I think it was the father of an ex-girlfriend who first suggested to me that we’re slipping into a new dark age. I was about as stupid as the average 20-year-old. He was a doctor, an articulate speaker, elegantly white-maned, and terribly English. He took me to some excellent restaurants. At the time, I don’t know that I really grasped what he was getting at, but I took his word for it. Years and much technological innovation and internet expansion later, the penny dropped: the proliferation and accessibility of information, and the ease with which that information is manufactured and delivered, seems to result not in a more well-informed public but rather threatens to cultivate the very opposite, a world of individuals who have to work a whole lot less to find out about a whole lot more—and that more is so overwhelmingly composed of dunderheaded trash as to boggle, or should we now say google, the mind.
The words of the wise doctor—who might I also add drove one hot little antique sports car—came back to me as I tucked into Counterknowledge (Viking, $28), the new book by Damian Thompson, who I remembered from an enormously engaging study of millennial cults he penned some years back called The End of Time, which I picked up because of a rave from my beloved English author J.G. Ballard, and who, it turns out, is yet another Englishman! The subject of Counterknowledge is what Thompson deems the current “pandemic of credulous thinking” that threatens to undermine “the greatest legacies of the European Enlightenment,” which is to say, rigorous scientific inquiry. The titular term is an invention of Thompson’s, signifying anything passed off as fact that can be proven false by more carefully scrutinized facts. Creationism, intelligent design, and “young earth” science; the satanic ritual abuse scare of the 1980s and 90s; The Da Vinci Code; radical academia’s rewriting of migration history; Scientology; the Chinese discovery of the Americas; anything purported by Rosie O’Donnell; the denial of the AIDS virus; the denial of the Holocaust; the notion that 9/11 was engineered by the US government (bizarrely, these last two conspiracy theories seem to be frequently espoused by the same parties): Thompson’s examples are diverse and make for compelling, troubling, and inevitably funny, digressions.
The real issue here is not that such ideas are proposed but that, often in the interests of commodification, they are legitimized by the establishment, be it the publishers and booksellers that print up ostensibly fact-based pseudoscience and psuedohistory and market it as actual history and science, or be it venerated institutions that offer degrees of loose or nonexistent standards that mislead consumers into believing those degree-holders offering services are credentialized with great discretion. Curiously, this means that religion in itself is essentially off the hook, since the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved. I’ve been mulling that one over and I do think that the exception holds, but it’s worth noting that one of the few breaks given to any institution based on non-science happens to be one Thompson represents—in his other life, he’s the editor-in-chief of The Catholic Herald. All kinds of religious theories are skewered here, but the mere belief in a deity is let be.
Which leads me to a little bone I need to pick. Thompson is extremely knowledgeable with regards to the more dangerous interventions of religious or religiously-informed groups at work in the fields of counterknowledge, and I don’t even think we can begrudge him his special concerns about Christian fundamentalists who continually attempt to exorcise Darwinian theory from American schools, or Holocaust-denying Islamic scholars, as they do seem to carry a tremendous influence on the global community of Muslim youth. But there are other areas Thompson recklessly attacks without the same level of understanding at his disposal. In particular, Thompson throws everything that could be conceivably construed as alternative medicine into one giant pot and turns up the heat before sampling the ingredients. I’m absolutely sympathetic to his skepticism toward the hugely profitable industry built around what in some cases are, it would seem, placebos. But it seems unfair to lump the more dubious consumers of, I don’t know, bio-feedback, or hypnosis, let’s say, with someone who wants an extra boost of energy from ginseng, who wants to fight a cold with oil of oregano—and that shit works—or someone who just wants a good massage for crying out loud. What’s more, Thompson’s blanket dismissal of alternative medicine doesn’t account for the flaws in orthodox medicine, which, last I checked, contradicts itself on what is and isn’t good for you about as often as some people change their socks. But a double standard is at work here: “When a medical doctor makes a wrong assessment, that is either an honest mistake or a failure to follow diagnostic procedures.” I find Thompson’s faith in the medical community a little naïve to say the least, especially as it, too, has been thoroughly co-opted by capitalist interests.
Thompson’s attacks become so fevered if not hysterical at times that he himself teeters on coming off as a crank, or a purveyor of counterknowledge. His final chapter kicks off thus: “Credulous thinking is spreading through society as fast and silently as a virus, and no one has a clue how long the epidemic will last.” He likens this epidemic to AIDS. But, come to think of it, maybe he’s got a point there. There were fatal, difficult-to-contain diseases before AIDS, and likewise there’s always been heaps of bullshit out there being treated as fact. Which is no reason to ignore Thompson’s warnings. While he at times oversteps his boundaries and let’s what feels like a reactionary streak take control, Thompson’s lively, perhaps too concise study of modern misinformation is of enormous value and I don’t hesitate recommending it. He’s latched onto a trend that urges further examination, and the groundwork he’s laid in a number of fields has certainly enriched my own understanding of how this trend is playing itself out in new and alarming ways. Not that I’ve checked all of his facts, of course. I guess I just have to take his word for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment