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| Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History | 
 enlarge | Author: Damian Thompson
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £3.09
You Save: £4.90 (61%)
New (26) Used (3) from £2.49
Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 13434
Media: Paperback
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 1843546760
EAN: 9781843546764
ASIN: 1843546760
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW - ***Delivery usually * 2 - 3 * working days - From Aphrohead of SOUTHPORT, Lancs, UK *** . Priority Airmail used Worldwide on International orders. Thanks from all at Aphrohead.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 Forceful yet lightweight October 13, 2008
A good read but quite slight. Although I did agree with most of the author's arguments it was mostly because I was familiar with them already. I can't imagine that this would likely convince anyone who believes in 'alternative' notions of reality as it doesn't really examine them with any real rigour.
I'm still looking for the definitive book on all things 'woo' and though this is not it, it's still a decent primer into the world of 'Counter-Knowledge'.
Where the subject of this book -counter-knowledge- begins and ends I don't know and from the author's definition I'm still not entirely clear. Given the author's occupation as a writer for a christian publication, what defines orthodox knowledge for him may not chime with everyone else's definition.
Still, I believe at least he is nominally on the side of rationality and reason. Even if some of his personal beliefs, for me, make him a target of his own argument.
 Terrific Stuff! October 2, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
If the last Diana inquest bored you to tears, or you are sick of listening to crap 9/11 conspiracies, get hold of this brilliant book now.
Conspiracy theories, along with quack medicine, fake history and bogus science, all form "Counterknowledge" - that is, `misinformation masquerading as fact.'
The problem is huge, and Thompson powerfully argues that the 21st century faces a `pandemic of credulous thinking' when, conversely, our ability to evaluate claims made about science or history is better than ever before.
With the arrival of the scientific enlightenment, ideas that no longer held their ground were banished to the fringes of society. Now, with internet communication, they have a larger following than ever before.
But it's not all turtle-neck wearing novelists and bible-crazy wackos - the City of Westminster University offers, astonishingly, a degree in homeopathy.
Readers of the Guardian's Bad Science column will love this book. Damian Thompson fights Counterknowledge tooth and nail using reason and, crucially, systematically tested evidence. With his razor-sharp prose, he not only rubbishes the credulous world we live in, but calls on us to challenge the `guardians of intellectual orthodoxy' and waken them from greedy, slothful indolence.
Without doubt, this is my book of the year.
 An odd combination of sneering and alarmism, containing numerous misconceptions and errors. September 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Young-earth creationists in the US have built a museum containing mechanised tableaux showing dinosaurs and humans in Flintstone-style coexistence. `Alternative' therapies of no more medical value than sugar pills are available on the British National Health Service, with homoeopathic hospitals well-established and degree courses available in one of the new universities. In US academia, some `Afro-centric' historians play fast and loose with facts in their attempt to construct a distinctively `black' history which, according to at least one proponent, is teachable only by black people. Meanwhile, postmodernist literary and cultural theorists take it upon themselves to develop ill-conceived philosophical doctrines about the nature of truth and reality - and even in some cases to offer criticisms of such specialised fields as quantum physics.
Damian Thompson criticises all these trends, with copious footnotes and some theoretical discussion. He alerts the reader to many other putative instances of 'counterknowledge' - glossed: "misinformation packaged as fact" (p1) - and decries the "casual approach to the truth"(pp12, 44) that underlies and sustains them. This seems a worthwhile project, and in reviews it attracts descriptions such as `timely' and `much-needed'. These epithets are somewhat hyperbolic: this is only the latest addition to a substantial body of debunking literature, which goes back at least to Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841.
To adapt a remark of Dr Johnson, while one expects to see it done, one is surprised that it is not done better. While many of Thompson's points are correct as far as they go, the book's defects are so numerous and glaring and themselves betray such a `casual approach to the truth' that the reader could be forgiven for thinking that the word `Counterknowledge' embossed across the front categorises its contents rather than defining its subject matter.
