A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

Why Truth Matters, by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom UKP 9.99
Continuum 2006, pb ISBN 9780826495280

In The Threat to Reason, (the title being ironic) Dan Hind in fact presents a welcome antidote to the current range of self-declared defenders of 'rationalism' and 'the enlightenment'. These are people such as Frank Furedi who, as Hind reminds us, insist that:

The cultural valuation of superstition over reason and revival of ancient forms of mysticism testify to the profound crisis of meaning in contemporary society. We are no longer talking about isolated and marginal practices. The 'alternative' has gone mainstream and exercises formidable influence over our lives. Superstitious prejudice about the unique psychic power of holistic healers is systematically transmitted through popular culture. Ideas that were formerly associated with the esoteric - holistic, organic, psychic healing, cleansing, detoxing, rebirthing - now trip off our tongues.

... we are living through a flight from reason itself, a kind of collective paranoia. Unchecked, this can lead to dictatorship or totalitarianism as people no longer have the wherewithal to defend themselves...

In fact, for many of its founding figures, science was not the enemy of religion, and equally, religion is not the friend of irrationality and eccentricity. The Bible warns rather against anyone who practices the arts of "divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritualist or who consults the dead", adding "Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord" - and we know what happens to them!

Then again, Dawkins et al see irrationality in all the shades of minority opinions and alternative lifestyles. But the entities that make up the modern world, the national and transnational corporations are left alone. Yet the corporation, if it is an individual, as legally it is allowed to be, has a peculiar kind of character. It is entirely selfish. Indeed, as has been observed, it is 'psychopathic'.

In 1929, the Georgia Supreme Court noted of corporations that although treated in law as 'persons':

... freed as such bodies are, from the sure bounds to the schemes of individuals - the grave - they are able to add field to field, and power to power, until they become entirely too strong for that society which is made up of those whose plans are limited to a single life...

Or take racism. The progressive liberal politician Charles Dilke wrote in 1867, after a tour of the United States in praise of the 'extirpation' of the American Indians by the English colonists, saying:

The Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth. Up to the commencement of the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians of Central North American, of the Maories, and of the Australians by the English colonists, no numerous race had ever been blotted out by an invader.

There is in these matters less hypocrisy among the Americans than with ourselves. In 1840 the British Government assumed the sovereignty of New Zealand in a proclamation which set forth with great precision that it did so for the sole purpose of protecting the aborigines in the possession of their lands. The Maories numbered 200 000 then: they number 20 000 now.
(Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in the English-Speaking Countries (1885)

In the words of Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays (1891-1995, day-job, theatre promoter)  human wants and desires are "the steam that make the social machine work". Properly handled, the pressure of public opinion can be controlled as if "actuated by the pressure of a button" (Propaganda).The herd, he noted in the late 1920s, liked to follow the example of a trusted authority figure. Failing that, it relied on "clichés, pat words or images which stood for a whole group of ideas or experiences".

As Dan Hind sums up the philosophy: it is pointless to present the facts to the public and expect them to make a 'rational' assessment. Instead, they must be stampeded in the required direction.Those who are in charge of controlling public opinion, are 'an invisible government, an elite who 'pull the wires that control the public mind'.

When Hitler came to write Mein Kampf, following his unsuccessful putsch in Germany, he echoed many of these ideas. A few years later, with Goebbels, he implemented them to terrible effect - a lesson that the Allies were quick to note - and mimic. Of course, there is nothing new in this either - indeed Plato outlines the 'little lies' that are necessary for directing the public in the good direction as part of the management of his 'Republic'. As Socrates says: "our Rulers will have to employ a great deal of fiction and deceit for the benefit of their subjects".

Public opinion is regularly - and easily - manipulated. According to the journalist, Robert Parry, when the US government wanted to create support at home for its covert and not so covert activities in Central America, centred on the use of 'rebel armies' to topple left-leaning governments, it found that the usual warnings about stopping the tide of communism were falling on deaf ears. On the other hand, people were frightened of a wave of immigrants from the South, so..

