Dinesh D’Souza’s book Illiberal Education (1991) is a dishonest book that fooled a lot of people. I wanted to explore how a reader could have efficiently spotted the dishonesty.
The book makes use of “protective coloration.” It reads like a conventional fact-based work of popular quasi-journalism, one of the type readers are accustomed to trust because of the form. Fact checking to the point where you’re sure something is a lie can be a lot of work. But noticing tells of dishonesty and letting them mount up to a conclusion can be done while reading along. That’s what this series is about: clue-spotting.
Watch for citations to hard-to-track-down sources. Watch for citations that are intended to be treated as nothing more than a marker of “someone said it, it must be true” – a variant of stolen valor. And footnote marks⁴ deployed in such a way that you’re discouraged from following them to the actual citation. And, if you do, not notice what kind of source is actually being cited (such as an opinion column rather than reporting). And so on.
First of two posts.
D’Souza uses four pages to “summarize” a particular book. Those pages are wildly misleading and incomplete, deftly leaving out counter-evidence and mischaracterizing many of the messages of the book.
3.2: Reading a book report critically
To write the previous post, I had to read the book being mis-summarized. That’s too much work to expect from a non-obsessive. So I list some further tells specific to books about people (biographies and the like).
Numbers carry gravitas. It’s easy to present them such that they give an impression that they don’t actually support. Asking what’s actually being presented, why it’s being presented this way, and asking yourself about obvious omissions and substitutions are among the relatively lightweight ways to raise your suspicions.
How do you know when quotations are being taken out of context? Elements like fragmentary quotations and the words around the quotes provide clues.
And how can you guess that a quotation is just made up? (Does it present a message the speaker would want heard, or does it fit too tightly with the overall interests of the interviewer? Is it too good?)