PATH TO POWER, ROAD TO RUIN

Kavanagh explores the hazards of blind allegiance to political and religious ideologies in this nonfiction debut.

Born into a conservative Irish Catholic home, the author was taught (or in his words, “indoctrinated”) to simply accept the family’s religious faith without question. At the time, he found comfort in his unbridled loyalty to this belief system, which not only provided cut-and-dried answers to the complexities of life and death, but also promised its adherents that their “status and identity would be raised to new heights.” Yet an off-putting experience during confession (related to the sin of eating meat on a Friday), combined with contradictory messages from Church leadership, prompted Kavanagh to question his faith as a teenager. Later, during a college visit to Yale (where he would eventually earn a degree), the author was introduced to the scholarship on genocide, learning of the interwoven histories of ideological movements and extreme violence. With a subsequent graduate degree from Columbia University, and as the CEO of Market Corporation of America, Kavanagh draws on his own personal experiences and solid grasp of world history to make his case against ideological extremism. The book begins with an interdisciplinary look at the psychological attraction of ideologies across the political and religious spectrums, emphasizing how they offer adherents the “the promise of a better life or better world,” ease anxieties, and provide access to social groups that “give meaning to their lives.” He goes on to examine how power-hungry leaders have exploited ideologies for their own ends and the roles of ideologies in fostering some of history’s grimmest examples of brutality.

The strength of the book lies in its critique of extremism on all sides. In surveying the popularity of Donald Trump, for instance, Kavanagh discusses the corrosive aspects of Christian Nationalism on American democracy, from targeting reproductive rights to the marginalization of immigrants, non-Christians, and others deemed “second class citizens.” Alternately, the author details the failures of Leftist movements in providing promised utopias, noting the death tolls associated with the killing fields of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and Mao’s Great Famine and Cultural Revolution in China. Indeed, per Kavanagh’s convincing historical narrative, nearly all of the world’s worst atrocities—from transatlantic slavery to the Holocaust—have ideological roots. Making the case against “absolutism” (which the book defines as “The Refuge of Small Minds”), the author urges readers to question the ideological fallacies that they may blindly embrace and offers pragmatic advice for “developing well-grounded, bottoms-up belief systems” based on openness, high standards of evidence, research, and intellectual honesty. Writing explicitly for a general audience, Kavanagh here aims to provide “ordinary people” with a path toward ideological freedom. His accessible writing style is backed by a solid grasp of the relevant academic literature—the text is accompanied by two dozen pages of endnotes and bibliographic citations. While at times a bit reductionist in its terminology (for instance, using simplistic definitions of “Evangelical Christianity” that ignore the vibrant history of America’s Black churches in defying their white counterparts), the book otherwise mounts a powerful argument against extremism on all sides. A useful appendix offers readers a systematic timeline of “Mass Killing[s] By Ideology,” providing thorough documentation of ideological violence associated with imperialism, racism, religious fanaticism, and other scurrilous ideas.

A powerful case for independent thought.