An Actual First Review For The Threat to Reason

So I've just seen my first review for The Threat to Reason; Jonathan Derbyshire's piece for the New Humanist is published online here. It is fair to say that he isn't overwhelmed by the book, which is fair enough, though he does call it 'breezy' at one point. Breezy I can live with.

But in his conclusion Derbyshire makes a claim that I find very troubling. He says, of my comments on the danger posed to free inquiry by states and corporations, that:

'The problem with this kind of analysis is that it criticizes the dupes of military or corporate might on the basis of principles (justice, say) that, by its own lights, can't be anything but the ideological residue of power politics. But the ‘betrayal of the Enlightenment’ that Hind denounces wouldn’t be real if its principles themselves weren’t real.’

I can't see why he thinks that my analysis implies that moral principles are 'the ideological residue of power politics'. I yield to no one in my ethical and epistemological simplicity / simple-mindedness; the truth is the truth, no matter what power politics tells us, and it is good to try to find out the truth and to share it with others. In my book that's what the Enlightenment is, or should be, and it is entirely possible to betray it.

I have written to Mr Derbyshire to ask him why he thinks the analysis in the book implies some sort of scepticism about morality. It would be horrible if I gave anyone that impression. Hopefully we can have a public-spirited debate about the meaning and relevance of the Enlightenment in the modern day.