The Ideological Brain

The most introspection-provoking work I have ever read.

Dr. Zmigrod’s writing is clear and employs both a wonderfully diverse vocabulary and gifted imagery. Playing with and teasing her readers a bit, she is frankly fun to read.

Well into floating the sweeping view of her treatise, she engages in narrated ‘whispering’. Why? The section/chapter is The Dogmatic Gene. By this point in her conducted voyage into our interlinked brains and belief susceptibilities, we have a real apprehension that traits of dogmatism, narrow-mindedness, and even the ability to absorb new knowledge might be genetically determined (so whisper it). Resolving that foreboding, whilst acknowledging possibilities, our helmswoman steers us almost intimately through the rocks to calmer, if organically complex, further voyaging. Free will does emerge from the froth.

The breadth of erudition displayed is like a powerfully enabling current. Delving into the philosophical origins of ideology as a study, following its evolution (and ofttimes corruption) through history, a common feature emerges. Each philosophical development is personified with thinkers’ personal circumstances, developments, and intellectual/political environments so limned as to immerse the reader in their historicity.

Belief systems, faiths, dogmas, and cultures are examined, and their interlocking causation channels explored. Often, those explorations involve learning not only history, but also the undercurrents of intent by individuals and institutions.

Because our voyage is both through time and methods of measurement and inquiry, the good doctor’s introductions to actors and originators make for a sense of human development. She does touch on the tender subject of women’s significant contributions to the progression of learning and thought, which are often obscured by prejudicial attribution.

Warnings abound along the shores; extreme ideologies, mind- and learning-inhibiting dogmas, cultures that seem fossilized in history. Sometimes spears and darts can be seen emerging from the jungle. We get to meet, at a distance, some of the guiding chieftains of hostile tribes. Entire peoples, sometimes, constitute war parties operating from fear of ‘subversion’.||I’ve been characterizing this fascinating journey as flowing motion. It might as validly be thought of as a cozy conversation with a friendly and engaging tutor.

Indeed, the final landing is a conversation amongst the author and some of the compelling intellects she has summoned out of the dark and introduced us to so adroitly.

Introspection-provoking is an appellation that may be too mild. In reading, I found myself pausing often not only to think about, but to internally debate, much of the mental wealth offered.

All thinking folk should acquire this book.