Review by Terrell Clemmons.
When J. Budziszewski talks to groups about social topics, people often ask him, “What’s wrong with us?” or “Why are we going crazy?” It’s not an unreasonable question. We might laugh off tampons in boys’ bathrooms, but surgically disfiguring children and endorsing after-birth abortion in a medical-ethics journal — these indicate something has gone seriously wrong in our thinking. “Unfortunately,” Budziszewski writes in the Introduction to his most recent book, Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy, “derangement has real-word consequences.” We are not “lazily drifting into chaos … we are propelling ourselves into it.”
Budziszewski is a professor of government, philosophy, and civic leadership at the University of Texas, Austin. He’s written more than 20 books for scholarly and lay readers. Pandemic of Lunacy is for the lay reader hungering and thirsting for sanity in just such a sea of chaos. It’s not about the virus of 2020, but rather about the plethora of ever-metastasizing crazy ideas gaining acceptance as conventional knowledge.
Pandemic of Lunacy dismantles 30 delusional ideas that hold mind-boggling sway — and exact real-world harm — in our culture. The terms “delusion” and “lunacy,” according to Merriam-Webster, apply to any idea about reality that is demonstrably false, contrary to sound evidence, or irrational. “Delusional” can also mean “psychotic” or even “insane.” In 30 succinct chapters, Budziszewski addresses 30 delusions related to virtue and happiness, politics and government, family and sexuality, God and religion, even human nature and reality itself. He doesn’t polemicize for “sides” on the controversial subjects nearly so much as help us think through falsehoods clouding our current milieu.
