Product Description

An entertaining, impassioned polemic on the retreat of reason in the late 20th century. An intellectual call to arms, Francis Wheen's Sunday Times bestseller is one of 2004's most talked about books. In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In Britain, an era of weary consensualist politics was displaced by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, whose ambition was to reassert 'Victorian values'. In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1,300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the twentieth century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonised the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo. Modernity was challenged by a gruesome alliance of pre-modernists and post-modernists, medieval theocrats and New Age mystics. It was as if the Enlightenment had never happened. Francis Wheen, winner of the George Orwell prize, evokes the key personalities of the post-political era -- including Princess Diana and Deepak Chopra, Osama Bin-Laden and Nancy Reagan's astrologer -- while charting the extraordinary rise in superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria over the past quarter of a century. From UFO scares to dotcom mania, his hilarious and gloriously impassioned polemic describes a period in the world's history when everything began to stop making sense.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2255 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
'A brilliant, eccentric book.' Observer Book of the Year 'Wheen has a Swiftian relish for exposing the cant that attends the 'new rationality'!bullshit's enema number one.' Tim Adams, Observer 'Hugely enjoyable!delightful reading.' Ferdinand Mount, Sunday Times 'Lightly and often hilariously told as it is, this book does make it clear that respect for truth and reason is retreating and mumbo-jumbo has a new confidence everywhere!This amusing, intelligent and elegantly argued book is as good a demonstration of the values it defends as could be imagined.' Philip Hensher, Spectator 'This book is a manifesto for rescuing the greatest philosophical movement of the past millennium. You have a choice: either read it or, pre-emptively shred your brain in anticipation of the coming darkness.' Independent on Sunday 'This book is a manifesto for rescuing the greatest philosophical movement of the past millennium. You have a choice: either read it or, pre-emptively shred your brain in anticipation of the coming darkness.' Independent on Sunday 'Such an entertaining writer. Wheen is, one senses, a good man to go tiger-hunting with; it is no less fun to watch him shooting fish in a barrel.' Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph 'Very funny!a brilliant satiric essay.' Will Cohu, Daily Telegraph 'If Wheen's book succeeds in starting to shift the balance between reason and sentimentality, between lavish prompts of the heart and the colder ones of the brain, between rigorous analysis and twaddled cloaked in obscurity, then I think the ghost of Jefferson will have every right, every reason, to be proud of him.' David McKie, Guardian 'This book is a well-informed polemic that most enjoyably challenges you to think. Wheen cuts a Jonathan Swift-like swathe through the morass of tosh, hogwash, and it could be added, bullshit that threatens to clog our minds.' Peter Lewis, Daily Mail Francis Wheen is the intelligent sceptic's intelligent sceptic, and How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered The World casts a cold eye on fads in government, management and health that have swept the Anglo-Saxon world in the past 20 years. The urge to believe is unstoppable in most of mankind. The abundance of stupidity in this book is enough to make you pine for Ian Paisley.' Jeremy Paxman, Mail on Sunday 'One of the best reads you are likely to read this winter, full of spark and fine writing. FT Francis Wheen also writes about Samuel Huntington in the Independent magazine's 'Heroes & Villains' column. His piece on 'mad theories making a come back and politicians helping' ran in the Sunday Times News Review.

Observer
'Wheen is doing his valiant (and hilarious) best for the rational...The book zings along, throwing up interesting facts.'

Guardian
'we should be very grateful indeed that Wheen has written this book...'

Customer Reviews

A small voice of reason
From the first page this book promises a great deal: Francis Wheen sets out to show how society, both Western and Islamic, has determinedly squandered the benefits of the Enlightenment and has developed an astonishing hostility towards contemporary science and rational thought.

Wheen paints a picture that is both amusing and chilling: our citizens and leaders are in the thrall of hocus and spin; educated people consume with gusto the diet of drivel served up in the media; an entire nation loses its grip after the death of a Sloaney princess; and post-modernists conjure with words to question the reality of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide.

This would have been a better book if Wheen had built on its early momentum and resisted the lure of diatribe, but there is such a surfeit of material to support his thesis, and so much nonsense routinely peddled by famous people who should have known better, that he seems unable to stop. The result is erudite and funny, but in the end this is a string of good journalism, rather than the serious manifesto that it might have been.

I recommend this book, and I hope that Wheen will soon produce another edition that not only updates us on the progress of this human ship of fools (which seems daily to surpass itself in its vainglorious stupidity) but also lingers more on the questions why, and what needs to be done.

A couple of points.
It's a great book in many ways, of course. Francis Wheen is consistently amusing and shares a breadth of knowledge comparable with another journalistic polymath of our times, Christopher Hitchens. However, a few caveat emptors. Mr Wheen was an enthusiastic supporter of the invasion of Iraq. As the war has gone increasingly tits-up for the invaders, Wheen and other supporters from the left-wing, such as Nick Cohen, have been getting more and more agitated about the rightness of their cause. The result of this is that their concerns about the war, by a process of what could be termed guilty hysterical osmosis, are leaching into nearly everything they write. Mr Wheen and Cohen could be prosing about anything from shower caps to sangria these days, yet still manage to get a couple of sly digs in about the islamo-fascist-appeasing nature of the left. Just a warning, that's all.
I have to take issue with his criticism of Noam Chomsky in this book as well. Not only does Francis Wheen swallow the tired old canard that Chomsky supported Pol Pot, a slur which I recall (doubtless erroneously) was invented by dear old William Shawcross, it would also seem incumbent upon Wheen to correctly identify the ideology of those he seeks to mock. In other words, in this book which celebrates the spirit of enlightenment, he seems to have Chomsky down as some unreconstructed Maoist/Stalinist, a charge which is so laughably misguided, I can only assume the exquisitely educated Mr Wheen has never read a damn thing by Chomsky, who, as any fule kno, is a self-proclaimed libertarian socialist/anarchist, primarily influenced by Rudolf Rocker. Doh! You may as well accuse him of being a Jehovah's Witness. Chomsky's acerbic dislike of Leninists and other state socialists is very well known. He also rather applauds the spirit of the enlightenment in many of his works, namechecking von Humboldt among others as his intellectual heroes.
Hey ho, apart from these little gripes, it's still a bloody good read and one in the eye for those who still insist on the validity of creatonism, Deepak Chopra, Kabbalah, and other fairy tales for the terminally ignorant. Mind you, they're not going to be reading this sort of thing, are they?

An excellent thought-provoking book
Francis Wheen covers a lot of ground in this book. If there is a criticism, it is that his analysis is not as in-depth as it could be. But it would have been a different, and excessively weighty, book if it had been.

Mr Wheen could have gone for the easier option of going after the obvious targets of mumbo-jumbo such as complementary medicine and new ageism. These certainly get a look-in, but are far from the whole story. Mr Wheen has more interesting targets in mind including post-modernism and a variety of topics beloved of political left and right including the free market, globalisation and the Third Way. By straying into this territory, Mr Wheen guarantees that few readers will agree with everything he has to say; but as the whole book is about challenging the accepted wisdom of the day, this is perhaps no bad thing.