One cannot avoid the suspicion that Thompson chose his title first and only then attempted to construct an entity corresponding to the catchy `counterknowledge' label. Many of the book's failings can be traced back to the assumption of a simplistic, polarised view of the intellectual landscape. Insiders, those engaged in a scarcely-examined `enlightenment project', have knowledge: a steady accretion of certainties, irrevocably established by academic consensus. Outside lies knowledge's evil twin, counterknowledge: not only untrue, but to Thompson, obviously so. The interesting - but potentially controversial - middle ground is simply ignored.
In delimiting the contours of his invented category, Thompson sides with orthodoxy and with the powerful, granting a latitude to supposed political and technical authorities which he denies to those on the intellectual or social fringes. Such facile deference betrays the enlightenment ideals he professes. Knowingly or not, he also includes among the enemies of reason a number of views which don't belong there. These views are caricatured or exaggerated, either by Thompson himself or by others whose reports he casually adopts.
The book is not aimed at changing minds: few of its significant targets will come as news to its self-selecting audience. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but Thompson affects a gravitas which leads one to expect something a little more edifying than the opportunity to bay and jeer, as an assortment of intellectual freaks and outcasts is paraded by. Still, Thompson does his best to foster a certain siege mentality. His readers may be assured of the triumph of reason and the rightness of their opinions, but, crucially, they are offered a frisson of danger and flattered with the role of tough-minded hero standing, with Thompson, against the forces of chaos.
In the first three pages, Thompson's vocabulary sets the tone: "pandemic" (p1); "disturbingly", "alarming" (p2); "threatened", "vulnerable", "[not] immune", "converts", and more subtly, "outlandish"(p3). According to the synopsis on the inside cover, Thompson demonstrates that "unless the defenders of enlightenment values fight back soon, the counterknowledge industry has the potential to create new political, social and economic disasters". On the back cover, reviewer Nick Cohen joins the fray, projecting his own preoccupations onto Thompson's sketchily apocalyptic canvas: "Thompson shows how apparently harmless pseudo-science breeds nationalism, race hatred and disease".
Finally and perhaps most perniciously, Thompson swaddles his banalities, biases and non-sequiturs in an impenetrable tangle of junk philosophy and sociological verbiage. Even those astute enough to detect that something is wrong in Thompson's approach may well be baffled, browbeaten or bored into conceding that Thompson has a point - whatever exactly it is.
You can download my full detailed review - which is too long to post here - at mediafire.com/?mdyewdkdyw1.
A searing indictment of woolly thinking August 24, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book must be read by the people who very earnestly insist that you "be more open-minded". Yes, Princess Diana may have been assassinated on the orders of the British Royal family, who may be lizards in human skin - however this is unlikely, in fact extremely unlikely. This book is a testament to the power of logic and common sense. All the usual suspects in the conspiracy theory game are picked apart, bit by bit, and revealed to be the total and inveterate nonsense that they are. We need more books like this for the people whose minds are so open, their brains have fallen out.
Shooting fish in a barrel July 6, 2008
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
Generally I am with Mr R A Davies who gave the book two stars, but perhaps that is a little harsh.
Thompson is quite selective in his choice of targets, and treats them largely the same (despite his repeated points about what is and is not "counterknowledge"). That is, he attempts not only to oppose their arguments and their evidence but also to undermine their motives, and to treat them as charlatans. In most cases that may be legitimate, but not always.
The blurb says he has a PhD in the sociology of religion from LSE (presumably supervised by David Martin?). I would have expected that someone who had worked in that very nuanced area, which poses interesting questions about the validity of knowledge, to have been able to distinguish between positions better than he does. Take complementary medicine (CAM) as an example. He is very rude about it, relying heavily on one of its severest critics. That's fine (and I tend to agree with him).
However, he extends his condemnation beyond the science to the business, including pharmacists in Boots who refuse to assert that a product on sale is useless. This is not the same world. Placebo is a potent treatment, not entirely reliant on conscious belief but upheld by it (Evans D [2004] Placebo London; HarperCollins). The discourse has shifted, but Thompson has stuck with his positivism.
And it does not help that he castigates some proponents as "batty". Assertions like that are sloppy playground name-calling; they detract from his very sound analyses in many areas.
Pity; I heard him on "Start the Week". I was looking forward to reading the book, and to a sociologist's eye on these phenomena. All I found was some predictable debunking of fairly obvious targets.
Read Francis Wheen's "How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the World" instead.
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