The Hand that Rocks the World: An Inquiry Into Truth, Power and Gender - David Shackleton,

The Hand that Rocks the World: An Inquiry Into Truth, Power and Gender, by Ottawa's well-known men's advocate David Shackleton, is one ambitious undertaking. Shackleton’s goal is to lay the groundwork for a new social science discipline, one that will guide humanity to truth and wisdom. According to Shackleton, once this innovative psychosocial regimen is established and put into practice, it will lead to -- among other previously unattainable accomplishments -- the eradication of the psychological blocks that prevent men and women from understanding and accepting one another other fully. Applied properly, the new social science will ensure both sides learn precisely how the two groups can fit snugly together into the same world, and live happily ever after.

Is such a utopia possible, or even desirable? Probably not, but that doesn't mean someone can't try, and Shackleton, an engineer by training, gets an A+ for effort. Indeed, in working with extremely complicated issues -- including, among others, evil, truth, love, wisdom and spirituality -- his is a gallant, maybe even heroic, attempt.
    Shackleton integrates his own -- sometimes quite traumatic -- experiences with his extravagant, "dualistic balance" theories on human behaviour and thought, as well as his reasonable but not entirely original hypothesis about four-stage psychic development from denial to enhanced knowledge and consciousness. The latter scheme is not dissimilar to what Alcoholics Anonymous calls a spiritual awakening after years of denial, a system he also credits.
    But after 346 pages of dense, difficult reading, this reader remains unconvinced, and even a little pained that after all that work, no hitherto unknown psycho-social truths are uncovered. His dualism idea looks eerily similar -- though not precisely like -- Hegel's thesis-antithesis-synthesis model. Dualism itself, Shackleton admits, has origins as far back as Plato and takes substantive but useless form with Descartes, though the three hypotheses do of course comprise different elements.
    Shackleton begins his book by insisting that we, as humans, must seek out and embrace truth no matter how much pain it causes. Sounds good, but then he goes on to write on page twelve that: "It is clear that we need this understanding urgently -- our inability to comprehend and therefore manage our own behaviour and that of our societies has led us to the brink of disaster. Environmental destruction, climate change, economic collapse, fossil fuel depletion, overpopulation -- any of these could lead to devastation on a scale we haven't seen in centuries, if ever, and all of them together represent a most urgent call for us to wise up, to grow up, to begin to get a handle on our own behaviour on this planet. To begin, in short, to understand ourselves."
    Whoa! Wait a minute! Climate change? The man- made variety -- to which I am sure he is referring -- is an ideological assertion, not an empirical, that is to say demonstrable, fact. Serious demographers don’t talk about over-population anymore – instead, they talk about population decline. Environmental destruction can mean anything to anyone. Where is it happening? From what I read, we are steadily improving in every single area of environmental concern. Economic collapse is also meaningless. Greece, North Korea, even backwards and corrupt African countries, have functioning economies, albeit not conforming to the highest practices and standards. Moreover, the Western world is nowhere near falling to those levels. And we are not in imminent danger of running out of fossil fuels. It may happen someday, but not for centuries, by which time mankind will have perfected the next generation of mass energy-producing technology.
    Given the absence of facts in the above quote from The Hand, one wonders how much genuine truth-seeking Shackleton actually engages in.
    Perhaps the most striking illustration of Shackleton’s failure to adopt his own professed standards of intellectual rigour is his assertion that Hitler, Stalin and McCarthy all belong in the same category. My reaction was, Really? McCarthy on par with Hitler and Stalin? McCarthy may have been a buffoon and a drunkard, but serious historians (as opposed to ideological polemicists masquerading as historians) all agree that, personality flaws notwithstanding, McCarthy was almost completely right about communists in the U.S. government. More importantly, unlike Hitler and Stalin, he never killed anyone, let alone orchestrated the mass murder of millions. Shackleton’s comparison isn’t just absurd, it’s self-evidently so, causing one to question – once more – how serious a “truth-seeker” he really is.
    In Shackleton's best chapters, he is discussing the marvellous attributes of and positive differences between men and women. In particular, I was brought to tears when he described how, as the Titanic sank, one of the richest men in the world put on his best clothes to die, as he watched the women of even the lowest classes row away to safety. The three middle chapters on evil are definitely food for thought. In one section, he goes to some lengths to show that both men and women suffer from violence in society, yet women unfairly and irrationally receive 98.2 percent of the attention from media and elsewhere. In fact, worldwide, more than 75 percent of homicide victims are male. Where's the outcry?
    I can get on board when Shackleton states that modern feminism is evil and hurtful to both genders, and I agree that the best method for change is to approach feminists and policy-makers without anger and recriminations and with a whole heart desiring of fundamental and common sense transformations. I don't think I am yet quite as serene as he is to make generous offers of conciliation.
    There is a chapter on abortion wherein the author purports to apply his theory. I will leave that to other readers to decide for themselves how well it works.
    In the end, I can't get past the troubling fact that someone who claims to be interested in pursuing truth is jumping off from positions that are so obviously unsupported by facts. And in all honesty, I would have put the book down after fifteen pages, but I promised the writer I would do this review.

As with most books on Lynne Like's, you can get this on Amazon.ca.