Andy Norman

When I saw the cover of “Mental Immunity” the first thing that came into my mind was “Oh, here’s a book about the light treatment politicians on Parliament Hill or Capitol Hill get when they say outrageous things. They simply declare “Mental Immunity,” sort of like diplomatic immunity for diplomats, but in this situation they get to say whatever they want without journalists calling them out for their stupidity.”

Or maybe what its like to get a spot on FOX and Friends, where you can say completely crazy things and the others simply nod their heads.

Then I saw that Anthony Doerr had come out with a new novel (which I haven’t read yet) called “Cloud Cuckoo Land” which has to be about some of the conversations I’ve read on facebook.

But Andy Norman’s project for this work of psychology is a little more serious. He wants to launch a new science to cut down on the number of lousy ideas people use in public discourse and, worse, which people use to develop public policy.

He starts out using the science of immunology as a metaphor for the kind of restorative science he wants largely philosophers to brandish. He talks of “infectious ideas” and “mind-parasites” in much the way we view medical viruses.

If I were a cynic I might treat Norman’s thesis as a subtle means for improving the status of philosophers on campus these days. Or possibly improving their pay scale.

I imagined philosophers running around campus in white lab coats with stethoscopes dangling on their necks. They’ll claim brain parasites as pre-existing conditions for health insurance claims. It could be a great boondoggle for private universities to get public subsidies.

There may even need to be isolation wards for the worst afflicted, something like the mental hospitals of old but for FOX News hosts and freshmen Congressmen.

Material for a great lampoon? For sure.

His diagnosis is largely correct: crazy ideas are over-running the air waves and average people are consuming them like lollipops.

Norman proposes that general education includes a new Socratic method for training better, more critical thinking, and better consideration of the impact ideas have on society. All in all, it’s not such a bad idea.

But I shudder to think we would have to re-train our over-burdened police forces with special training to handle mental outliers. They already have trouble handling schizoid personalities.… (mehr)

All the useful or informative bits of this book could be easily covered in a 10 page essay; Norman rabbits on needlessly about things like his teaching experiences or the history of medical immunology to bring his subject to book-length. The overall tone reads as though the anticipated audience is slack-jawed undergrads who smoke a lot of weed, with unnecessary repetitions and a charmingly condescending warning about the "difficulty" of the concept he is about to introduce. He also seems to be laboring under the delusion that he has developed a revolutionary concept; if he has, nobody would know since his thesis is so mired in unnecessary verbiage.… (mehr)