Benazir Bhutto was not killed by a suicide bomb blast but shot by a lone assassin with possible links to Pakistan’s sinister Inter-Services Intelligence agency, acting on behalf of the Musharraf regime and the CIA. British schools are to drop the Holocaust and the Crusades from the curriculum to protect Muslim sensibilities. Acupuncture with IVF treatment can raise the chances of conception by 65% claims a ‘meta-analysis’ of previous trials. This ‘is a striking result, especially as nobody has any idea why acupuncture should be having this effect’.

All recent examples of what Damian Thompson terms ‘counterknowledge’: knowledge that ‘misrepresents reality (deliberately or otherwise) by presenting non-facts as facts’ (p2). His new book seeks and destroys counterknowledge wherever he can find it: in the pseudohistory of The Da Vinci Code and 1491: The Year China Discovered the World, amongst the quackery and snake oil of complementary alternative medicine, behind 9/11 conspiracy theories and intelligent design arguments for Creationism. Read with a certain glee and bask in the warm glow of reason as Thompson lays bare the fakery of you-are-what-you-eat nutrionists.

Thompson, a self-professed Catholic conservative capitalist, takes his counterknowledge counterattack deep on into the trenches of left-wing academia and the dugouts of postmodern relativists. Globalisation and free market consumerism are equally to blame, as is the ubiquity and speed of the internet-fuelled media. Fundamentally, however, it is the ‘fragmentation of traditional authority structures’ that he sees as best explaining contemporary gullibility. He sees capitalism propelling us on a trajectory from ‘fate to choice’ as ‘the subjective side of human experience takes over from the objective’ (p119). In other words, without church, monarch and state to tell us what to think, we are left ‘uncertain, hesitating, anxious’ (p120) in the face of overwhelming and bewildering choice. And if that is difficult for educated Westerners to cope with: just imagine the impact on Muslim youth, whose culture has ‘failed to keep up with the intellectual advances of Western civilisation’ (p131). It is self-evident for the Catholic Thompson that ‘the conjunction of radical Islam and counterknowledge is particularly dangerous’ (p21). Its unclear what intellectual advances he means except maybe the very postmodernism he attacks. Pakistani scientists have certainly kept up with nuclear technology.

Whether or not you agree with Thompson on the particular dangers of Islamic counterknowledge, it is welcome and timely to see arguments for a resurrection of Enlightenment thinking. Counterknowledge forms, along with the work of Francis Wheen, Dan Hind, Jeremy Stangroom and Ophelia Benson among others, part of a growing backlash of opinion against the excesses of subjectivity and multiculturalism. But behind the trumpet calls of pure reason lurks more than a little defensiveness. As some reviewers have been quick to point out, Thompson is a part of that very traditional authority whose loss of authority he so laments. He never puts the Church’s declining appeal to the question, however, and nor does he examine the wider rejection by Western thinkers of reason, progress and truth, long before the counterculture of the 1960s. Nietzsche dismissed all truth as nothing more than what we might call ‘convenient truth’:

‘Truth is the type of error without which a particular type of living being could not exist’ (cited in Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, Merlin Press London, p390).

Arthur Koestler expressed his despair of rationality in 1940:

perhaps reason alone was a defective compass, which led one on such a winding, twisted course that the goal finally disappeared in the mist. Perhaps now would come the time of great darkness. (Darkness at Noon, Penguin, p206)

Most tellingly, it was Karl Popper, whose criterion of falsifiability Thompson quotes admiringly, who did much to undermine classical empiricism and reduce human knowledge to the level of conjecture or hypothesis waiting to be disproved. For Popper no amount of looking at white swans can make it a truth that swans are white: it is only a matter of time before a black swan swims past and proves us wrong. There are no truths: only possibilities.

In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper dismissed induction and therefore empiricism as the source of human knowledge. Instead it was to be found in the creative inspiration of isolated geniuses. In The Open Society and its Enemies, he robbed history of universal meaning and opened the door to relativism. This makes life very difficult for someone like Thompson who so wants to prove that facts are true. To do so requires a belief in the ability of humans to understand objective reality. It is this that Popper and many others since reject. This also makes life very difficult for any authority: it can be no surprise that governments that no longer claim to represent the truth command but scant respect.

Paradoxically, in this context a certain kind of very non-Popperian science does command real respect in contemporary society, and scientists are increasingly used to back up the pronouncements of government. Restrictions and interventions in our daily lives and diets are justified in the name of ‘the science’. This is an unquestionable ‘science’ in the guise of a window onto an external world of truth, a window through which the privileged can discern how we should live. Al Gore is such a seer, picking out lessons for how we should behave in the light of his ‘inconvenient truth’. It is a form of knowledge that has little time for those who would question its immanent and pressing truths: those trying to debate the facts and make sense of them are silenced as ‘climate-change deniers’. We hear that the time for talking has gone: now the imperative is to act in the light of the truth shown to us by the science. Before it is too late.

