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Biased and superficial

Reviewed: 16-08-22

Disappointingly opinionated commentary. Some of the quotations and historical details are interesting. The rest of the series has been better.

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Woke unintellectual drivel

Reviewed: 02-08-20

Robin DiAngelo's hyper-woke creed is a transcendentally awful, intellectually dishonest, and unintentionally hilarious book. The whole premise of "white fragility" is a ingenious "Kafka trap" whereby any criticism of the book is evidence of the worst kind of racism. And indeed, even a modest hint at slight disagreement with ANY of the rapidly multiplying dogmas of the most feeble-minded versions of political correctness, such as the profileration of corporate seminars of wokeness, is supposedly evidence of structural racism. Indeed, we are led to believe, any intellectual disagreements with ANY of DiAngelo's claims are a priori manifestations of structural "whiteness." You are damned if you do, damned if you don't! And this is how she likes her readers: beaten to submission by cheap rhetorical tricks, malleable to be molded into paying customers of her seminars.

This fanatical devotion to the party line extends to the self-serving claims of corporate diversity merchants and bullshit peddlers like Robin DiAngelo who rake in a good fortune with their seminars and boot camps. She wants every organization, private and public, to hire an army of perpetual diversity training experts to set up and run pathetic kangaroo courts seemingly modelled after the Soviet show trials or the Maoist cultural revolution. (It is only with the greatest self-restraint that I have here avoided mentioning the famous pen name of Eric Blair.) The function of these morbid carnivals, aside from making DiAngelo very rich, is to perpetuate racist stereotypes about white and black people, discourage individualism, stultify critical discussion about race, institutionalise blind obedience to vapid dogmas, and stamp out the last remnants of ideological diversity.

This might sound like a hyperbole, but it is not; the full lunacy of her views is manifest on every page of the book. The following activities, according to the author, are evidence of systemic racism: Being too nice towards "people of colour" (PoC), striving towards racial harmony and colourblindness, believing in individualism, believing in the possibility that some people can be non-racist, questioning the wisdom of corporate diversity training seminars, questioning the efficacy of implicit bias training, disagreeing with the opinions or arguments of a PoC (or DiAngelo), crying in front of PoC (or DiAngelo), mentioning class or gender oppression, mentioning the social problems of white people, objecting to being condescended to, objecting to being yelled at, objecting to being treated as a stereotypical member of a racial group, wishing to be heard or taken seriously, wishing to be treated as a complex and flawed individual, and in any other way disagreeing with or talking back to well-meaning and knowledgeable (and well paid!) diversity training leaders (that's DiAngelo by the way)... Indeed, everything is evidence of structural racism! And how could it be otherwise if racism indeed permeates our entire sociocultural existence and "white fragility" lies hidden behind our every thought, emotion, and action? The Catch-22 is real. It has no possible solution.

The real tragedy of the book is that it prevents us from talking seriously about race. Kowtowing to ritualistic self-flagellation and morose authoritarianism is a debilitating and self-defeating exercise that prevents us from coming up with serious solutions to the racial problems that plague our societies. DiAngelo is a new breed of a pseudo-intellectual vampire who feeds on the unresolved and real racial tensions that exist in the United States. She has elevated herself to become the high priestess of the new anti-intellectual movement that pretends to care about black people but actually perpetuates racial tensions. Her every claim is designed to hamstring intellectual opposition. Her ideology consciously seeks to abolish individualism, critical thinking, and humour in an effort to stultify our minds, break our souls, and corrode our hearts. She does not deserve our time, attention, or respect.

The idolisation of such silly ideologies in the name of social justice is an obstacle to moral progress, scientific discourse, free speech, and rational debate. No, I am not the biggest fan of hers, I guess... The multiplication of the expositions of the flaws of the book would be easy. But this review must come to an end. And frankly, DiAngelo does not deserve any more of our time.

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7 people found this helpful

excellent but academic

Reviewed: 31-07-20

Only go for it if you like academic writing! It's very dry but supremely informative and comprehensive. There is a lot about all the aspects of human enhancement.

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Longwinded but erudite

Reviewed: 18-07-20

The book is way too long but nonetheless a treasure trove of interesting ideas, anecdotes, and erudition.

The narrator doesn't know how to pronounce German or many of the other languages. I expect more from professional productions. If you can get over that, her voice is soothing and a good fit for the role.

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Moderate and nuanced

Reviewed: 19-04-20

The author has written a very timely and useful book. Whether his conclusions are sound or not the book is a worthy contribution to the debate around nature and nurture in politics. It is sometimes hard to follow as an audiobook due to the technical jargon and statistical data.