.. they developed what they called the 'feet people' argument, which was that unless we stopped the communists in Nicaragua and San Salvador, 10 per cent - they came up with that figure somewhere - 10 per cent of all the people in Central American and Mexico will flood the United States.

(Lecture by Robert Parry, quoted in The Threat to Reason)

Of course, op-ed articles and book reviews were important too.
Dan Hind's slightly strange solution to all this is that a tiny group of iconoclasts retreat from 'modern society', away from the TVs, the music players and games computers, to continue to think and reflect, and - when the times are better - to publicly philosophise. 

Dan Hind's work is a rare bloom in the philosophy garden. However, there are two sorts of hardy perennials in the philosophical book business: potted summaries for the uninitiated and rambling attacks on wooly thinking and religious belief, conducted in the name of 'rationality' by by 'A. N. Expert' 

Jeremy Stangroom, who describes himself as a British website editor with a degree in social science, has just competed (with James Garvey) one of the former, and here, sure enough comes one of the latter too, this time co-authored by Ophelia Benson, an american who describes herself as having been a zookeeper for a number of years. Whatever their different backgrounds, the two share a particular distrust of 'post-modernism', 'marxism' and alternative lifestyles generally. In their place, Stangroom and Benson offer a rigourous not to say monolithic version of 'Truth' (they capitalise many words for emphasis), as identified by Scientists and evidently Enlightened Rationalists such as themselves.

And truth mattes, of course, to academics. Not so much to publishers. They've allowed Stangroom and Benson to write a book here that is intended to appeal to a general reader, one who does not think very much of complicated theories and 'uncertainty' which, after all, can be dealt with much more efficiently, as Bishop Berkeley is supposed to have once done, by kicking a stone and uttering "I refute it thus!".

In so doing the 'general reader' is co-opted by the authors to join in an attack on academics, especially philosophers and social scientists, who are accused of promoting 'fashionable nonsense'. The conceit of the book is that it is 'other people' and not the reader that the authors portray as relying on 'authorities' and ending up following blindly whenever "The Reverend X says that's wrong" or "when our Leader says that's an enemy-idea" - as they crudely caricature it, adding, "what is good for the community to believe, [is] not (necessarily) what corresponds to some state of affairs in the world or some mind-independent objects".

The contradiction is resolved somewhat if you realise that Stangroom and Benson are not worried so much about the threat from the community as a whole as that from 'the Left', which is time and again identified as the enemy to truth seeking that the book must regularly return to and expose. 

The Community speaking (at least apparently) on behalf of the victimised and downtrodden... [presents] arguably one of the most powerful and effective tools of denial going at present. Simply invoke the holy name of The Community or Religious Beliefs or Their Culture and very often disagreement will slam to a halt in a fog of embarrassment and guilt...

Honest to f***ing Christ. [asterisks added by The Philosopher] Is that cute or what? Can cultural theorists spin a metaphor or can they not. If that doesn't make you sick, you have a stronger stomach than I do.

Certainly there are conflicts and contradictions at the heart of this book. The authors do not adequately distinguish between those who deny there is one objective version of reality 'the truth' - and those who merely disagree with them over exactly what the facts are. S&B move from attacking postmodernism to attacking critics of the theory of Evolution in one breath, unaware of the disparity. Again, S&B insist they want to 'unshackle' freethinkers from the restraints of convention and left-wing propaganda, yet at the same time they wish to seek out and destroy all the rival schools, and all the different opinions, that are inseparable from free-thinking and indeed truth seeking. Needless to say, awareness of contradiction and complexity makes no appearance anywhere in their discussion. 

