We Are Not Saved

This was my entry to the 2026 ACX Book Review Contest. Given that it was, sadly, judged inadequate to the high standards of the ACX readership, I must now inflict it on you. Hopefully, with your obviously lower standards, you'll enjoy it. It is ridiculously long. These warnings aside, I would urge you to at least read parts one and two.
The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
By: Michael Strevens
0. Why This Book?
Out of the tens of millions of books ever written over the centuries, why review this one?
Because science is the secret to the creation of the modern world and this book holds the secret to the creation of science. 
In particular, it answers the question: why didn't modern science develop any sooner? Why didn't the Chinese, the Greeks, the Romans, or the Arabs develop internal combustion engines, arrive at the germ theory of disease, or send a man to the Moon? 
The answer it gives is surprising, and right there in the title. Everyone thinks that the essence of science is open inquiry, but it's really a deliberately narrow procedural straitjacket. Modern science has many irrational qualities. It requires us to wall off our thinking. Natural philosophy was never going to succeed as long as it included philosophy. Philosophy is deep. Science only works if it's shallow. 
Strevens is not the first to delve into the workings of science. Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn trod similar ground, and they'll make an appearance, but Strevens incorporates the best of both. He keeps Popper's focus on empiricism, while better describing how actual scientists work. And he acknowledges Kuhn's assertion of paradigmatic thinking, but shows how this gets channeled into productive public argument. 
By showing how science works, Strevens also demonstrates how it might stop working. And once you understand the components of the "Knowledge Machine" it would appear to be in greater peril than most people realize. This is why I chose to review this book out of all the books ever written: science needs saving, and with it the rest of the world.
I. My Father, the Physics Teacher
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I.
If you don't live in Utah, you may not have heard that the Great Salt Lake is in trouble. It's been rapidly dwindling in size and depth, and while it's never going to disappear entirely (though look at the Aral Sea), there are always issues when an environment goes through a rapid transformation. The big worry is that the lake will become so salty that even brine shrimp and brine flies can no longer survive. This would eliminate a major source of food for migrating birds, while at the same time a shrinking lake also removes the wetlands they use for mid-migration habitat. There are other potential problems as well, but you get the idea.
 
I'm old enough to remember when we were having the opposite problem, when the lake was so high that it threatened I-80 (the stretch west of SLC), the SLC airport, and various communities and businesses perched around the edge of the lake. This was in the mid-80s and my father worked at one of those businesses. This particular business would take lake brine, pump it into shallow ponds, allow the water to evaporate away, and then harvest the minerals left behind. Their big cash product was potash, which is used in fertilizers. The rising lake threatened to flood their carefully managed pond system, so it was a real ongoing crisis for my father back then. 
After a couple of years of hard fighting, the lake eventually won. The outer dike was breached and lake water flooded into the pond system, completely wiping out the productive capacity of the business. It was a dark day...

The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity
By: Carl R. Trueman
Published: 2026
256 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?
In the standard story of the transition from the premodern to the modern, the world has gradually been disenchanted. Depending on who you are, this is either a good thing, a sad thing, or a mixed thing.
Trueman's contention is that disenchantment has, over the last few decades, transitioned to desecration. In his telling, the modern world hasn't just outgrown the sacred, it's rebelled against it. Much like a headstrong teenager might revel in doing the opposite of what his parents expect, society has come to celebrate the transgression of things that were previously deemed to be holy. 
These transgressions are not only a source of rebellious pleasure, but more critically, they provide a way to make the person feel superior to the divine. Violating rules and norms allows one to feel above them.
Why is this important? Because (pulling in Nietzsche) having rejected God, men now need to become gods, and this is one way to do it. But these transgressions, rather than elevating men, debase them. We see this debasement in everything from the sexual revolution down through assisted suicide and IVF. In the end Trueman claims one can either accept Christianity root-and-branch or engage in full-on Nietzschean self-creation, but that there is no middle ground, no cultural Christianity, no stable progressive moral creation. It is either one extreme or the other.
What authorial biases should I be aware of?
Trueman is, himself, a root-and-branch Christian, so he definitely favors one side over the other. 
Who should read this book?

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1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by: Eric H. Cline

1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed by: Eric H. Cline and Glyinnis Fawkes

The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing by: Brink Lindsey

The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History by: Odd Arne Westad

Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death
By: Kathleen Stock
Published: 2026
304 pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The general topic is right there in the subtitle, but Stock separates out two distinct ideological foundations. There are those who consider assisted death (a term she prefers over "assisted dying") to be a way of eliminating suffering. And then there are those who view it as a principle of liberty: If we allow people absolute bodily autonomy, why should someone be prevented from choosing to end their life? One problem with having two ideologies is that they might end up pointing in different directions. And indeed one of the big themes of the book is exactly this tension. But the bigger issue is that proponents of assisted death end up using whichever ideological framework is the most convenient for their argument at the time. 
When these different ideologies are distilled down to the practice of implementing a legal "right to die"—which is to say actually assisting in the actual death of actual individuals—it results in incoherent standards. This incoherence leads to misinterpretation. The misinterpretation allows for opportunistic expansion. The expansion leads to abuses not foreseen by the law's framers, and these abuses lead to deaths we might otherwise want to avoid.  Some people might call these deaths murders.
What authorial biases should I be aware of?
If you've heard of Stock previous to this it was almost certainly for her gender-critical views, which led to her being forced out of her position at the University of Sussex in 2021. I don't think it's fair to call her right-wing, but she is definitely iconoclastic. 
Who should read this book?
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