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Against the Idols of the Age

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This is not a book for moralizers, ideologues, fanatics, dogmatists, right thinkers, or anyone who cannot tolerate having some pet idea or another ripped to rhetorical shreds. David Stove must have been one of the most splenetic philosophical critics ever to put pen to paper. There are very few ideas, thinkers, ideologues that Stove approves of. He is, to use a phrase of the great critic William Hazlitt, a "great hater." Whether its Karl Popper, Plato, feminism, Darwinism, religion, idealism, Thomas Kuhn, Victorianism, Schopenhauer, academic, racial egalitarianism---they are all so much grist to the Stovean critical mill. Stove relishes attacking popular positions. Are women as intelligent men? No, declares Stove; nobody believes that, he insists, despite all the liberal fustian to the contrary. Is racism a valid concept? No, Stove argues, it is a mere neologism that nobody accepts in everyday life. Stove's iconoclasm might lead some to dismiss him as a mere crank. Certainly there is nothing easier than to disagree with him (his positions do tend towards unpalatable extremes). But because of Stove's incendiary wit, his clear, forceful, ingenious (though sometimes, admittedly, sophistical) argumentation, and his pungent, graceful, perspicuous style, he cannot be so casually dismissed. Stove is a master at finding compelling reasons to adopt outrageous opinions. Against "The Idols of the Age" is a contrarian classic. It belongs on the shelf of every person who is opposed, on principle, to all the appalling bilge that passes for common wisdom among today's "intellectuals." And even, as is more than probable, Stove attacks some idea or individual that you admire, what of it? We all of us need to be shaken out of our dogmatic slumbers now and again. I can think of no more invigorating way to be awaken than by reading Stove's brilliantly inflammatory essays. Highly recommended.

David Stove is the only essayist I have read whom I enjoy as much as I do Montaigne. You may think some of his views crazy, but they are always beautifully expressed, often funny, and overall they are couched in terms of such reasonableness as to make you wish, when you get to the end of this volume, that he had written 100 times as many.

"Women are intellectually inferior to men"; "Discrimination on the basis of race is often justified"; "Darwinian evolutionary theory is not well-supported by evidence." Anyone can think up such theories, but only Stove can suport them with serious argument, different from what you would have thought of yourself.

In the first place, David Stove was a crank, a witty crank but a crank nonetheless. After reading these reviews, it appears that most of the people who like his books are cranks as well. It is a reliable rule of thumb that any philosopher who accuses his targets of being dogmatic, irrational and guilty of elementary errors that even a child could detect is almost certain to be at least as guilty of these vices as those he attacks. Indeed, it is only because he or she is committed to a set of definite and usually simplistic views that he or she is capable of seeing those opponents in this palpably distorted way.
Stove is often accused of being a latter-day positivist, but he was in fact a Baconian inductivist who believed that casual, everyday observation was a sufficient epistemic ground for sweeping philosophical claims. (This, in fact, was the view that he defended - against Hume - in his technical philosophical work on induction.) His constant appeals to "what everybody knows" and the prejudices of two generations ago that pass themselves off as "common sense" illustrates that well enough. For example, we all know that women are less intelligent than men; history proves it, after all, inasmuch as women have failed to acheive anything even remotely close to what men have acheived in historical time. And, if women do as well on math tests as men, that just proves that math tests are not a good way of comparing males and females with regard to intelligence. Casual induction, the source of stereotypes and prejudices of all sorts, apparently trumps the social sciences as well, which are to be dismissed simply as the running dogs of political correctness.
Stove is funny (though in a mean-spirited and often heavy-handed way) and entertaining to read; I throughly enjoyed reading his essays. That is not to my credit. Each of us secretly desires to see those smarter and better than ourselves exposed as stupid and wicked; Stove appeals to this form of intellectual schadenfreude - we read him and we feel good. However, when this guilty pleasure wears off and we begin to actually think about his arguments soberly, they are far from convincing. I am neither a Popperian nor an Absolute Idealist, but I know enough about these philosophies to know that what Stove says about them amounts to a silly caricature, one so distorted as to be completely irrelevant to the proper philosophical evaluation of those views. I am much more sympathetic to his attacks on sociobiology and cosmic evolutionism - which has been much more effectively critiqued by others without his particular axe to grind - but I doubt that anything Stove says will impress Dennett or Dawkins, and not simply because they are as intransigent and dogmatic in their own way as Stove is in his quite different one.
To conclude, "irrationalism" is not a matter of what views one holds, but rather of the manner in which those views are held. Humor, wit and style are not antithetical to good philosophical prose, but hyperbole, misrepresentation and dismissivenss are and no substitute for argument. Stove's passionate commitment to a set of atavistic ideas that have long since fallen out of fashion (at least in some cases for good and solid reasons) leads him to see "irrationalism" and imminent anarchy lurking everywhere in the contemporary world. He is the philosophical equivalent of the prophet of doom standing on the streetcorner with sign saying "THE END IS NEAR" hanging around his neck: good for a laugh, nothing more.
Still, a good laugh is worth something - so read this book.

