This is not a book of scholarship. It is a master class in the art of trolling*. Rousseau Part Deux. Take up a sharp critical line, divide the world into separate camps (filled only with ideologues, really), and meet all objections on the safety of your own turf. But beware. You are a partisan. If you fight the conclusions, you are being a partisan. If you agree, you are being a partisan. If you try and remain neutral or sanguine you are being partisan. All the world is partisan, so devilishly clever goes the myth-making. It’s almost Biblical in its retelling of the origins of our modern existential crisis.

The common enemy is the optimist’s faith in the project of the Enlightenment. Ever steady progress in civilization and the power of reason. Ever rising boats. There’s just no here, here. No science, no edification, only the romanticism of the lost State of Nature (safe in our middling Pre Cog Revolutionary days).

You can’t engage the troll. It’s not even wrong. It’s not even asking the wrong questions, because the questions it raises aren’t even questions. (It’s a pointless counting exercise, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 1/10th of the book is nothing but a series of questions, and proof that one was invited to a dinner and the host forgot to set the table.) I am a philosopher, by practice and disposition, and am immediately drawn to a book’s metaphysics. The assumptions are where the whole edifice falls apart. Introduce the slightest nuance (Is not mind also matter? Aren’t you perhaps conflating myth-making, mass delusion, and fictionalization?) and the subterfuge collapses under its own weight. Still, a lot of fun, though not deserving of the fawning praise as a grand revelation, a singular, mind-altering experience. It’s popularity says something more about us, our insipid times. We know too much, have too much to say. So we find different ways of saying the same thing in incongruous ways. It’s not a flattering portrait. It hits the mark whenever its aim is off.

To give one example: “The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world.”

Shot: Writing has fundamentally changed the way we think and view the world. Undoubtedly true. How can we argue!?

“Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.”

Chaser: Writing has imprisoned our minds in the iron cage of instrumentalism. Ah, a delicious mouthful worthy of Weber! There’s a whole lot of heavy lifting going on in that last sentence, a tidy clean up at the conclusion to a thought. Clean up! Aisle 11!

The clean-up is not always so subtle (and jarring). Take this example. “Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.”

Instrumentalism (the application of reason to practical ends) is here conflated with myth, which is conflated with fiction, which is conflated with an artificial instinct – all products of human nature, but somehow standing over and above and opposed to nature.

It’s rather strange to rest an entire work on the tendentious claim that human language and the mental worlds we inhabit are mere contrivance, artificial and unnatural, while at the same time reducing all complex behaviors to the very coarse biological imperatives they supposedly do not respect. Of course, one cannot tell precisely where the Scylla of objective biological laws meet the Charybdis of human imagination.

I can imagine a rock talking to me. I can also imagine the same rock comprised of a staggering amount of elementary particles known as electrons and quarks. None of these acts of imagination can remotely be described as delusion. Delusion enters the cognitive picture at the moment when a false belief intercedes, encroaches, interferes with the ability of the mind to make general, relatable, reliable, mappable composition. Delusion happens when a complex information system breaks down. The feedback between memory storage and retrieval has been disrupted in some acute physiological way. If someone points out that the rock doesn’t actually have a brain, a mouth, and lungs, I can truthfully say that has no bearing on my ability to imagine a rock possessing those qualities. I have an artistic bent, that’s all. Hence, no delusion. If it turns out that the rock is actually comprised of super symmetric strings, my schematic model is simply updated. Again, no delusion because everything is working in an organized manner, imagination, judgement, belief, calculation, measurement, distillation, error, refinement, adjustment.

A belief in God represents no delusion because it is a simple statement of subjective experience. I live and experience a world filled with promise, higher meaning, and purpose. Perhaps the same person will encounter enough objective data about the world that leads them to question this belief and perhaps reject the former faith and no longer believe in God. Again, this is no delusion (or a liberation from a former delusion). Clinically, we are better off putting mental illness in the same class as other illnesses in which normal biological operations (wellness) is severely restricted, hampered, and rendered inoperable.

If we could navigate that treacherous path, carefully choosing our words rather than making broad brushstrokes, the journey would no longer take us along these incongruous vistas but to well-worn ground and perhaps less surprising sights. And science must not get in the way of a good story!

*Trolling is the art of deliberate provocation in order to evoke an emotional response or argument.