Have We Reason to Believe? | The Nation


Have We Reason to Believe?

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About the Author

Carlin Romano

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As truth-tellers, journalists remain the undocumented aliens of the
knowledge industry, operating in an off-the-books epistemological
economy apart from philosophers and scientists on one side

nonfiction bestseller list. In the
half the top ten nonfiction bestsellers belong to a genre that
"exclusionary" or worse, though the Times's blurbs artfully avoid
the issue.

Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, which manages the non-Euclidean
Ben Fritz's stiletto review in Salon demonstrated, of being "One
research is often to blame."

David Brock's Blinded by the Right castigates the conservative
that even though many conservatives believe in right-wing principles as
the real binding glue among the right." Despite Brock's repeated
acknowledgments that he's been an unscrupulous, self-serving liar
possibility voiced by Slate's Timothy Noah that lying may be "a
purported conversation with CBS News president Andrew Heyward, however,
Wall Street Journal, Goldberg sounds certain that he's packing
revisable evidence, or why conservative bias poses no problem within
eclectic media.

Finally, Kenneth Timmerman's Shakedown, another targeted killing
by the only national publishing house with the reflexes of a helicopter
gunship, leaves Jesse Jackson barely breathing as a political player.
National Review
complimented the author for "collecting the dossier
department typically contains both good and bad. The Washington
's Keith Richburg, crediting Timmerman's "meticulous research,"
rightly noted that the author also wholly ignores "Jackson's
accomplishments," like his registration of millions of new voters.

So is Moore a direct literary descendant of Adolf Hitler, that
over-the-top idea man whose snarly diatribes grabbed Publishers
) Goldwater? Should Timmerman, whose Shakedown
batters Jesse so badly his reproductive equipment may never recover, be
considered just another scion of Victor Lasky, whose ferociously
Will his Bias someday be taught in the Columbia publishing course
alongside that 1923 bestseller, Emile Coué's Self-Mastery
Through Conscious Auto-Suggestion
, whose system apparently involved

omits. Are they skyrocketing hits because they're tantamount to "big
lies," texts unwilling to address contrary views?

Maybe we've entered an era in which publishers and readers no longer
counterevidence, arguments and counterarguments, decency toward subject
accept that literary producers and consumers think we should leave all
that to college debating societies, scholarly journals and books,
entertainment. And could that actually be the crux of the putative
alike, that well-balanced, evenhanded, scrupulously fair nonfiction

curiosity, a reaction to political correctness cutting both ways in 2002
America, but a stage of evolutionary development in a post-
eternal verities culture. Educated readers--whether right or
and that's roughly the amount of brainpower the reader desires.

Moore, Brock, Goldberg and Timmerman (a crackerjack adversarial firm
Michael Korda's recent Making the List: A Cultural History of the
American Bestseller, 1900-99
(Barnes & Noble), suggests
that curators of American bestseller lists could have put up the neon
to Win Friends and Influence People
, not How to Win Friends,
Influence People and Also Estrange a Ton of Other Folks
. Books by
political candidates advancing their platforms may not sizzle with
Moore's streety phrases or Brock's inside snitching, but they slant the
Begins at Forty
and Walter Duranty's I Write as I
--suggest unshakable points of view promised and delivered.
the 1942 bestseller list, while John Roy Carlson's Under Cover,
and Timmerman bring added assets to their unbalanced texts--Moore's
rocket to the binding.

fleeting phenomenon. It's a tradition. But might their increase threaten
American culture.

Korda extrapolates from bestseller history that "American readers have
status quo." He cites fiction as well Laura Hobson's novel
that American bestsellers from the beginning sometimes set themselves
against a prevailing yet vulnerableview. Tom Paine's Common Sense

Korda's insight jibes with a larger truth. Our growing readiness not
unprecedented marketplace of truth, argument, evidence and individuated
poly, the foundationalist, the nonfoundationalist, the libertine, the
puritanical, the environmental, the deconstructionist, the Lacanian, ad
infinitum. That reservoir of opinions, attitudes and slants lifts our
tolerance for one-sidedness into an appetite for edifying entertainment.
our cornucopia culture, only diners have to offer everything.

interactive audience member who'll supply or obtain elsewhere whatever's
American pluralism, if not neatly packaged truth or beauty in marketable
texts, is an unburdening of public intellectuals and trade authors from
artists, they're simply expected to arouse.

rights? Don't even ask.

That monomaniacal spirit, obsessed with balancing the world on one foot or idea, meanders through the Western philosophical tradition, stopping at major stations such as Spinoza's sole substance of "God/Nature" and local curiosities like Bergson's élan vital. Thus it has ever been: If you would stir tumult in the canon, surround a concept, then exalt it, make it over or drive it out of the temple, whipping the mangy beast if necessary.

In these fin de millénaire dog days for philosophy, "reason" presents an especially inviting conceptual target. Humiliated and marginalized by twentieth-century politics and war, belittled by psychoanalysis, stripped of its capital letter by everyone except the Germans, it hobbles along in the humanist vocabulary, mainly surfacing in musty older-generation conversation. ("Won't he listen to reason?") Even intellectuals who treasure its Enlightenment glory days treat reason like a rickety emeritus, worthy of deference during chance encounters but not of mention in one's current work. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists exclude it from their books and indexes, ignoring it like some now embarrassing cousin of phlogiston.


Calne speaks in the softer register. A Vancouver neurologist who specializes in neurodegenerative disorders, he comes not to bury reason in the new semantics of neurons, synapses and the anterior cingulate sulcus (where Francis Crick locates free will) but to raise it out of wet matter and see what's left. Reason, Calne assures, may still be regarded as a psychological "faculty" in traditional style, so long as we recognize that it's "a biological product" and understand that we're "motivated by instinctive urges and emotions linked to cultural forces--reason is their servant and not their master." Calne argues that modern neurology gives reason no role in setting our goals: It deals with "how" issues, thus explaining why ours is not to reason "why." It is "simply and solely a tool" fashioned by evolution, a capability that "cannot assign or control the purposes to which it is put," something we use "to get what we want, not to choose what we want."

Lakoff and Johnson deliver their goods in preachier language, particularly when taking swings at philosophy as a discipline. This is unquestionably their "big trade book," coming after the influential work on metaphor they developed together in Metaphors We Live By (1980) and More Than Cool Reason (1989), then elaborated separately in Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (1987) and Moral Politics (1996), and Johnson's The Body in the Mind (1987). Philosophy in the Flesh aims to mine the gold of that corpus for the well-educated nonspecialist, to trumpet for the sentinels of lay culture that a Cartesian-sized turn in philosophy is here (however anti-Cartesian its bent).

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