This book is like a necessary slap in the face. It's also like eating a wild strawberry. There's something real and rare in it.

Still, buy it before it's banned. Be prepared to laugh aloud. You may have trouble reading it if you have recently gained a college degree, but I recommend it especially in that case.

Truly, the trees that died to produce this book died with honor. May their memory live through many reprints.

A collection of philosophic essays which combine trenchant wit, intellectual brilliance and absolute fearlessness. Not to be missed by anyone who enjoys philosophical argument, scintillating writing and acidic humour. Whether or not you agree with Stove on everything (and as many of his opinions were eccentric, this would be difficult) you will find him incisive, stringent, delightfully funny and a companion who sharpens your own thinking.

If you scan the reviews of this book, you'll quickly discover that a lot of people hate it. They seem to be a mix of convinced pomos, the devout, and "professional philosophers" who have a Ph.D. but no teaching job. (This is one of the real risks of going for a Ph.D. in philosophy: winding up waiting tables or writing computer software.) I especially admired the review which tried to imply that Stove was a CIA tool. :-)

But a lot of other people admire David Stove, including Roger Kimball, who is nobody's fool.

A lot of people get worked up over his essay on the intellectual inferiority of women, which is of course historically accurate (as Camille Paglia would agree). I think Stove misses the main reason for this unequal performance, which is largely that the bell curve for males is a lot wider (or longer) than the bell curve for females. So men have more geniuses and more morons. This probably does not completely explain the difference in math ability, but I find it hard to care because I have never accepted the loony idea that men and women are interchangeable parts. Nevertheless, a lot of people get seriously upset by this essay, as if it were illegal even to broach the idea of sexual inequality. (By the way, Jensen in his authoritative book, The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence) documented at some length the fact that men and women score equally on intelligence tests.)

No, the most interesting essay in here is the one about Idealism ("A Victorian Horror Story"), although the others are well worth a read. Contra Idealism, it seems to me the most obvious thing in the world that human beings have knowledge about the (external) real world. This is not some sort of Primitive Philosophy: it was shared by Avicenna, Maimonides, and St. Thomas Aquinas. It is the matrix which underlies modern science. The idea that the only reality is in your head is the Loony-Tunes idea, defended among others by that "pathological windbag Schopenhauer." (Those are Stove's words, not mine, but I agree!)

I don't think that David Stove is the first philosopher to Get Everything Right, but he does write brilliantly and he will make you think. I recommend this book highly.

As it turned out, reading Against the Idols of the Age, an anthology of Stove's work, was a good decision. I received inspiration not because the book reassured me, as in "don't worry, everything will work out just fine." On the contrary, it paints a grim picture of the state of Western intellectual life. Rather, I was inspired because Stove lays bare many of the absurdities--the "idols" of the book's title--that today pass for sacred, unassailable maxims. He shows that one can unravel the knot of politically correct dogma in which we are entwined, and do it in a clear, commonsense way. Think of it as a housecleaning for the brain, sweeping away cobwebs in various unlikely places.

