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One of our most brilliant social critics—author of the bestselling The Middle Mind—presents a scathing critique of the “delusions” of science alongside a rousing defense of the tradition of Romanticism and the “big” questions.
With the rise of religion critics such as Richard Dawkins, and of pseudo-science advocates such as Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer, you’re likely to become a subject of ridicule if you wonder “Why is there something instead of nothing?” or “What is our purpose on earth?” Instead, at universities around the world, and in the general cultural milieu, we’re all being taught that science can resolve all questions without the help of philosophy, politics, or the humanities.
In short, the rich philosophical debates of the 19th century have been nearly totally abandoned, argues critic Curtis White. An atheist himself, White nonetheless calls this new turn “scientism”—and fears what it will do to our culture if allowed to flourish without challenge. In fact, in “scientism” White sees a new religion with many unexamined assumptions.
In this brilliant multi-part critique, he aims at a TED talk by a distinguished neuroscientist in which we are told that human thought is merely the product of our “connectome,” a map of neural connections in the brain that is yet to be fully understood. . . . He whips a widely respected physicist who argues that our new understanding of the origins of the universe obviates any philosophical inquiry . . . and ends with a learned defense of the tradition of Romanticism, which White believes our technology and science-obsessed world desperately needs to rediscover.
It’s the only way, he argues, that we can see our world clearly. . . and change it.
- Sales Rank: #678100 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-05-28
- Released on: 2013-05-28
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“A symptomatic tour of the real sense of anxiety about the disenchantment of all those qualities that make us feel most alive and unique in the world.”
—New York Times Book Review
“[White's] brisk takedowns of Hitchens, Hawking, Krauss, Lehrer and others are sharp and necessary, wielding elementary logic against figures who should know better. [White shows] just how easily good science can shade into the self-aggrandizing ideology of scientism.”
—Mark Kingwell, Globe and Mail
“There’s certainly a very real need to march on that citadel, because the idea that there can be only one kind of truth has to be deeply damaging to the intellectual development of a culture.”
—Mark O’Connell, Slate
“An important and necessary book.”
—Philadelphia Review of Books
“Thoroughly well researched and astutely put… An essential read.”
—PopMatters
“White’s prose is fluid and often enjoyable… White clearly knows his stuff when it comes to classic literature, and offers an interesting sidebar on the development of Romanticism.”
—Willamette Week
“A bracing and necessary critique by an able arguer.”
—Toronto Star, Books of Note
“A highly readable yet powerful defense of the importance of the humanities against those who believe science to be the last interpretative framework standing. It is destined to become a classic among artists, dreamers, revolutionaries, and anyone who, like Kierkegaard, believes asking questions to be as important a quest as finding answers.”
—Tottenville Review
“An enjoyable and worthwhile read."
—Christian Research Journal
“A witty critique of scientific overreach that celebrates the totality of human achievement.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Curtis White and The Middle Mind
“Cogent, acute, beautiful, merciless, and true.” —David Foster Wallace
“Re-visioning the world takes brawling muscle and a sneer. Curtis White gots that.” —Andrei Codrescu
“The most inspiringly wicked social critic of the moment . . . White exalts the subversive pleasures of the imagination, not simply as a tactic for individual psychic survival, but also as a spark for collective engagement.” —Will Blythe
“Curtis White writes out of an admirable intellectual sophistication combined with viscerality, pain, and humor.” —John Barth
“A master of bewitchments, parodies, and dazzling tropes.” —Paul Auster
“Not the least pleasure in reading the book resides in the refreshing malevolent irony that transpires from every page. Absolutely indispensable.” —Slavoj Žižek
About the Author
CURTIS WHITE is the author of the novels Memories of My Father Watching TV and Requiem. A widely acclaimed essayist, he has had work appear in Harper’s Magazine, Context, Lapham’s Quarterly, Orion, and Playboy. His book The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves was an international bestseller in 2003.
Most helpful customer reviews
41 of 53 people found the following review helpful.
