The most ingenious, passionate and sarcastic attack on the twenty-first-century march of unreason is by the left-wing journalist and historian Francis Wheen. His book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (Harper Perennial, 2004) is subtitled ‘A Short History of Modern Delusions’. Targets include Deepak Chopra and other New Age quacks, alien abduction fantasists and pseudoscience-spouting postmodernists, all of whom also fall into my category of purveyors of counterknowledge. But Wheen’s canvas is broader, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. His impressively comprehensive list of ‘delusions’ comes perilously close to being a list of things he doesn’t approve of, such as American foreign policy and especially free market economics, which he portrays as a fantasy almost as dangerous as Islamism.
In contrast, Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer (Souvenir Press, 2002) is more cautious in its choice of ‘confusions of our time’. Shermer examines satanic ritual abuse, alien abduction, Creationism, Holocaust denial and maverick science. His focus is mainly psychological; in his final chapter, entitled ‘Why Smart People Believe Weird Things’, he argues that well-educated people are better able to give intellectual reasons to justify beliefs that they arrived at for non-intellectual reasons bound up with their emotional needs.
Much of the same territory is covered by Elaine Showalter’s Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (Picador, 1997). This was the first book to identify the common features of the epidemics of the 1990s. While we may not be entirely convinced by the author’s speculation about the hysterical origins of such epidemics, we cannot ignore the startling family resemblances between them. Her thesis is the more powerful because, as a leading feminist academic, she works in the same field as postmodern scholars who lend credence to the genuinely delusional narratives of ‘alien abductees’ and supposed victims of satanic ritual abuse.
One of the most comprehensive surveys of the American satanic ritual abuse scare is Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend, by the sociologist Jeffrey Victor (Open Court, 1993). He explains in detail how local rumours fed into a wider moral panic fuelled by an unlikely collaboration between fundamentalist Christians and a secular therapeutic culture.
For an English perspective on the same subject, see Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England by J. S. La Fontaine (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Jean La Fontaine is the anthropologist who was funded by the Department of Health to conduct research into allegations of satanic ritual abuse. She found no evidence of such abuse, but she did uncover the horrifying story of how social workers managed to extract fantastic accounts of satanic rituals from suggestible children. A related form of counterknowledge, the phenomenon of ‘recovered memory’, is the subject of a comprehensive study by Mark Pendergrast, Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives (HarperCollins, 1998). Pendergrast demonstrates that illusory memories of sexual abuse have been promulgated and validated by misguided therapists, resulting in ‘devastating grief and irrevocably damaged family relations’.
Most counterknowledge emanates from the ‘cultic milieu’, the phrase coined by the sociologist Colin Campbell to describe the social and intellectual margins of society where bizarre ideas can circulate without hindrance. His original essay can be found in The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalisation, edited by Jeffrey Kaplan and Heléne Lööw (Altamira, 2002), together with studies of post-war occult National Socialism, the Swedish racist counterculture, and Satanism in the Italian ‘Gothic milieu’.
The historical antecedents of the cultic milieu are buried in a tangle of occult tradition, Gnosticism, folk beliefs, Bible prophecy, early modern conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. The literature covering these subjects is immense. For a picture of the theological ferment at the beginning of the Christian era, see Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew by Bart D. Ehrman (Oxford University Press, 2003), which examines the patently inauthentic Gnostic scriptures on which many modern pseudohistorians base their claims. Religion and the Decline of Magic by Sir Keith Thomas (Penguin, 1973) is a magnificent study of the marginalization of magic, prophecy and folk wisdom after the English Reformation–arguably the moment at which the cultic milieu began to take shape.
Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ (available in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, 1996) traces the origins of modern conspiracy theories to anti-Catholic and anti-Masonic rumour panics in the early years of the republic. A reading of Hofstadter helps explain the grip that Loose Change exerts on the imagination of young Americans. For a thought-provoking recent study of the effect of conspiracy theories on the United States, see A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America by the political scientist Michael Barkun (University of California Press, 2003). Barkun argues that conspiracy culture is being spread by popular entertainment from its traditional subcultures, the anti-government right and Christian fundamentalists, into the mainstream, where it is rapidly losing its stigmatized status.
