Product Description

In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next 25 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 1300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the 20th century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonized 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 impassioned polemic describes a period in the world's history when everything began to stop making sense.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16411 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Sunday Times
'a magnificent attack on contemporary stupidity... Getting angry hasn't been this much fun in a long time.'

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

Self-satisfied rant masquerades as the enlightened voice of reason
Francis Wheen is that curiously uncomfortable sort of liberal leftie: the sort who, possibly because it's part of the party line, agrees we are best served by a tolerant and pluralistic society, but in the same breath declares with startling certitude (if not good reason) in favour of hard-edged enlightenment values (in particular the primacy of science and logic over other modes of discourse), and who argues without apparent irony that the world would be better off without "mumbo jumbo" which, seeing as it encompasses not just astrologers, faith-healers, priests, and people who believe literally in science fiction, but also supply-side economists, Chomskyites, neo-liberals, neo-conservatives and post-modernists, appears to defy all categorisation other than "Things Francis Doesn't Like".

You can either take or leave his particular gripes: For example, it strikes me as a little arch to say the least for a devotee of Karl Marx to cast stones at other economists' glasshouses, and while one might not agree with Thomas (or Milton) Friedman's libertarian capitalism, it's difficult to see how it qualifies as "mumbo jumbo".

The pinch point with his argument is postmodernism, for it is the only philosophy which justifies the appeal to tolerance and pluralism he makes. As is customary a some relativistic straw-men are wheeled out and ridiculed (the Sokal Hoax makes yet another appearance as the sole evidence for the accused), but it doesn't alter the fact that tolerance and pluralism under Wheen's regime would surely be nothing more than the indulgence of the preternaturally dim: If there really is a Single Right Way To Do It, any temptation to stray from that path, however well-meaning, would be at best a wasteful distraction from the timely solution of the eternal verities. That is, Wheen ought to say there should be very little tolerance at all. But that wouldn't be very liberal: if Francis Wheen were serious about his programme (or at any rate consistent about it), he ought to be something more of an autocrat than he actually professes to be.

The postmodern view, on the other hand, is that a discourse need not be certified enlightenment-compliant for it to have value - value being, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. We all behold things differently, and thank heavens for that. What Wheen asks us to accept is the measure of beauty beheld by *his* eye. With respect, it really isn't all that beguiling.

In sum, what this book really doesn't do is what it says on the tin. It doesn't ever set out what it means by "mumbo jumbo" much less how, when, or in what way it "conquered the world" (I suppose Wheen thinks we have exited a golden age of some sort; I didn't notice anyone turning out the lights or closing any door). All this really adds up to is a Dawkins-like moan. If you fancy a grumpy old man blowing hard (and in places entertainingly, I grant you) against all the things he thinks are rubbish in the world, you'll find some value here. If you want a more thoughtful entry than that, look elsewhere.

Olly Buxton

Had to be said
There is a lot in that book. Some pruning of detail would have made it easier to read; on the other hand, it is all about the English and American political and business world, the late President Mitterrand's fondness for astrology would have been worth mentioning: there are fools everywhere.
One does not have to agree with his philosophical or religious views; indeed, his exagerated praise of eighteenth-century philosophy (otherwise known as "Enlightenment") make us think he may be a little naive himself. On does not have to agree with every detail of what he says, the other reviews show that well.
That being said, it is a magnificent debunking of gobbledegook of all kinds, psychoanalytical gurus, New Age trash, "consultants", authors of get-rich books, "self-improvement" etc. etc. etc. etc. Our age likes to think of itself as the cleverest, but... read that book and you will realise how gullible it is.
For further details, just refer to the book itself.

Now I understand...
Now I understand why I could never get the Post Modernism course I did as part of my degree 10 years ago! For years I had thought I had reached my intellectual limit on that damned course, but now it all makes sense, the whole post modern movement in science was, it turns out, based on nothing but mumbo jumbo and clever language games. It's about as far from science as you can get, and the expose by the physics expert who deliberately wrote a totally nonsensical article about post modern physics to see if it would be published in a leading post modern publication (it was!) was brilliant.

This book also covers the usual suspects of alternative medicine, self help books, political lying and religion creeping into the politics of secular countries, and does so with style and humour.

Wheen is very much a supporter of enlightenment scientific values - i.e. we should base knowledge firmly on empirical sensory data, his problem is with un-scientific, un-tested ideas sneaking into the world of what we call 'knowledge' and then staking a claim to rivalling traditional science. But as our history shows, most human beings will always make decisions and develop beliefs more on feeling/emotional responses than on rationalism and reason.

Wheen suggests that we are currently sliding further and further from these enlightenment values, and that the power of mumbo jumbo is rearing its head again. Let's hope this trend can be arrested before we're all learning creationism in school and having our taxes fund any more unscientific and unproven medical treatments.