The joy of reading (some) book reviews

Although I may live in the land of Minnesota Nice, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for book reviews that go straight for the jugular (apologies for that unmixed metaphor). So even though I don't much like the point of view from which he writes, I nonetheless must confess that I got some guilty pleasure out of reading Leon Weiseltier's NYT review of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell. Starting with the claim that "scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day," Weiseltier goes on to lambaste Dennett (along with the whole of evolutionary pscyhology) as of "historical interest" merely as "a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions." From there, it only gets better:

The orthodoxies of evolutionary psychology are all here, its tiresome way of roaming widely but never leaving its house, its legendary curiosity that somehow always discovers the same thing. The excited materialism of American society — I refer not to the American creed of shopping, according to which a person's qualities may be known by a person's brands, but more ominously to the adoption by American culture of biological, economic and technological ways of describing the purposes of human existence — abounds in Dennett's usefully uninhibited pages. And Dennett's book is also a document of the intellectual havoc of our infamous polarization, with its widespread and deeply damaging assumption that the most extreme statement of an idea is its most genuine statement. Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky.

The whole review is laced with such venomous, hyperbolic, and over-the-top ad hoc assaults and parries that it makes me want to buy and read a book that I might otherwise have simply ignored, just to see what's stirring all of this bile.

Some quick thoughts on blogging

I haven't posted here for awhile, and for a variety of reasons, but in the interim I've been thinking about the role of academic blogs and my original ideas for starting this one. Part of the justification was to start a repository for miscellaneous observations and short written work from here and there, and this still seems an appropriate use of the space even if it hasn't much been given over to that purpose (though perhaps it might be more so in the future). The rest was supposed to be for observations about "life on the political theory tenure track," or a kind of first-person log of my experiences in this corner of professional academia, to be shared with others that may have similar interests. Though I've had many such experiences - some of them of possible interest to others in similar positions - the non-anonymous blog has proven an ill fit for most of them. Having thought about posting a number of observations about the internal workings of my departments (I'm in both Philosophy & Political Science - two very different collectivities), college, and university, or of the academic search process (I've been on a number of search committees for both of my departments and have seen both successful and less-than-succesful searches in recent years), or of developments within the discipline that I like or dislike, each time I opted against posting such comments for fear of either violating privacy issues or (more commonly) because having to worry about whether my frank assessments (and I tend to be frank) might someday be held against me. I have, in other words, come to realize why most of the really good and useful posts on the The Chronicle's website are made anonymously. In time, perhaps, those worries may diminish (they are stronger since I am as yet untenured), but for now my focus shall be slightly different, if similarly therapeutic for me.