If anything was ever the enemy of Enlightenment philosophes it was the ‘enthusiasm’ of dogma. Locke, Berkeley and Hume all focused on the problem of knowledge and upheld the scientific method of empirical deduction as relevant to human society. Today there is no greater dogma than that of environmentalism: the heat generated by any attempt to question the predictions of climate change soothsayers is such that we might suspect more than a little enthusiasm on their part. So it is notable that Thompson has no time in his book to even name check environmentalism. If he had, it might have been possible to tease out a subtler explanation of the appeal of counterknowledge: it is not that people are ignorant and lack discernment; nor are they beguiled by the power of the internet; rather there is an attraction, sometimes cynical, sometimes desperate, but an attraction nonetheless to dogmatic points of view at a time when the power of human reason and our ability to make history are both seen as discredited.

Thompson overlooks another paradox in his attempt to explain counterknowledge as an surfeit of choice. We do have more choices to make than ever before at the level of individual consumption but ironically there is a corresponding reduction in our ability to understand and intervene in the real world. This is because, unlike in the Enlightenment, man is no longer seen as being at the centre of the world. Much contemporary thought is extremely anti-humanist: Nature is in trouble because of all the greedy, broody masses. Human reason and knowledge is decried as dangerous arrogance. This leaves us with a new form of fatalism, if not out and out nihilism. The science that appeals today is not the science of testing and pushing back boundaries (no space race now) but the science that explains even our most eccentric predilections in terms of our genetics.

If man is not allowed to make history any more, if blogs have replaced grand narratives as personal introspection becomes the new public record, then should we be at all surprised at the appeal of counterknowledge? Why not entertain the idea that China discovered America? Why not amuse oneself with imaginative conspiracy theory-fiction? Counterfactual history, after all, is taken seriously in academic circles. Consider Niall Ferguson, author of Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. Consider the fearful ‘what-if’ orientation of politicians and risk managers to the future. Consider how we are told to prepare for the merely possible rather than the mundanely probable, as Frank Furedi considers in Invitation to Terror. In a world where we are told anything can happen, everything becomes believable.

It is maybe no surprise that Thompson ends with a fairly pessimistic outlook: ‘We can almost certainly do nothing about the circulation of counterknowledge on the internet…this inevitable shift from fate to choice…’ (p138). The best we can manage is to wage a rearguard ‘guerrilla’ action: blogging it to counterknowledge on its home ground,the internet. Thompson advocates lone warriors in the blogosphere like Ben Goldacre who can name and shame the purveyors of counterknowledge. Indeed he has set up his own blog with just this aim in mind: www.counterknowledge.com. Obviously this approach is somewhat dependent on the ability of these blog exposes to go ‘viral’ and impact actual debate in the real world. A bit like counterknowledge in fact. These bloggers may well be factually correct but, to the people they are trying to convince, they too are selling parcels of ‘knowledge’ to be slotted into sets of beliefs or rejected as appropriate. It is telling that Thompson is full of praise for Goldacre’s ‘outing’ of Gillian McKeith’s lack of academic qualifications:

if I mention the name Gillian McKeith to my friends, they reply: ‘Oh, you mean “Doctor” Gillian McKeith,’ wiggling their fingers to indicate inverted commas (p136).

Kudos for discrediting her sham nutrition science, but it seems clear that this kind of knowing and self-satisfied reaction only reinforces a deeper cynicism towards all pretensions of knowledge.

A more robust defence of the importance of truth and knowledge must start from putting humanity back at the centre of history. Knowledge involves more than factual certainty: important though this is. It also needs public debate and engagement in how we see humanity relating to the world and what it means for us. This requires a more optimistic and involved attitude to the future. We must avoid a fatalistic response to history and instead take responsibility for making it happen.

The truth is indeed out there but it is only discovered through human activity. And soon surpassed and re-discovered. Although truth may be relative to the sweep of history, it is not all relative: only more or less faithful to objective reality. When we reject a theory as false it is only because we have discovered one yet more likely to be true. This matters because, to the degree we allow truth to be taken out of human control and repackaged as moral imperative, so we lose our ability to shape reality and so the wheel of fate turns. Our most pressing problem today is not counterknowledge but the need to counter ‘knowledge’ with debate at every turn.