Stove nimbly traces the genealogy of a ubiquitous modern idol, the accusation of "racism." He reminds us that it grew out of the less menacing but equally vacuous notion of "racial prejudice." He adds:

"Nowadays, you cannot open a daily paper or a popular periodical without meeting [the word racism]. You wonder how journalists could possibly have managed without this word until recently. A politician must now neglect no opportunity to pronounce a curse on 'racism.' He can probably still remember the very first time he heard the word, yet he must now pretend that he had always had 'racism' on his curse-list."

Stove maintains that it is perfectly reasonable to make generalizations about groups of people in categories such as race; in fact, everyone does it. For example, it is clear that Ethiopians are more skilled at long-distance running than Eskimos. Such judgments have no necessary connection to violence, and the linkage between them is a canard:

"I am not a fanatical enthusiast for long-distance running. But suppose I were: would consistency then require that I try to extinguish the race of Eskimos, and multiply the number of Ethiopians?"

In fact, it is the general obsession with "anti-racism" that tends to increase violence and strife. It divides society into battling groups, oppressing everyone with its focus on victimization and revenge. And, as we all know, it shuts down discussion of critical issues that are related to differences between people, as in the immigration debate (or lack thereof).

Stove takes the racism ploy to its logical extreme:

"If we are to have 'racism,' we ought also to have 'healthism,' for the belief that some people's health is not as good as others', and that differences in health are sometimes properly made the basis of differences in our behavior towards people....The disadvantage is that there are going to be far too many new words at this rate. We will need 'weatherism' for the belief that the weather is worse on some days than on others....For the crime (already notorious) of preferring one neighborhood to another, we will need 'neighborhoodism.' And so on.

Another idol that Stove smashes is relativism. Tracing the path of this deadly disease of the intellect, he reaches back to idealists such as Kant, who helped strip the Western mind of its belief in objective reality, instead positing a world that exists only when a "subject" perceives and analyzes an "object." This kind of thinking, asserts Stove, paved the way for the anti-rationalist philosophies of science in the 20th century. For this group, no real scientific truth or progress exists, but only competing conceptions, or, as Thomas Kuhn would have it, "paradigms." These paradigms cannot be measured by any objective criteria.

With this infrastructure in place, it is a short hop to cultural relativism. If knowledge can be evaluated only relative to the mind perceiving it, then culture can be assessed only relative to the mass of minds inventing it.

Since no culture has any intrinsic value behind it, all cultures are equal. Western culture, based as it is on science and reason, has implicitly if not formally declared its superiority. This cannot be the case, says the relativist; we must break out of the chains of our own culture and view simultaneously the entirety of cultures (ironically, a view that could only be produced by Western thinking).

Writes Stove:

"The cultural relativist....inveighs bitterly against our science-based, Europe-centered, white-male cultural perspective. She says that it is not only injurious but cognitively limiting. Injurious it may be; or again it may not. But why does she believe that it is cognitively limiting? Why, for no reason in the world, except this one: that it is ours....Since this reason is also generally accepted as a sufficient one, no other is felt to be needed."

Note the jab at the feminists--one of Stove's favorite targets--this being the only place in the book where the pronoun "she" is used in a generic sense. Elsewhere, he describes in gory detail the convergence of feminism with relativism, Marxism, and other related ills.

Stove does not argue from any religious perspective, and in fact in several places takes elements of Judeo-Christian thought to task for what he sees as inconsistency or error. This does not stop him, though, from lamenting the Enlightenment's attack on religion. On the one hand, he says, it is true that religion caused a fair amount of human misery, including wars, expulsions, witch-hunts, etc. On the other hand:

"[This misery] makes a startlingly trivial comparison with the misery which anti-religious zeal has produced in our century. Indeed, it is hardly even a comparison....How many Spanish Inquisitions equal one KGB? How many St. Bartholomew's Day massacres, plus expulsions of the Huguenots, would it take to equal the misery caused by Lenin plus Mao?....And this is to speak only of the societies in which religion has been actively persecuted. It is leaving out of account the misery of mere godlessness which now afflicts the free societies, where religion was never persecuted, but simply faded away under Enlightened criticism and ridicule."

