Wheen, Francis - How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
(22 February 09)How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
Francis Wheen How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World:
A Short History of Modern Delusions (Harper 2004)
Reviewed by John Carr.
(Reviewed February 2006)
Francis Wheen is an English journalist, best known for his biography of Karl Marx (1999). His latest book is a scathing attack on what he sees as a world-wide regression to irrationality through ignorance, laziness and expediency. His purpose “is to show how the humane values of the Enlightenment have been abandoned or betrayed.”
As might be expected, a major target is religious fundamentalism, but much more space is devoted to the flight from reason in politics, business, medicine, academia and popular culture. He points out, for example, that both Muslim and Christian clerics saw the hand of God behind the strikes on the World Trade Centre, that most leading economists were blind to the impending Enron and ‘dot.com’ collapses, that the Royal Family supports homeopathy and that both the Blairs and the Clintons are New Age dabblers. He claims that the post-mortem adulation of Diana was a ‘blubfest’ that sucked in otherwise rational people of all political and social persuasions.
While acknowledging that the Enlightenment program has always been under attack, he believes that two events in 1979 accelerated humanity’s descent of the slippery slope to unreason. In that year two very different leaders came to power with agendas that have given Mumbo-Jumbo new momentum: Margaret Thatcher was elected with a vision of re-establishing ‘Victorian values’ in the UK; and the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile in France, vowing to turn the clock back to the Eighth Century. Both came to be seen as Messiahs by large numbers of powerful leaders far beyond the confines of their own countries.
Though Wheen is predictably dismissive of religious fundamentalists, right-wing politicians and multi-national corporations, he reserves his strongest criticism for liberal and left-wing intellectuals, because they should know better. In universities, post-modernism is so extreme in its relativism that academics can play no useful part in solving practical problems in the real world. All too often, professional anti-Americans like Pilger and Chomsky are blind to evidence that is at odds with their prejudices, so they continue to fight ‘the last war’ long after new enemies are clearly in sight.
Some Sea-of-Faithers may find Mumbo-Jumbo a challenging read — Wheen refers to progressives as ‘squishy’! Ouch!