Good cultural criticism, bad metaphysics
By Ran Prieur
This book is a spirited rant, it's easy to read even when it covers difficult subjects, and I agree with most of it, including the idea that the mechanistic paradigm has overstepped its limits. But when White says stuff I disagree with, I can see that his arguments are mostly bluster. He's just like his adversary Christopher Hitchens in that he thinks he's making one knock-down argument after another when really he's just strongly stating his opinions; and he enjoys arguing so much that he'll become temporarily stupid to make a point.
For example, White dismisses Thomas Nagel's paper "What is it like to be a bat?" by pretending the word "like" is suggesting that bats are capable of metaphor, when clearly Nagel was just doing the best he could with a language (English) that is inadequate for describing consciousness. Maybe White thinks it's impossible for language to have limits since he seems to think language is the basis of everything. I can't tell whether he thinks animals, lacking language, also lack feelings and therefore it's okay to torture a dog.
Anyway, if you believe that we live in an objectively real physical universe in which mind is an accident, White's metaphysical arguments will seem silly and toothless. To be fair, it's a damn hard argument to make. But it's made better in a Rupert Sheldrake book also called The Science Delusion, and in The End of Materialism by Charles Tart. And for a book that no materialist can read without being deeply troubled, see The Trickster and the Paranormal by George Hansen.
White is best when he writes about politics and culture, especially the value of romanticism. I like his definition of art as something that models freedom: "Can you return to being in the world in the way you were in the world before you heard this song?" And he makes a good argument that scientists are trying to have it both ways by talking about beauty and meaning in a clockwork universe. My favorite dig: "It's as if they were saying, 'Life has no purpose, but my life had a purpose: I won a Nobel Prize!'"
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A secular, humanist response to pop-sci reductionism
By The Thinker
The first 2/3 of the book is a fast-moving, entertaining take-down of the pretensions of much of pop-sci, whose rhetoric, White shows, is unknowingly lifted from the Romantic moment in Western intellectual history (in whose moment we are all still living, to some extent).
Extra credit too, for his often very funny footnotes. The last 1/3 is a summary of summary the author's philosophical views on consciousness and German Idealism: interesting, but too brief.
I only give it 4 out of 5, because the book is irritatingly short, and I feel the author could have gone into much more detail about both the Romantic movement in the arts and philosophy. In particular, White uses the thought of an early German Idealist, Schelling, but gives us only a short introduction to his thought, and no direct way to follow up this thinker. (I recommend the Oxford Short Introduction to Continental Philosophy for example). It needs a much bigger bibliography. Also, some of his criticism of the New Atheists (ignorance of philosophy, intellectual sloppiness, etc.) have been well covered elsewhere; I think he could have spent more of his time on his criticism of the TED talks, for example, instead.
He also loses points, in my book, for way too much rock and roll, (a little is OK), and for the painful book title and subtitle (though I guess the publisher knew what they were about, as I picked the book up...) The subtitle is vaguely relevant, but what White really seems to mean is that our culture likes the easy answers of science, not the hard answers of continental philosophy!
All this said, well worth picking up if you are following the debates about New Atheism and "scientism" and want to see a response that is not coming from a religious perspective.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
The challenge of the Romantics
By John C. Landon
The strange social mentality suddenly visible in much of the New Atheism debate, but prevalent throughout a culture of scientism, is exposed at length is this robust 'dawn raid of the Romantics' against the Fankenstein hulks of reductionist omniscience. It is not hard to straddle both sides of this debate: after all, the compelling interest of much science is not really in question. But the fact remains that the overspecialized study of science has produced a strange culture of derisive commentary on religion, the arts, and philosophy. It is hard to see how the hauty disdain for philosophy could ever have gained such a foothold, and the interest of Shrodinger in Schopenhauer points to an era now long lost on the current generation of science-mongers.
The author aptly points to the Romantic period at the climax and passing of the height of the Enlightenment: the dilemma of much scientific Reason was becoming obvious to a generation trying to both absorb and pass on from the failures of overly physicalized science. The figure of Kant in solemn grandeur at the key transition stands in evidence of the 'critique' that got underway. And many of the insights were soon lost, and in fact the onset of positivism was just beginning. And we can see this reflected in the confusions over evolutionary theory which was soon the darwinized cult of the gene and natural selection that so graphically illustrates the 'theory delusion' in action.
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