Against the Idols of the Age: A Contrarian's Critique of the Twentieth Century

There is something appealing about contrarians. People who see things from a different perspective may often be on to something. Hence my attraction to David Stove's Against the Idols of the Age, a provocative collection of essays that challenges dominant intellectual trends of the 20th century. 

The book gathers Stove’s critiques of scientific irrationalism, modern philosophy, and cultural orthodoxies, arguing that many influential ideas—especially in the philosophy of science and evolutionary theory—rest on faulty reasoning and misplaced reverence for fashion-able thinkers. Stove targets figures like Popper, Kuhn, and Darwinist interpretations of human behavior, while defending common sense, empirical realism, and logical clarity.

I've read a few books over the years by authors dissecting and debunking contemporary "experts" by pointing out the king had no close on. One of these examined papers in physics that were called brilliant when, in fact, they were primarily gobbledygook. When Camille Paglia tears into Michel Foucaut, and Norman Finkelstein slaughters contemporary golden calves (e.g. I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It), I applaud.

You don't have to agree with everything, but there's a lot of meat on them bones. Our capacity to think more deeply may be challenged. So be it. Exercise that brain muscle. Make it sweat. It feels good.

Here's the table of contents for Stove's book:

Against the Idols of the Age

Introduction: Who Was David Stove?

Acknowledgments and a Note on the Text

The Cult of Irrationalism in Science

Cole Porter and Karl Popper:

The Jazz Age in the Philosophy of Science

Sabotaging Logical Expressions

Paralytic Epistemology, or The Soundless Scream

Idols Contemporary and Perennial

D'Holbach's Dream:

The Central Claim of the Enlightenment

"Always apologize, always explain":

Robert Nozick's War Wounds

The Intellectual Capacity Of Women Racial and Other Antagonisms

Idealism: A Victorian Horror-story (Part Two)

Darwinian Fairytales

Darwinism's Dilemma

Where Darwin First Went Wrong about Man
Genetic Calvinism, or Demons and Dawkins

"He Ain't Heavy, He's my Brother," or Altruism and Shared Genes

For an introduction to this author, read Roger Kimball's Who was David Stove? in The New Criterion. It may give you just the courage you need to swim upstream against the current in your own battles.

His beef with Darwin is elaborated on in his 1995 book Darwinian Fairytales, which critiques sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. He argues that Darwinism fails to explain human behaviors like altruism, which he sees as contradictory to the "selfish gene" theory. Though a non-creationist, Stove argues that while natural selection is a successful biological theory, its application to human behavior is overblown and often relies on "fairytales" to explain away inconsistencies, such as why humans engage in self-sacrificing or non-reproductive behaviors. 

Stove is best known for scathing attacks on a variety of concepts, especially Popperian falsificationism, Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism. 

David Stove's comments on Cole Porter are classic. Evidently Stove repeatedly quoted Cole Porter’s lyric “Anything goes” (from the 1934 musical of the same name) as a shorthand critique of modern intellectual culture. For Stove, Porter unintentionally captured the spirit of relativism: the idea that there are no firm standards of truth, reason, or evidence.

Here are a few reviews of this book, pilfered from Amazon:

"Stove was undoubtedly the most stylish and witty writer of all philosphers of the last one hundred years, if not of all time. When it comes to attacking the absurdities of twentieth century intellectual movements no one else came close, and certainly no one else was as funny." --The Review of Metaphysics

"What separates Stove from your average angry-eyed reactionary is the startling brilliant way that he argues, combining plain horse sense with the most nimble and skillful philosophical reasoning this side of Hume, along with a breathtaking wit."
--The Parisian Review

"As most reviewers before have acknowledged, it seems impossible to be able to agree with everything Stove says. But that only adds to the enjoyment. The book may be controversial but it certainly is FUN. What's more, even when making the most preposterous claims, Stove will usually do two other things: 1) lay out his argument in an innovative, surprising and clear way, 2) make several brilliant and true observations on the side, which otherwise would probably never have crossed your mind." --MrOzik

And one more from Amazon:
Critically, Against the Idols of the Age offers sharp, lucid, and often entertaining arguments, marked by wit and rigor. Reviewers praise Stove’s analytic precision and polemical force, though not all will agree with his conclusions; his style is combative and opinionated, which makes the book both stimulating and controversial. It serves as an engaging introduction to Stove’s thought and a trigger for readers to question prevailing assumptions in science and culture.