Instead they attack people who ask 'unanswerable questions' (such as 'Why are we here?', or 'What is the meaning of life?' - or even general questions involving the idea of ethical value). These people they accuse of attempting to 'temporarily silence or divert' the truth-seekers. Such thinking should be outright banned. But so too should attempts to offer alternative explanations. Those who say "It is always possible to think of alternative explanations for any set of data", must understand that this is a tactic of the "Enemies of the Enlightenment project" as they melodramatically put it. Calming slightly, Stangroom and Benson continue:

Clearly to many people the desire and need to come up with a more pleasing, less disconcerting explanation is vastly more important than any lumpishness and roughness in the explanation itself.

But to those for whom the truth matters more than a pleasing account, the contortions involved in the fit are almost always a dead give-away that the explanation is question is not the right one, and it is not merely imperfect or unattractive but rather entirely worthless.

However, by contrast, Stangroom and Benson say that truth applies everywhere and at all times. They warn: "If one decides that truth does not mater in one area, what is to prevent one from saying it doesn't matter in any, in all?"

This is what some people would call a non sequitur, that is, a kind of argument in which the conclusion does not actually follow 'logically' from the premises. What sort of people would say that? Well, of course, people like Stangroom and Benson. Towards the end of the book they criticise this argument, made by one of the defenders of Jacques Derrida, who represents the kind of truth dismantling philosophy they particularly oppose:

"If Derrida's contributions to philosophy, literary criticism, the theory of painting, communications, ethics and politics made him into the most internationally renowned European intellectual during these times, it is because of the precision of this thought, the way his thinking always took a brilliant and unanticipated turn, and because of the constant effort to reflect on moral and political responsibility."

Elsewhere Stangroom and Benson criticise those who saw in the mass protests against the British Prime Minster, Tony Blair's, support for the US war in Iraq, a sign that Blair would "never be forgiven" for 'Epistemological confusion' or 'wishful thinking'. They note that Blair in fact won the election a few years later, but not of course that he was 'never forgiven' and was forced out of office a few years later. (Nor indeed that Stangroom himself wrote in support of the war...)

Stangroom and Benson object to 'bad arguments' but they still use plenty of their own illegitimate devices to make their points. Derrida, they immediately continue, 'might' be famous because of frequent mention of his name. (Circular argument or what?). But, they growl nastily, "serial murderers have much higher name recognition than any intellectual and its not because of their precision of thought (though it may be because their thinking takes some unanticipated turns)"...

Apart from the strange compliment to serial murderers for being 'original thinkers', this is clearly a clumsy effort to discredit Derrida (and his supporters) by making irrelevant links to 'bad people'. This in fact is the modus operandi (to use one of the literary devices employed in the book - the odd bit of Latin ) is to attack those with different views as 'Nazis' and murderers. It might seems a ridiculous tactic, but it is one that many have used before and no doubt will do hence. On page 171, as part of their grand closing statement of their quasi-legal case against "Leftist thinking" , Stangroom and Benson warn:

There is a frivolity, a lack of responsibility, an indifference to canons of coherence of logic, rationality and relevance- which are reminiscent not of the the Left or progressivism, but, as Richard Wolin argues, of counter-Enlightenment and reaction.

That's not a mere accidental association, it is what counter-Enlightenment and reaction are all about, the rejection of reason, enquiry, logic and evidence in favour of tradition, religion, instinct, blood and soil, the Nation, the Fatherland[emphasis added].

That, the authors conclude grimly, is what is left standing "once canons of coherence and relevance are stripped away". Canons of what? But "The Left is not well advised to discredit or undermine reason and respect for truth, because those are ultimately the only tools the Left has..."

There is, they say, "a profound irony in the situation". Indeed "postmodernist epistemic relativism... is thought to be, and often touted as emancipatory. It is supposed to set us free from all those coercive repressive restrictive hegemonic totalizing old ideas". 

In a review of the book, (printed on the back of the paperback edition) for the London based daily newspaper the Independent, Johann Hari praised the authors for :

"a sassy and profound response to [a] cascade of superstition and silliness... Benson and Stangroom answer the clotted, barely readable sentences of the postmodernists with sentences so clear you could swim in them."