Lord Taverne's The March of Unreason Challenges the Counter-Enlightenment

Dick Lord Taverne is a lawyer-politician married to a scientist. He's the sort of guy one expects to rely on reason and fact every second of the day, a life peer in the House of Lords who was ennobled for being clever. Unfortunately, the trend to dogma and faith-based hope in place of fact and reason is growing. Lord Taverne's new book, The March of Unreason, seeks to put a finger in the dyke of the Enlightenment and protect it from those who are, frankly, uncomfortable with thinking. If the book has a flaw, it is its inherent preaching-to-the-choir nature.

Lord Taverne argues that the distrust of technology embedded in certain segments of western civilization is a Luddite disaster waiting to thwart human progress. Rather than accept needles and vaccines, some folks prefer an herbal tea. Lord Taverne states, cogently and pithily, that if the stuff worked and if that could be scientifically proved, then the medicine wouldn't be alternative; it would be mainstream. Penicillin, after all, is just a mold extract -- a folk remedy that really does work.

In this survey of irrationality, he touches on the debate between genetically modified foods and organic farming. While changing no minds here, he does note that there is a naive belief on the organic side that Nature would somehow be in perfect balance if humans would just leave well enough alone. At the same time, he is a bit too ready to accept the claims by manufacturers of GM foods that they can solve the world's food shortage (ending hunger is a bit trickier than just growing more food). In the end, though, he leaves one with the impression that the eco-fundamentalists would be happier if the agricultural revolution never happened so they wouldn't have to worry about it.

In the end, Lord Taverne believes that poverty won't fix global warming, that the risks of not developing nuclear power outweigh the risks of fission accidents, and that rational, scientific empiricism is ultimately the path to The Truth. The problem is, of course, to find a way to convince those who disagree. Quite literally, one cannot reason with them.

The good news is that Lord Taverne has been ahead of the curve in the past, and that may be ground for believing he is ahead of the curve now (Note to His Lordship: there is no proof of this at this time, however). Having taken a first in Greats at Oxford (a four-year degree, unlike most in England, focusing on Latin, Greek and Big Ideas), he became a lawyer in 1954 and a Queen's Counsel in 1965 (sort of a lawyer for the government). He was a Labour MP from 1962 to 1972, when he gave up on Labour as being too authoritarian, and beat the official Labour candidate for the seat as a Democratic Labour candidate. He was a guiding force in the Social Democrats when they split form Labour in the early 1980s, advocating policies that might have been New Labour's. As a Liberal Democrat in the House of Lords, he can say "Been there, done that." One hopes the book, when it debuts in the US, makes the best-seller list because nothing is more important today that the defense of reason.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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