge to serve their own self-interests. It is probably impossible to eliminate man-made "epidemics" but Thornton believes, and I agree, that it is possible to limit their damage.
As indicated earlier in this review, Thornton offers the reassurance that if all thoughtful persons respond "with that ability to "detect and expose error and cant and [what Sir Thomas Browne once characterized as] 'Prejudice and Prescription,' we will possess the most important freedom of all -- the freedom of our minds, out intellectual autonomy that allows us to confront the hard choices and make the hard decisions that are the responsibility of every citizen in a democracy."
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Albert Borgmann's brilliant analysis of the nature of information, Holding On to Reality.
Rating: 4
Summary: Interesting book
Comment: Interesting book, but I won't buy.
Customer reviews are becoming increasingly annoying. Although the idea of customer reviews was at first an interesting novelty, the negative reviews are tiresome. There are a great many Know-it-alls out there that are more interested in showing their own superior knowledge through negative reviews, than offering helpful critiques. Negative reviews have kept
me from buying on numerous occasions. I suppose that the option of "adding your own review" brings more people to the Amazon site, but it surely curtails sales. If reviews are really
necessary, perhaps Amazon could restrict them to one or two paragraphs. The joy in coming here to buy books, for me at least, is dying. I'd rather go to a bookstore and not be distracted by 1 and 2 star reviews and pages of annoying disparaging remarks by want-to-be critics! There must be
many more potential book buyers out there that are equally disgusted but simply don't take the time to say it.
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Title: Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization by Bruce Thornton ISBN: 1893554570 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality by Bruce S. Thornton ISBN: 0813332265 Publisher: Westview Press Pub. Date: February, 1998 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite by Bernard Goldberg ISBN: 044653191X Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 03 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton ISBN: 1882926544 Publisher: ISI Books Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past by Keith Windschuttle ISBN: 1893554120 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: 07 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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