Product Description

Today, media commentators, intellectuals and politicians
declare that western science and rationality are threatened by irrational
enemies. Evangelicals, postmodernists, and Islamists are on the march, they
say. The Rome that science built is under siege. But there's a problem with
these stirring attempts to defend the truth. They aren't true.

In this urgent new book, Dan Hind confronts the great machinery of
deception in which we live, and which now threatens to destroy our
civilization. In particular, he takes to task a group of prominent
intellectuals who have exaggerated the threat posed by the so-called forces
of unreason - religion, postmodernism and other "mumbo-jumbo". The
commentators, says Hind, distract us from much more pressing threats to an
open democratic society based on freedom of speech and inquiry.

This book shows that the real threats to reason aren't wacky or foreign or
stupid; they reside in our state and corporate bureaucracies - and, one way
or another, they probably pay your salary. In recovering the idea of
Enlightenment, Hind explores its vital importance and reveals how it can
help us to achieve a truly democratic politics, in which we have a genuine
say in the decisions that are taken on our behalf.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #251617 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Review
Fine, lucid and sharp...well written and worth reading before the next wave of western tanks crosses a border, somewhere in the Middle East. --Sunday Times

A thoughtful polemic. --Financial Times

An elegant polemical essay. --Independent

James Harkin, Independent
Since September 11 2002, the idea of Enlightenment has been ripped from university textbooks and airlifted into battle between the West and its irrational enemies. In this elegant polemical essay, Dan Hind rightly quibbles with this supposedly Manichean tussle between the guarantors of Enlightenment in the West and everyone else. Hind wants to rescue the idea of Enlightenment from its usurpers, while pressing it into the service of something better

Financial Times
In this thoughtful polemic Dan Hind argues that we are being misled by a debased "Folk Enlightenment" which has little in common with the Enlightenment initiated by Bacon and championed by Voltaire, Hume and Kant.

Customer Reviews

Think for yourself
This book really made me think. Instead of just going along with the assumption that the enemies of reason are such things as Christian fundamentalism, homeopathy and postmodernism, the author shows how better to direct our critical energies in order to preserve our ability to think for ourselves. In doing this he makes complicated philosophical arguments clear and, most importantly, relevant to our current predicament. By showing how reason can be undermined from the inside, by processes such as the corporate take-over of science, this book has helped me to think more critically, applying his methods to other areas of life, such as my own field of psychotherapy.