How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions (Francis Wheen, Fourth Estate, 2004)

Harvey Cox, professor of divinity at Harvard University, was reading the business pages of newspapers, and had an urgent thought: ‘One sometimes wonders,’ he writes, ‘in this era of market religion, where all the sceptics and freethinkers have gone. What has happened to the Voltaires who once exposed bogus miracles, and the HL Menckens who blew shrill whistles on pious humbuggery?’ Cox’s prayers have been answered: enter journalist (and deputy editor of the satirical fortnightly Private Eye and author of a biography of Karl Marx) Francis Wheen, exposing in a series of satiric essays the nakedness of most of our emperors.

His thesis: Reason is on the retreat in just about every area of public discourse. In 329 pages and 311 endnotes he argues that Enlightenment ideals (‘an insistence on intellectual autonomy, a rejection of tradition and authority as the infallible sources of truth, a loathing for bigotry and persecution, a commitment to free inquiry, a belief that, in Francis Bacon’s words, knowledge is indeed power’) have fallen on very hard times. Gullibility is stalking the planet.

Wheen’s book is an entertaining search for a unified field theory of nonsense/claptrap/gobbledegook/tosh (yes, he’s British), in an age where emotion seems to be elevated over fact and reason.

The opening chapter pokes fun at the exaggerated claims made for market economics in the 1980s. In the annus horribilis 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini and Margaret Thatcher led retreats from the values of the Enlightenment back to those of the Middle Ages and the Victorian era respectively.

Consider: how does one respond to the Reagans taking advice from astrologers, or Tony and Cherie Blair’s rebirthing experience in a Mexican mud bath, or Hillary Clinton’s getting help from past-lives adviser Jean Houston – apart from expressing either contempt or hilarity?

Another: how did 2 per cent of Americans (3.7 million people) come to believe they have been abducted by aliens? (As one commentator pointed out, this should, if nothing else, signal a crisis for air-traffic control).

And again: why is the best-educated generation in history so fascinated by horoscopes, New Age quackery, UFOs, Nostradamus, homeopathy, religious fundamentalism, the mawkishness of the cult of Diana, rebirthing, feng shui, the idea that ageing is learnt behaviour, de Bono’s six-hats thinking system, the Jupiter Effect (a bestselling book that claimed the alignment of the planets would cause devastating earthquakes in California in 1982) or the alleged healing power of crystals?

But Wheen mostly inveighs against mad, bad or irrational twaddle-in-high-places like

+ the unholy alliance between mysticism and management theory – promoted by the likes of Tom Peters, Deepak Chopra (‘affluence is simply our natural state’), and Stephen Covey

+ the relativism of postmodern literary theorists ‘who insist that fact and fiction are indistinguishable’. (Note critic Stanley Fish’s remark that ‘critical theory relieves me of the obligation to be right… and demands only that I be interesting’)

+ the notions of ‘trickle-down wealth’ (‘what George Bush called “voodoo economics” before he embraced them as president’) and the ‘Laffer curve’ – the famous napkin diagram holding that lavish upper-bracket tax cuts would magically result in increased government tax revenues

+ the dotcom boom/bust, the rise and fall of Enron and the ‘witch doctor economics of the IMF’

+ the simplistic faith of George Bush and Tony Blair – ‘postmodern relativism to justify appeasing pre-modern zealots’

Wheen doesn’t like John Gray (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus), Francis ‘End of History’ Fukuyama, Samuel P. ‘Clash of Civilizations’ Huntington, Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, John Pilger and a host of other radical/creative thinkers. The jargon of left-wingers is no more rational than free-marketeers’ selfish blather. Most religion, and literary criticism, is junk. He pokes fun at the mad get-rich-quick scheme we call the stockmarket (‘how did people come to believe that all was well when Wall Street prices bore no relation to actual economic conditions?’).

His heroes are a few polymath sceptics – HL Mencken, JK Galbraith – and writers ‘who dig where others skim’, like the Cambridge academic Richard Evans, router of holocaust-denier David Irving, Jonathan Weil who first exposed the fraudulent operations of Enron, or physicist Alan Sokal who sent a prank submission to the cultural studies journal Social Text denying any mathematical proof that reality exists.

I reckon we need more nonsense-debunkers (‘crap detectors’ is the current term) like Francis Wheen (and Noam Chomsky and John Pilger for that matter). Wheen rarely explores the reasons why superstition and credulity have taken such a dramatic hold on the public mind (e.g. the powerful influence of Freudianism – the belief that humans are controlled fundamentally not by rational thought but by irrational desire. Wheen dismisses most aspects of ‘therapy culture’). And yes, some postmodern theorising is nutty (probably the only people who still believe in Derrida absolutely are first-year students), but there has been a very thorough critique of it, both within and outside the academy, for some time now. By excluding the non-rational we exclude a major dynamic in human interactions with other humans, and with ideas.

A proper religious – especially Christian – apologetic marries reason and what I’d prefer to call an ‘enlightened suprarationalism’. I start from the life and claims of Jesus as described in the four Gospels, (yes, yes, I know about the Jesus Seminar caveats) and work from there. Until someone can suggest a better-put-together person/guru, I’m happy to remain a committed Christ-follower.

Rowland Croucher

January 2006