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4 people found this helpful

an excellent sociobiography

Reviewed: 24-11-19

Considering the controversial topic, it is surprising that the author neither fawns over nor sets out to destroy its subject matter. The result is a well researched, rich in scope, fair and balanced intellectual biography of the Austrian School. Its central characters are all the major thinkers of the school, from Menger and Böhm-Bawerk to Hayek, Morgenstern, and Haberler. Impressively, the book brings to life dozens of thinkers, institutes, and societies spread across a century of history and several continents. It manages to cover a lot of ground without losing track of the overall narrative. It is entertaining and educational in equal measure, and full of real world relevance. Although neutral in tone, the book is not entirely without its share of editorializing, especially towards the end. But for the most part the author wisely keeps editorial comments at a minimum and places them in parentheses and epilogues. And to the extent that the normative focus emerges, it is very commendable in its call for a "progressive" rediscovery of the Austrian school against reactionary appropriations and American simplifications. In reminding the reader of the dangers of dogmatism and narrow sectarianism, the book celebrates the pluralistic and cosmopolitan intellectual tradition of fin-de-siècle Vienna as the complex cradle of socioeconomic and scientific innovation.

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Nice provocation

Reviewed: 28-05-19

Lucifer Principle weaves a well-written and compelling narrative that is bound to shock the reader out of her ideological stupour. This style provides a healthy immunization against some of the illusions and self-deceptions that we all, by nature and education, live under. Thus broken free from dogmas, Bloom jolts the reader to freely exploring the link between dominance hierarchies, violence, genes, memes, and social groups. The very same passion that cures cancer often amplifies our self-righteousness into a blinding plea for world domination.

The book is well-researched and contains numerous fascinating and illustrative stories from history. At the same time, it suffers from a selective exposition of facts presented with a strong interpretative slant. I did not like the anti-Islamic rants that went on for way too long. And I did not like the many dubious empirical generalisations that appeared one-sided and based on anecdotal evidence. I concur with David S. Wilson's estimation, in the foreword, that Bloom has a tendency to exaggerate.

However, Bloom's cynical and pessimistic lens magnifies humanity's dark side in a way that is illuminating. It is illuminating not only of our capacity for evil, but also of the capacity for goodness and excellence in the same human organism. The takeaway lesson, if there is one, is therefore ambivalent. The pitfalls of the Lucifer Principle are ever present in our struggle to self-transcend our animal nature. And yet continually self-transcend we must. To reach for the stars and to perpetuate evolution is a bloody, violent, stressful affair, but without it we face the heat death of the universe. Bloom shows us how we can break free from entropy without succumbing to the worst conquering and genocidal illusions that humanity possesses.

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2 people found this helpful

Engaging popular science

Reviewed: 05-03-19

Do you like baseball metaphors? This is not a qualifier I expected to have to make - least of all for a book about two Israeli psychologists - but it is a question that inevitably comes up as the author repeatedly elopes away into another baseball escapade. But thankfully the sports section of today's audiobook is mercifully short.

The story of Tversky and Kahneman has sociological as well as academic interest. It is about clashing minds, clashing tribes, and clashing paradigms. Whatever the ultimate legacy of the behavioural psychologists, they have deepened our experimental grasp and classificatory understanding of the irrational vagaries of human mentality. And, in particular, their followers in economics have improved the discipline in important ways.

There are quite a few books about their ideas already, and some of them are much better on the actual science of biases and heuristics. The author explains the intellectual debate in a competent but superficial way. He focuses on catchy headlines and biased interpretations the key studies in the field. Critics of the twain protagonists are barely given a hearing, and e.g. the industry-shaking replication crisis (which, to be fair, is quite new) is not mentioned at all.

While the book falters as a definitive history of the academic impact of behavioural psychology, it succeeds in portraying the gut-wrenching drama and fierce friendship at the heart of it. This story exemplifies the old military wisdom that nothing brings people together like a common enemy - and this goes both for T&K and their critics. Their projects has been animated by a negative identification as much as a positive one: e.g. in the case of T&K, to subsume the "mis-" in misbehaving, the "ir-" in irrational, and the "deviation" in the norm.

The tribal camarederie that spawns from the sinuses of distrust and enmity can be a harbinger of love. Such love is an intense passion. The book showcases how this love affair is conditional on continued mutual cooperation and how this cooperation often breaks down into seductive defection. While the love still burns, the enemies are burnt into ashes; but when it is extinguished, "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." (T.S. Eliot)

This is the story that I picked up, on a very human level. I don't know why I read it in such an archetypical way, but it seems right. On another level, it's all about science modelling, statistical measurements, mental classification systems, and the fine-tuning of academic research. It's hard to make such data very compelling without recourse to the hypnotic power of storytelling, which connects us to the archetypical realm.

