A significant proportion of my favourite writings are profoundly negative reviews, such as the following. These are all great fun, but have serious points.

Sir Peter Medawar won a Nobel Prize for his work on organ transplantation and immunology. He wrote a review of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s book “The Phenomenon of Man”, (Mind, New Series, Vol. 70, No. 277 (January, 1961), pp. 99-106).

In “Unweaving the Rainbow”, Richard Dawkins writes “[The Phenomenon of Man] is, for Medawar (and for me now, although I confess that I was captivated when I read it as an over-romantic undergraduate), the quintessence of bad poetic science.”

Here are some choice quotes:

“French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.
…
Teilhard is for ever shouting at us: things or affairs are, in alphabetical order, astounding, colossal, endless, enormous, fantastic, giddy, hyper-, immense, implacable, indefinite, inexhaustible, extricable, infinite, infinitesimal, innumerable, irresistible, measureless, mega-, monstrous, mysterious, prodigious, relentless, super-, ultra-, unbelievable, unbridled or unparalleled. When something is described as merely huge we feel let down.
…
How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind, for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.
…
It is written in an all but totally unintelligible style, and this is construed as prima-facie evidence of profundity.
…
The Predicament of Man is all the rage now that people have sufficient leisure and are sufficiently well fed to contemplate it
…
I have read and studied The Phenomenon of Man with real distress, even with despair. Instead of wringing our hands over the Human Predicament, we should attend to those parts of it which are wholly remediable, above all to the gullibility which makes it possible for people to be taken in by such a bag of tricks as this. If it were an innocent, passive gullibility it would be excusable; but all too clearly, alas, it is an active willingness to be deceived.”

Richard Dawkins wrote a scathing review (“Sociobiology: the debate continues”, New Scientist, 24 January 1985) of a 1985 book called “Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature”. The book claimed that “Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology”, and that we need to replace it with “dialectical biology”.

Dawkins described the book as promoting a “bizarre conspiracy theory of science”, accused the authors of lies and idiocy, and concluded that it is a “silly, pretentious, obscurantist and mendacious book”.

Here are some quotes:

Rose et al have no clear idea of what they mean by biological determinism. “Determinist”, for them, is simply one half of a double-barrelled blunderbuss term, with much the same role and lack of content as “Mendelist-Morganist” had in the vocabulary of an earlier generation of comrades. Today’s other barrel, fired off with equal monotony and imprecision is “reductionist”.
…
Why do Rose et al find it necessary to reduce a perfectly sensible belief (that complex wholes should be explained in terms of their parts) to an idiotic travesty (that the properties of a complex whole are simply the sum of those same properties in the parts)? “In terms of” covers a multitude of highly sophisticated causal interactions, and mathematical relations of which summation is only the simplest. Reductionism, in the “sum of the parts” sense, is obviously daft, and is nowhere to be found in the writings of real biologists. Reductionism, in the “in terms of” sense, is, in the words of the Medawars, “the most successful research stratagem ever devised”.

He ends,

Cyril Burt went to the extreme length of faking numerical data, but it can be argued that what lay behind his crime was an eagerness to give ideology priority over truth. If this is so, who are the Cyril Burts of today?

Staying with Dawkins, he wrote an article criticising “postmodernism”, called “Postmodernism disrobed” (Nature, 9 July 1998, vol. 394, pp. 141-143). It is actually a review praising the excellent book Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, and also the excellent book “Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science” by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. I urge you to read both books, which go into detail.

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like [Félix Guattari]
…
We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don’t know anything about.

The feminist ‘philosopher’ Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton’s Principia (a “rape manual”), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a “sexed equation”. Why? Because “it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us” (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an ‘in’ word). Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray’s thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. “Masculine physics” privileges rigid, solid things.

Sean Gabb can be a caustic reviewer. In one review he describes post-modernism as “the last refuge of people who realise they have been wrong for most of their adult lives, but who for reasons of pride or career cannot make a full recantation.”

The author spends 125 pages arguing for these propositions; and, so far as I can tell, he fails to establish either of them.
…
All Mr Clarke does succeed in showing is a reason to cut off all public funding to the University of Essex, which employs him as a lecturer—and where I understand he is thought to be tremendously clever.

Indeed, his book is so opaque that even its intention would have escaped me without the back cover to act as a guide—a back cover that was probably written by somebody else.

Dr Gabb wrote a review of Danny Kruger’s On Fraternity, which I intend to review more favourably later. Gabb describes the book as “an intellectual fraud in its intention, and shabby in its execution”:

“The Conservatives have no intellectual basis that they dare honestly explain to us. They must at the same time convey the impression of one. They have, therefore, put Dr Kruger up to write a whole book about Conservative principle, but to do so in a way that will allow almost no one to understand him.

The language of his book is in all matters of importance pretentious and obscure.
…
There is page after page of this stuff. We have commonplaces dressed up to look profound. We have manifest nonsense. We have knowing references to Plato and Aristotle and Hobbes and Burke and Mill. We have untranslated words and phrases, or words that have been taken into English but never widely used. There is, of course, “Aufhebung”.
…
Look at this:

But the 1980s also saw the defoliation of the natural landscape. In The City of God Augustine quotes a Briton saying ‘the Romans make a desert and they call it peace’.[p.2]

Never mind that defoliation happens to trees, not natural landscapes. What matters here is that St Augustine did not say this, and could not have said it, bearing in mind the purpose of his City of God. The correct reference is to Tacitus in his biography of Agricola: “Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant”. Dr Kruger went, I believe, to an expensive public school, I to a comprehensive school in South London. Perhaps the classical languages are not so well studied in these former places as they once were. But anyone who wants to quote the ancients should make at least some effort to do it properly.

