Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge [Hardcover]

Bruce S. Thornton (Author)

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Rather than cleaving contemporary intellectual foolishness to its historical roots, Thornton starts at those roots, advances from the crucial eighteenth century to the present, and concludes with case studies of three modern loci of falsehood--romantic environmentalism, the American Indian as ethical paragon, and goddess worship. The trouble all began with the Enlightenment assumption, founded on similar dispositions in classical Greek philosophy and scholastic Christianity, that knowledge bred virtue. Once a person knew the good, reason would compel realizing it, for humans are naturally inclined to goodness. Thereafter, romanticism demoted reason and preferred feeling but didn't dispute natural human goodness. Thus the stage was set for "if it feels good, it is good" as the highest ethical standard, and all three current follies that Thornton analyzes are rife with the sentimental indulgence, self-righteousness, and contempt for empirical evidence, especially about human behavior, that the feel-good ethic fosters. Thornton's exposition is complex, yet as he draws the thoughts and interpretations of an impressive array of social critics into his grand intellectual-historical argument, his prose never becomes obscure, though Al Gore, Vine Deloria, Carol Christ, and other targets of his criticism have reason to wish it had. Ray Olson

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"Thornton does not mince words and he is not taking any intellectual prisoners." -- ForeWord

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 303 pages
• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute; 1st edition (November 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 188292634X
• ISBN-13: 978-1882926343
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,451,393 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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51 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well-reasoned literate defense of conservative mysterianism, April 15, 2002

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Todd I. Stark "Cellular Wetware plus Books" (Philadelphia, Pa USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge (Hardcover)

This is a well-written, literate manifesto that divides the world into good knowledge and bad knowledge and then tells us which is which. The most important conclusion is that human nature is and should remain a fundamental mystery, and that our pretense at explaining it scientifically leads more to abuses than to useful knowledge. While the tone and underlying values are strongly conservative, as befits a classical scholar, there is also an interesting blend of less conservative thinking when it comes to the consistent arguments against scientism applied to human beings.

The author spends a lot of time praising and applying the powers of human reason while criticizing the proliferation of "false knowledge" and most significantly, telling us where reason simply can't go. All of psychology and social sciences in particular are on the bad list.

The "false knowledge" the author attacks isn't limited to the usual suspects parodied by the skeptics; alien abductions, recovered memories, pseudoscience and popular baseless myth of various sorts. It also includes any attempts to probe human nature using science and unravel the "fundamental mystery" of the human heart.

As a scholar of classical studies, the author represents the received Christian wisdom of sacred mysterianism, or mystery regarding the human soul, and plays it off against the hubris of modern science in daring to try to understand human nature. He illustrates all sorts of foolish trends of thinking in modern culture that ignore the received wisdom a classicist is expected to respect. People instead rely on fads in poorly based scientific research and nonsense dressed in scientific garb. Unfortunately, though, the author so throughly debunks anything resembling scientific psychology that if we relied on this book we would simply assume that there was no way to use science to study human beings. As if we weren't part of nature at all. That's where the author's relentless logic begins to break down for me, and where he also breaks his rhythm and ironically pulls ideas from leftist critiques of science as well.

The book is filled with good common sense and clear thinking, but its fundamental arguments about human beings as a mystery can be confusing to someone who doesn't follow the way the conservative mind works. In particular, the author is convinced that scientific research can't tell us much about human nature, but never explains why; other than that he says is must be "beyond the complexity horizon." However, he never demonstrates how and why that must be so, he assumes it and reviews cases where the ideal of simplifying our understanding of human nature has led to horrendous abuses. The argument falters here because we also see how simplifying our understanding of other aspects of nature have improved our lives dramatically through science. The dividing line at human beings appears arbitrary. For the author, science becomes scientism at times solely because it is science about human beings, rather than because it crosses some meaningful criterion in an accepted philosophy of science.

To follow the author's argument, I think you either must share the author's respect for the traditional view of impenetrable human nature and free will or you must somehow draw the same conclusion based on how much foolishness has been perpetuated in the name of scientific study of human beings. It isn't that the author doesn't make the point well in this manner. He does, and I was persuaded to agree that scientific hubris is more prevalent in psychology and social science than is real knowledge. The problem I see with this is that it doesn't leave any room for a legitimate accumulation of scientific knowledge about human beings, the author assumes they will always be a mystery. I don't think that case has been made, and to me it goes against the spirit of scientific inquiry.

In making his point about the mystery of human nature, the author cleverly and surprisingly shows intellectual flexibility and seems to pull a half a page from the less conservative philosophers and argues, in almost the manner of Stephen Jay Gould, for a pluralistic view of human nature, rather than a traditional conservative one. However, it is only human nature that is beyond science for some reason, and that seemingly as an irrevocable rule of life. He doesn't agree with the pluralists in other areas, only in trying to understand human beings.

He may be right, of course, and he makes a good case for the dangerous foolishness that psychology and social sciences have often led us to.

This reader was left with two strong impressions from the book. One impression is that modern psychology and social science have largely been based on ideals and trends rather than real accumulated knowledge. The other impression is that there must be some way of identifying real knowledge about human beings when we come upon it, rather than treating ourselves as a sacred mystery, and that there must be some intermediate position between the abuses of scientism and the author's human mysterianism.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Contagion of the Mind in the 21st Century, March 29, 2002

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Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge (Hardcover)

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.

43 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Antibiotics for the Mind, February 7, 2001

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G. Passantino (Costa Mesa, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge (Hardcover)

Having addressed hundreds of Philosophy, History, and Literature classes over the last 20 years, I am often frustrated by the students' typical lack of critical thinking ability. They mostly don't want to think for themselves or test what they're told, they just want to know what they have to memorize for the test. This book not only exposes some of the most pernicious historical myths of our contemporary culture, it also teaches the reader to think critically and care more about truth than conformity. I highly recommend it!