This book has some good points, but other of its statements are plainly incorrect. I cite examples (among others) below. The referenced page numbers aThis book has some good points, but other of its statements are plainly incorrect. I cite examples (among others) below. The referenced page numbers are to the Kindle edition.
First, the book fails to apply critical thinking to the doctrine of postmodernism. It is impressed with the postmodern view that “there is no objective truth” (95). “Keep the postmodernist view in mind: perhaps we can never know the truth, and perhaps meaning is completely relative. If that is the case, many things are possible” (99). My response: As postmodern ideology has manifested itself in the early twenty-first century, one of its principal teachings is that reason and evidence are inventions of the Western, White, straight, male patriarchy and, as such, are to be rejected or minimized. (See the discussion at Alan E. Johnson, Reason and Human Ethics [Pittsburgh, PA: Philosophia, 2022], 121–23, Kindle.) If this postmodern principle is correct, then critical thinking itself must be rejected or minimized as the invention of the Western, White, straight, male patriarchy, and this subject book on critical thinking must therefore be rejected or minimized as being the invention of the Western, White, straight, male patriarchy. More generally, if relativism is true and there is no objective truth, then this book should be rejected on the ground that critical thinking—including this book on critical thinking—is merely the author’s subjective, personal opinion. The premise of relativism—and its application to this book on critical thinking—is self-contradictory (Johnson, Reason and Human Ethics, 1–5).
Second, this book starts a sentence on page 108 as follows: “In 1782, during the US Civil War, Benjamin Franklin . . . .” (emphasis added). The U.S. Civil war occurred from 1861 to 1865—many decades after Benjamin Franklin’s death in 1790.
Third, on page 187, the book states that the following deductive syllogism is valid.
All fruits have seeds inside them. Cucumber has the seeds inside. Therefore, cucumber is a fruit.
This is obviously not a valid syllogism. The premise “all fruits have seeds inside of them” does not logically exclude the possibility that there may be living things other than fruits that also have seeds inside them. If the premise had been “only fruits have seeds inside them,” the syllogism would have been valid from a logical point of view. But that’s not the way the book framed the syllogism.
At this point in the book (page 187 of 436 Kindle pages), I gave up and marked the book as “partially read.”...more
This book was published today (July 23, 2024), and I have begun reading it on Kindle. The first three paragraphs are as follows:
All of us have in our
This book was published today (July 23, 2024), and I have begun reading it on Kindle. The first three paragraphs are as follows:
All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of an autocratic state. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. The army and the police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the twenty-first century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote another’s—as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America.
This is not to say that there is some secret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor is our conflict with them a black-and-white, binary contest, a “Cold War 2.0.” Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists, and theocrats. Their regimes have different historical roots, different goals, different aesthetics. Chinese communism and Russian nationalism differ not only from each other but from Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialism, North Korea’s Juche, or the Shia radicalism of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All of them differ from the Arab monarchies and others—Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Vietnam—which mostly don’t seek to undermine the democratic world. They also differ from the softer autocracies and hybrid democracies, sometimes called illiberal democracies—Turkey, Singapore, India, the Philippines, Hungary—which sometimes align with the democratic world and sometimes don’t. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc.
For those of us who grew up during the Cold War and whose parents were involved, directly or indirectly, in the Second World War, totalitarianism or authoritarianism was often connected with ideology, e.g., Nazism or Communism. I look forward to reading this book, which evidently shows that autocracy today is not so much about ideology as it is about pure power. Of course, Hans J. Morgenthau and other international politics “realist” scholars of the last century always said that ideology masked the underlying power motivation of the various rulers.
Anne Applebaum is a historian and journalist. She is a staff writer for the Atlantic as well as a Senior Fellow at the Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of several history books, including Twilight of Democracy, which I have reviewed here....more
Loading...