Further on, Stove links this misery back to the problem of philosophical idealism and its derivatives:

"But whatever may be the explanation of it, that misery [of godlessness] is one of the most momentous facts of human life....It is also the fact behind many other post-Enlightenment historical phenomena: for example, the drug-dependence which has in the twentieth century crippled the Western world. Idealism was, to all the profoundest philosophers from Kant to Bradley, what heroin now is to millions in the West."

Another of Stove's "idols" that I found particularly fascinating, because seldom discussed, is modern architecture:

"It is now impossible, and has been impossible for over fifty years, for anyone to make a building which is beautiful or even agreeable. Whatever may be the reason for it, this is simply an historical fact....No one likes to look at a modern building, let alone live or work in it, and hardly anyone even pretends nowadays that they do like to."

The reason for this, according to Stove: Disgust and even horror at the past, particularly its visible relics, on the part of the modern intellectual elite. Perhaps, I would add, it is a case of profound embarrassment at seeing traces of what we used to accomplish, when our civilization was capable of producing great works--even in the most commonplace objects.

This book is a collection of 12 essays, all of which have appeared before in other books by the same author. There are 4 essays from 'Darwinian Fairytales', 4 from 'Cricket versus Republicanism', 3 from 'The Plato Cult', and 1 from 'Popper and After' (later retitled 'Anything Goes'). So if you are planning to buy any of those, think twice before getting this collection. Especially since even the introductory essay by Roger Kimball ('Who Was David Stove?') can be found elsewhere (it has been reprinted in Kimball's 'Lives of the Mind'). If, however, you are looking for a representative collection of Stove's writing, this should definitely be your first choice, since it contains essays from several different fields of interest.

As most reviewers before have acknowledged, it seems impossible to be able to agree with everything Stove says. But that only adds to the enjoyment. The book may be controversial but it certainly is FUN. What's more, even when making the most preposterous claims, Stove will usually do two other things: 1) lay out his argument in an innovative, surprising and clear way, 2) make several brilliant and true observations on the side, which otherwise would probably never have crossed your mind. For instance, he may be wrong in saying that the intellectual capacity of women is inferior to that of men, but how ingenious of him to point out that this is in no way a moral statement. The book abounds in "banalities" of this sort and thanks to that it is truly an enlightening read. Recommended!

This book isn't what it seems. Rather than making a case for anyone or any particular idea, what the book is really unintentionally about is showing technic in laying out arguments. In terms of tecnique, the man is a master of the art. He can take up any position in his mind and make an impassioned case for it being the absolute universal truth.

But the problem is that its all mindless and hollow. He is all flash and techinque without a thinking mind to go with it. All we get in the book in the end is a series of him taking out mindless reactionary ideas one after the other and making a case for them. He is so flawless in presentation that many will not see through him. But he offers really nothing of value other than showing the general failure of philosophy in the last century.

He is right in his criticisms of Karl Popper but for the wrong reasons. In some sense, he suffers from the same faults in countering Popper that he accuses Popper of.

On Darwinism, he falls into the same trap that most do. He fails to see that Darwinism walks the line of being both science and a philosophy. The philosophy which has no scientific basis always hides behind the science. Its supporters will always attack the critic as being irrational and never defend the philosophy itself.

The problem with Stove is the problem with modern intellectual life. Its at its core dishonest and false. Be it Stove or Chomsky, these people are presenting empty arguments of technique to advocate a political platform of ideas. Left or right, it doesn't make a difference.

For those who want to learn the art of the disingenuous arguement, Stove is the place to start. But before going there I would really advise thinking about what you want to accomplish and the price your willing to pay to accomplish it.