The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power Book

The World Turned Upside Down is a review and critique of liberal-brand groupthink, protective stupidity, and scapegoating that can break the pull of polarization for anyone not already thoroughly polarized to the left or to the right.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist who writes from the perspective of a disillusioned liberal with an abiding respect for her liberal Jewish upbringing. She begins her concluding chapter with a poignant reprise of her thesis:

"The Enlightenment is consuming its own progeny. In the West, the culture of reason is dying, brought down by a loss of faith in progress and in the rationality that underpinned it. The replacement of objective truth by subjective experience has turned some strands of science into a branch of unreason, as evidence is hijacked by ideology."

The subtext of The World Turned Upside Down concerns the world turned rightside up, by which I understand Philips to hold that the best of all possible worlds is a secular society, organized as a liberal democracy in a market economy guided by the lessons of Jewish history. And further, that what is required in order to establish and maintain such a society is the inculcation of Jewish morality and ethics, rooted in a reverence for life as a gift from our Creator, which nurtures a characteristically Jewish love of learning and inquiry, that alone can produce an informed, rational, responsible, citizenry.

But, there is a fly in the ointment. The Christian term is "original sin," a concept explored in depth by René Girard in I See Satan Fall Like Lightening and by Gil Bailie in Violence Unveiled. I recommend reading Phillips' book in connection with those two and with one other: Jacques Ellul's The Meaning of the City. In that sort of meeting of the minds, Phillips contributes significantly to the conversation.

For me, a pair of disappointing and distracting aspects of Phillips' otherwise cogent presentation is that she does not seem to have an appreciation of the thoroughgoing Jewishness of the New Testament, and that she retrofits Medieval Christian beliefs and attitudes back onto the New Testament in ways that are entirely anachronistic and misleading. In doing so she is only following the lead of liberal Christian writers, but I would have liked to have seen her get it right.