Skip to main content

Brainwashing – Kathleen Taylor ****

Here we see a prime example of that rarest of species – a book that is both academic and readable. It makes no concessions on content, yet Kathleen Taylor writes well enough to keep the attention of the interested lay person.
The topic is a controversial one. “Does brainwashing even exist?” is a legitimate question – but you’ll have to read the book to find the answer.
This isn’t a “true crimes”, “revel in real human horror stories” type book, but the first section does contain a few rather unsettling case studies as it reveals examples that could be labelled brainwashing. Taylor is catholic in her coverage, though – as well as explicit attempts to brainwash by totalitarian military regimes you will find religious cults, advertising and even the apparently innocent activity of education.
The book is in three sections. The first examines the different activities that could be and/or are described as brainwashing, the second examines the brain itself, its surprising fluidity and the different activities and mechanisms that could be the subject of attempts at thought control, and the final section looks at the possible future developments in brainwashing, and whether it is possible to have strategies for resistance.
Few criticisms can be raised here. Surprisingly, one of these might be that Taylor is too scrupulously fair – so a lot of statements are bordered around by qualifications and “excepts” and “despites”, which is honest but breaks up the flow of a good read. It’s also a long book – only around 300 pages, but of tight-packed, smallish text – and for the lay reader she probably goes into too much detail on the workings of the brain. That’s really all that comes between this book and a five star rating.
One of the best things about reading Brainwashing is Taylor’s light touch with language – she really does write as if a real person is sharing with you something that fascinates her, and she knows you will be interested in too. It’s a delight. Also Taylor is quite happy to take on some heavyweights for their oversimplifying – you might even say brainwashing – approach in putting across a scientific message. So for example, she points out how Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore misinterpret the idea of faith by associating its dangers with religion, thus blundering into blaming religion for most of the world’s woes without considering how totally religion-free inter-human disasters from the Chinese cultural revolution to Nazi Germany have been even more destructive. Taylor isn’t supporting religion, but rather pointing out the over-dependence on simplistic views that is a common feature of brainwashing, and that is being incorrectly used to put down religion here – her standpoint should be obvious, but it takes guts to oppose names like Dawkins and Blackmore.
Altogether a thoughtful, insightful and thoroughly well-written book on a subject that is often mentioned but rarely understood.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you 
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more