ninme

The Telegraph is excerpting Damian Thompson’s new book Counterknowledge (available in this country, but out of stock on Amazon with no date listed for new shipments):

Telegraph - Lies, damn lies and ‘counterknowledge’, by Damian Thompson

and

Telegraph - How Da Vinci Code tapped pseudo-fact hunger, by Damian Thompson

I liked this, from the first:

In the 21st century, bogus knowledge is no longer confined to self-selecting minority groups. It is seeping into the mainstream, cleverly repackaged for a mass market. This crisis goes beyond traditional political ideology. Yes, the Left has helped to spread counterknowledge by insisting on the rights of minorities to believe falsehoods that make them feel better about themselves. Afro-centric history aims to raise the self-esteem of black youngsters by feeding them the fantasy that the origins of Western civilisation lie in black Africa. Last year, a British government report revealed that some teachers are dropping the Holocaust from lessons rather than confront the Holocaust-denial of Muslim pupils. …

The fingerprints of the alternative medicine lobby are all over the worst British health scare of recent years, in which thousands of parents denied their children the MMR triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella following the dissemination of flawed data linking it to autism. In that case, distrust of orthodox medicine increased the danger of a measles epidemic.

But that is nothing compared to the impact of medical counterknowledge in underdeveloped countries. In northern Nigeria, Islamic leaders have issued a fatwa declaring the polio vaccine to be a US conspiracy to sterilise Muslims: polio has returned to the area, and pilgrims have carried it to Mecca and Yemen. In January 2007, the parents of 24,000 children in Pakistan refused to let health workers vaccinate their children because radical mullahs had told them the same idiotic story.

These incidents cannot be dismissed as examples of medieval superstition: these people are not rejecting life-saving vaccines because they reject modern medicine, but because their leaders are spouting Islamic takes on Western conspiracy theories. Counterknowledge, with its ingrained hostility towards a political, intellectual and scientific elite, appeals to anti-American, anti-Western sentiment in the developing world.

And then this, from the second:

In reality, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was pure pseudohistory. Laura Miller, writing for Salon in 2004, described its technique: “A preposterous idea will first be floated as a guess, then later presented as a tentative hypothesis, then still later treated as a fact … The miasma of bogus authenticity becomes impenetrable; you might as well use a rifle to fight off a thick fog.”

Sounds like journalism!