'A wonderfully clear-sighted and intellectually exciting polemic... A splendid, short sharp shock of a book.'

'Excellent... Widely enough read and clearly enough understood, 'Counterknowledge' might save us from the tsunami of misinformation, falsity, error and distortion that infects our culture... Superb.'

'The perfect little riposte to the cultic milieu in which we suddenly, somehow, appear to have found ourselves... Now we can counter the counterknowledge.'

'After reading this impressive study the reader will be convinced that we are indeed in desperate times.'

We are being swamped by dangerous nonsense. From 9/11 conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial, creationism to alternative medicine, we are all experiencing an epidemic of demonstrably untrue descriptions of the world. For Damian Thompson, these unproven theories and spurious claims are forms of 'counterknowledge', and, helped by the internet, they are creating a global generation of misguided adherents who repeat these untruths and lend them credence. 'The sleep of reason brings forth monsters', warns the title of Francisco Goya's famous etching of 1799. As Damian Thompson demonstrates, unless the defenders of enlightenment values fight back soon, the counterknowledge industry has the potential to create new political, social and economic disasters.

2008-07-06 Shooting fish in a barrel

Generally I am with Mr R A Davies who gave the book two stars, but perhaps that is a little harsh.

Thompson is quite selective in his choice of targets, and treats them largely the same (despite his repeated points about what is and is not "counterknowledge"). That is, he attempts not only to oppose their arguments and their evidence but also to undermine their motives, and to treat them as charlatans. In most cases that may be legitimate, but not always.

The blurb says he has a PhD in the sociology of religion from LSE (presumably supervised by David Martin?). I would have expected that someone who had worked in that very nuanced area, which poses interesting questions about the validity of knowledge, to have been able to distinguish between positions better than he does. Take complementary medicine (CAM) as an example. He is very rude about it, relying heavily on one of its severest critics. That's fine (and I tend to agree with him).

However, he extends his condemnation beyond the science to the business, including pharmacists in Boots who refuse to assert that a product on sale is useless. This is not the same world. Placebo is a potent treatment, not entirely reliant on conscious belief but upheld by it (Evans D [2004] Placebo London; HarperCollins). The discourse has shifted, but Thompson has stuck with his positivism.

And it does not help that he castigates some proponents as "batty". Assertions like that are sloppy playground name-calling; they detract from his very sound analyses in many areas.

Pity; I heard him on "Start the Week". I was looking forward to reading the book, and to a sociologist's eye on these phenomena. All I found was some predictable debunking of fairly obvious targets.

Read Francis Wheen's "How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the World" instead.