How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World
By Francis Wheen
Harper Perennial
338 pages
REVIEW BY DAVE RILEY
When oft upon my couch I lie with my head in a book, I sometimes wallow in my choice of pastimes. While growing up it was seen as so much more intellectual to read rather than do something else with one's time. If there could be snobbery in my urban milieu it was one born from a determined rationalism. Books were supposedly a gateway to intellect.
So if you think you have the smarts, this book by Francis Wheen is for you. It doesn't take much effort to recognise after a few years at the page face that there is an awful lot of crap between covers. I mean insidious, destructive mumbo jumbo that gets passed around as the best thing since sliced bread was first written about.
Take postmodernism — mumbo jumbo if there was ever a jumbo. I'm sorry if I offend by being so off-hand about a fashionable intellectual trend, but then I've just read my surfeit of Wheen and I doubt that any registered postmodernist could survive his savage polemic against his or her preferred investigative "narrative".
Similarly all those keen New Age-ists who wrap so much banana oil — such as that sold by Deepak Chopra — in big warm fuzzy hugs could learn a thing or two about the absolute irrationality of their preferences. Or the can-do do-it-yourselvers, who take on any one of any number of patented versions of awaking the giant within, they too may find that the inner giant may be out to lunch when they go to rouse same.
Firing broadsides at the new populist methodologies like these is Wheen's forte and when he packages them together you have to wonder where the collective brain is at nowadays. What, he keeps asking, happened to the Enlightenment? In unison with him you have to wonder.
Along with such an array of certifiable mumbo jumbo, Wheen also throws in the new ideology of economic rationalism sponsored by such gurus as Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman. No slouch when in comes to being polemical, he addresses the new rightist ideology at its theoretical sources. In response, you cannot help wondering how we were fooled these last 30 years into being so complacent while so many chatterboxes refined the marketing of the capitalistic ether we breath today.
It's insidious. Across the board from Derrida to Tony Robbins to Ronald Reagan, we are constantly being asked to disengage our brains and believe that these "systems" will work for us in the real world, despite their shared determination to present that world as different from our own everyday experiences of it.
So if you are looking for a "sceptics' own manual", this book is for you. It may be a bit late in coming but at least Wheen has taken a broad sweep at attacking this pandemic voodooism that is being employed to warp our intellect. His is "rationalism for dummies".
Nonetheless, in his determination to go on the offensive, Wheen fails to explain where all this mumbo jumbo stuff fits in ideologically. Is there method in this madness? Are we just a bunch of fools being led by the nose because we suffer from the unfortunate delusions of crowds?
Similarly, if it is not too much to ask of a registered rationalist, where does this mental weakness come from and why now? Wheen is keen to date the onset of unreason with the 1979 Iranian revolution and the concurrent rise of Thatcherism. So this period of voodoo has, for him, a clearly defined time frame.
So it is strange that he side steps the invasion of Iraq. No matter how expectantly you read this book, on the obvious flip side to the events of 1979 he falls silent — that is until you get to a postscript written after the book was first published.
Here, as well as attacking the likes of Tariq Ali, John Pilger and the British Socialist Workers Party for supporting the Iraqi resistance, Wheen accuses the "self proclaimed" left as a new champion of obscurantism because of the side it has chosen in this conflict and its united front with Islamic outfits such as the Muslim Association of Britain.
In a rhetorical manoeuvre akin to those of George Orwell, Wheen, who has also published a biography of Karl Marx, is claiming space for himself on the left that proclaims a rigid loyalty to the Enlightenment tradition. "Seldom has a hefty dose of rational thinking, been more necessary", he writes, "seldom has it been harder to find."
This book is a great assault on the mindless crap we have to put up with day in day out, but Wheen falls for the snob's trap of playing at being more rational than thou.
From Green Left Weekly, August 24, 2005.
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