The best account of late twentieth-century battles over Creationism is Robert T. Pennock’s Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism (MIT Press, 1999). Pennock shows how old-fashioned anti-Darwinism has transformed itself into ‘scientific Creationism’ and Intelligent Design, camouflaging its religious agenda in the process. Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism, edited by Andrew J. Petto and Laurie R. Godfrey (W. W. Norton, 2007), is a multi-pronged attack on the physics, cosmology, mathematics and political strategies of the new Creationism–though, as I noted earlier, none of its sixteen essays addresses the phenomenon of Islamic Creationism. To the best of my knowledge, no non-Islamic book on this subject has been published in English. Faithlines: Muslim Conceptions of Islam and Society by Riaz Hassan (Oxford University Press, 2002) contains survey data showing that over 90 per cent of Muslims in Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia reject the theory of evolution.
Roy Porter’s Quacks: Fakes & Charlatans in English Medicine (Tempus, 2000) stresses the entrepreneurial vigour of fringe medicine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the book is even more relevant now than it was when it was first published in 1989, before the emergence of a new generation of ruthlessly self-publicizing ‘nutritionists’. Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and its Discontents (Atlantic Books, 2005), by the physician and philosopher Raymond Tallis, contains the most devastating attack on alternative medicine I have ever read; it leaves one in no doubt that the bungling opportunism of health service administrators has proved an enormous asset to purveyors of politically acceptable quackery.
Alternative medicine is one of the manifestations of bad science discussed by the American physicist Robert Park in his book Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University Press, 2000). Many of the counterknowledge entrepreneurs he describes, such as the inventors of perpetual motion machines, might seem like easy targets, and Park’s tone is occasionally smug. But his main point is a valuable one: that media stories about fringe science are rarely held to the same standards as stories about politics, foreign affairs or sport. ‘Charismatic hucksters’ often receive respectful coverage from networks that assign general reporters to cover science topics.
Intellectual Impostures, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (Profile Books, 1998), attacks a more sophisticated form of huckster: the postmodern humanities professor who appropriates highly technical scientific language which he or she does not fully understand. Sokal, of course, was the perpetrator of the famous hoax; Bricmont is another French physics professor. Their book argues that the left is contributing to ‘the demise of reason’ by squandering its energies on a meaningless discourse. The March of Unreason: Science,Democracy and the New Fundamentalism by Dick Taverne (Oxford University Press, 2005) uses the example of the ‘superstitious’ campaign against GM crops to argue that special-interest lobby groups and their media allies have created a deplorable mood of pessimism about science and its possibilities.
In comparison with bogus science, few books have been written about bogus history. The most exhaustive debunking has been done by Stephen Williams, a retired Harvard professor of archaeology. His book Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) gives dozens of examples of deluded scholars (including Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism) who have tried to locate the Lost Tribes of Israel in the Mexican jungle and Vikings in Minnesota. This is the ignoble tradition to which Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval belong.
Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History by Mary Lefkowitz (Basic Books, 1996) is a classical historian’s response to the fantasy that the ancient Greeks stole their philosophy from Egypt. We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism by Clarence E. Walker (Oxford University Press, 2001) is a study of Afrocentrism by a black historian who believes that it encourages black Americans to discard their recent history in favour of a ‘therapeutic mythology’.
The social changes that have created space for counterknowledge have been discussed by countless scholars. Chapter 1 of Peter Berger’s The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Collins, 1980) sets out the movement ‘from fate to choice’ which, by undermining plausibility structures, effectively makes heretics of us all. Anthony Giddens’s Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Polity Press, 1991) asks how we construct our new identities in the face of almost limitless choice. The effect of the electronic media on this process is described in Life: The Movie by Neal Gabler (Vintage, 1998), which suggests that we respond to disorientation by glossing reality and even transforming it into an imaginary feature film starring ourselves. Mediated: How the Media Shape your World by Thomas De Zengotita (Bloomsbury, 2005) is a hilarious study of our narcissistic responses to the culture of celebrity. It suggests that consumer choice creates philosophical solipsism; the mediated world flatters us into believing that we are ‘above truth’, with consequences that are both comic and depressing.