Is this pedantry? I do not think so. The quotation should be familiar to everyone of moderate education—even to people who do not know Latin. Its use is not absolutely required for the meaning of what Dr Kruger is trying to say. Like much else, it is there to impress. And he gets it wrong. And the fault is not confined to him. This book has gone through many drafts. Remember that it has been read and discussed by every intellectual close to the Conservative leadership. Even so, this glaring error on the second page was not picked up and corrected. This says more about the intellectual quality of modern Conservatives than anything else in the book.

Roger Ebert is a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and his reviews are always the first I turn to after watching a film.

He ranks movies from zero to four stars, and has published books of his no-star reviews with titles like “Your Movie Sucks”. He once described the movie “The Brown Bunny” as the worst film in the history of the Cannes. The director responded by calling Ebert a “fat pig with the physique of a slave trader… The only thing I’m sorry for is putting a curse of Roger Ebert’s colon.” Ebert replied “one day I will be thin, but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny” and said that watching his colonosopy was more entertaining than watching The Brown Bunny.

However, my favourite review by Ebert is for a movie that he did not give “no stars”: Constantine.

No, “Constantine” is not part of a trilogy including “Troy” and “Alexander.” It’s not about the emperor at all, but about a man who can see the world behind the world, and is waging war against the scavengers of the damned. There was a nice documentary about emperor penguins, however, at Sundance this year. The males sit on the eggs all winter long in like 60 degrees below zero.

Keanu Reeves plays Constantine as a chain-smoking, depressed demon-hunter who lives above a bowling alley in Los Angeles. Since he was a child, he has been able to see that not all who walk among us are human. Some are penguins. Sorry about that. Some are half-angels and half-devils. Constantine knows he is doomed to hell because he once tried to kill himself, and is trying to rack up enough frames against the demons to earn his way into heaven.

There is a scene early in the movie where Constantine and his doctor look at his X-rays, never a good sign in a superhero movie. He has lung cancer. The angel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton) tells him, “You are going to die young because you’ve smoked 30 cigarettes a day since you were 13.” Gabriel has made more interesting announcements. Constantine has already spent some time in hell, which looks like a post-nuclear Los Angeles created by animators with a hangover. No doubt it is filled with carcinogens.

…

Strange that there is a priest, since that opens the door to Catholicism and therefore to the news that Constantine is not doomed unless he wages a lifelong war against demons, but need merely go to confession; three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and he’s outta there. Strange, that movies about Satan always require Catholics. You never see your Presbyterians or Episcopalians hurling down demons.

The forces of hell manifest themselves in many ways. One victim is eaten by flies. A young girl is possessed by a devil, and Constantine shouts, “I need a mirror! Now! At least three feet high!” He can capture the demon in the mirror and throw it out the window, see, although you wonder why supernatural beings would have such low-tech security holes.

Reeves has a deliberately morose energy level in the movie, as befits one who has seen hell, walks among half-demons, and is dying. He keeps on smoking. Eventually he confronts Satan (Peter Stormare), who wears a white suit. (Satan to tailor: “I want a suit just like God’s.”) Oh, and the plot also involves the Spear of Destiny, which is the spear that killed Christ, and which has been missing since World War II, which seems to open a window to the possibility of Nazi villains, but no.

David Stove (1927-1994) was an Australian philosopher. His essay, “What is Wrong with Our Thoughts? A Neo-Positivist Credo”, which I highly recommend, is not a review, but it does contain a hilarious put-down.

“Any student of the history of thought is soon able to say, with Macbeth, `I have supp’d full with horrors.’ To read a book of magic, say, or astrology, is horrible, because the spectacle of steady and systematic irrationality induces depression and nausea. Yet the most horrible book, in this way, that I have ever read, does not come from the underworld of thought. On the contrary, it comes from the dizziest heights of contemporary academic respectability.

The book is the second volume of Hegel’s Development, by H.S.Harris, of York University, Toronto. It is subtitled Night Thoughts (Jena 1801-1806). It was published in 1983, by Oxford University Press at the Clarendon Press; which is to say, by the best. The book is a colossal monument to the scholarly industry of its author. It is over 700 pages long, and the work of which it is only the second volume must inevitably run into many more volumes. In 1806, after all, most of the publications on which Hegel’s fame rests still lay in the future. For Professor Harris, however, no manuscript, no scrap of paper, quite literally no doodle even, lacks profound significance, as long as it is Hegel’s.

Indeed, all previous instances of philosopholatry, even the one which had Plato as its object and perhaps as its founder, are thrown entirely into the shade by Professor Harris. He does not actually say that Hegel’s philosophy can cure wooden legs, but I do not think he would like to hear it denied.”

I’m thinking of compiling a short volume of them, entitled “Great Destructive Reviews”.

What are your favourite destructive reviews?