Suddenly the baseball analogies make more sense, don't they? They make academic insights concrete in the world of common events and common people. That said, I still intuitively dislike baseball. But that's just my bias. We all know how hard those are to override, thanks to the fierce friendship that burnt like the sun.

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Jargon and Vision

Reviewed: 16-02-19

Brilliant yet obscure; competent yet dilettantesque; visionary yet misguided... There is a lot to unpack in The General Theory.

The book is written with a heavy-handed jargon that freely mixes established economic terminology with Keynes's own innovations. I am firmly of the opinion that technical jargon and mathematical expression are important servants of economic analysis that should never be allowed to become masters. In Keynes's case, the consequence of the style is not clarity, but a needlessly frustrating reading experience.

Nonethless, the book also contains lucid sections and even a few inspiring and rhetorically powerful sections. This book is a real treasure trove of powerful quotations that distil important but counterintuitive ideas.

And speaking of counterintuitive, let me briefly talk about the contents (without any attempt to summarize the main arguments or to do justice to the pros and cons).

Aside from the obvious impact on trade cycle theory and depression management, the real strength of the book, in my opinion, is that it dares to go against the flow, to swim against the current, in so many crucial respects: 1) By positing a difference between the micro and the macro, and showing how the laws of the first need not operate on the second (and vice versa); 2) By denying the folk wisdom of "a penny saved is a penny earned" and the classical economic wisdom of household frugality (austerity) as a guide to sound fiscal policy under certain macro conditions. 3) By resuscitating numerous occasionally valuable heterodox theories, such as the theory of underconsumption (under the guise of aggregate demand management) and the Sentimentalist-Scottish-Mandevillean emphasis on the dark psychology of capitalism (under the guise of propensity to consume, animal spirits, etc). 4) And by mixing some fresh insights of psychology, probability theory, and complexity theory, with the classical insights of economics (although in a rudimentary way).

That said, there are severe problems with Keynes's theory - both in the pure formulation and in the impure application. The central notions of aggregate demand, the marginal efficiency of capital, the propensity to consume, full employment, the Kahn multiplier, etc., all seem to break down under careful scrutiny. The whole distinction between micro and macro might have been a big mistake. At the very least, the applicability of Keynesian concepts is much more tenuous and limited than might be supposed by the lofty title of a "General Theory."

But whatever the failings of the Keynesian enterprise (there goes one star!) and whatever the failings of the obscure prose (and there goes another!), the book is a rare achievement in two respects: in innovation and inspiration. It is impossible not to be delighted and impressed by the amount of valuable insights and out-of-the-box thinking contained herein.

The cute party trick of being a perennial contrarian seems less impressive when it leads to intellectual error and bad policy (both of which have been the occasional consequence of the General Theory). And the muddied terminology of Keynesian macroeconomics is a needless swamp. But the diversification and improvement of science - and social progress itself - is built upon the work of people who dare to be wrong in an enlightening way.

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11 people found this helpful

Delightful skepticism

Reviewed: 07-02-19

Anybody who doesn't appreciate Hume doesn't appreciate philosophy. His dialogues are entertaining and insightful, and they are a good introduction to Hume's style and thought.

The dialogues exhibit the typical Humean combination of technically proficient but also commonsensical arguments. Hume methodically dispels the haughty aura of self-declared experts in the ivory tower by appealing to the intuitions and the common sense of ordinary people. (In this there are strong echoes of Plato's dialogues.) But he simultaneously, and miraculously, avoids the trap of being caught up in the superstitions and logical fallacies of the uneducated mind.

Hume's skeptical agnosticism, while not as radical as the atheistic materialism of Hobbes or Lucretius, carried out the death sentence of theism and abstract theology. The arguments are rhetorically powerful and framed in a fashion that respects the intelligence of the reader. Religious philosophy has never recovered.

The only thing that drags the dialogues down is the passage of time. They seem partially outdated in the Western world, where Humean skepticism has become fashionable. The even more radical Marxist atheism and New Atheism have seemingly overtaken Humeanism. At the same time, advances in cosmology and biology have rendered some of the scientific speculations in the dialogues moot. But I'm sure Hume would appreciate those things, since he was a fan of radical thinking and science.

And in some ways these new developments have strayed from Hume's teachings. The spirit of Humean skepticism is a precious civilizational heirloom whose true value is easily forgotten by the younger generations. The skeptical attitude has too often been lost in the exuberant hubris of Enlightenment, Marxist, New Atheist, or physicalist-scientistic dogmatism.

Only a perpetual recursion back to Hume can save the critical spirit of humanity from succumbing to the dark nemesis of its own creation: the dogmatic certainty of belief.

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