14.02.2006
The Enlightenment had taught us that we could rid ourselves of ignorance through careful observation of the world, intellectual freedom, and the scientific method. Tradition, authority, superstition, and absolutism were no longer to be relied upon. This gave rise to secular democracy. Yet, after several hundred years, science and empiricism are being attacked by hot-gospellers as being just another belief system … or attacked as a form of “intellectual imperialism” by post-modern scholars … or attacked as rigid narrow-mindedness by New Age spiritualists. Large numbers of people, including many influential politicians, are willing to believe in all sorts of bazaar notions: conspiracy theories involving extra-terrestrials, faddish management gimmicks, anti-foreigner hysteria, and the spiritualism of feng-shui furniture arrangement, to name just a few.
What is all this nonsense? Where have our critical faculties gone? When did it all go wrong? Francis Wheen goes some way toward answering these questions in his witty exploration of modern delusions, entitled How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. Each chapter of Wheen’s book is devoted to debunking a different set of Counter-Enlightenment beliefs.
One chapter is about faddish management writing and the management consulting industry. The key characteristics of half-baked management ideas are described: appeals to empty platitudes and mottos; use of neologistic jargon to give the appearance of methodological rigour; use of silly analogies, often historical in nature (books such as The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun and Confucius in the Boardroom); a condescending and cheer-leading writing style, drawn largely from the genre of self-help and self-motivation books; and the reduction of complexity into simplistic formulae and lists (The Seven Habits of… or The Ten Steps to…). This has given rise to a chattering class of gurus and the cult of leadership within the workplace. All this amounts to the trivialization of management and the way organisations work. These ideas are also extremely influential despite the fact that the evidence supporting them is often lacking (it’s usually anecdotal, if that).
Two chapters are focused on academia. Wheen’s first targets are celebrity academics who peddle “cretinous oversimplification” to policy-makers and think-tanks, notably Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington.1 Attempts to give creationism and evolution equal weight in the American educational curriculum are also attacked. Most of Wheen’s discussion is focused on schools of thought beginning with the prefix post-, such as post-modernism. Po-mo scholars have become a snobbish and dogmatic clique that peddles ideology under the guise of a highly convoluted (often impenetrable) language. Much of Wheen’s discussion focuses on the Sokal Affair. This involved the physicist Alan Sokal submitting a nonsensical critique of science to the post-modernist journal Social Text. The article was written in a satirized post-modern style and contained some outrageous assertions and bazaar non-sequiturs, while simultaneously flattering the ideological views of the editors. It was published. The editors were unapologetic about being oblivious to the hoax.
Next target: superstition. Wheen covers a lot of ground here. Nostradamus-like predictors of the end of the world are lampooned. More interesting is the widespread belief in horoscopes. These are often defended as harmless fun yet, as Wheen argues, it is not clear how preying on ignorance and fear is harmless. It probably isn’t harmless given the large number of stockbrokers who claim to read them. Even high-minded, staunchly secular newspapers print horoscopes these days. Alternative medical treatments like homeopathy have become a booming industry despite the complete lack of evidence that it works. Sightings of UFOs and claims of government cover-ups have become frequent. Conspiracy theorists seem to draw out hidden meaning from every coincidence or unexplained phenomenon. People are looking for secret codes in ancient texts and developing strange fascinations in the existence of angels. Wheen notes how many celebrity politicians seem to buying into this stuff, even those who claim to be devout Christians. Speaking of which, Wheen includes a brief chapter about how religious nostrums have come to guide the actions of many powerful people.
The most novel chapter is about the new sentimentality that has gripped popular culture. There is a new emotionalism in public life whereby feelings count for more than thinking. This is typified by Oprah-like, confessional television talk-shows. Politicians who exude empathy are able to manipulate audiences through personal stories and expressing sympathy towards those who have experienced pain and suffering. In contrast, people who use intelligent, well reasoned arguments are made to appear like “emotionally immature” grumps. The death of Lady Diana Spencer is the case in point Wheen cites. Diana mixed “therapized victim-speak”, self-destructive behaviour, and the flamboyant consumerism we’ve come to expect from modern celebrities. When she died, British tabloids were unrelenting in their call for open displays of emotion from politicians and the Royal family. According to Wheen, the more sinister side of letting emotionalism rule politics is tabloid calls for lynch-mob justice. This creates moral panics and hysterical fits whenever a highly provocative crime story hits the front page.
The remaining chapters cut large swaths through economics, politics and international affairs. The overarching theme is the how the serious and debatable ideas animating the affairs of the state and market have somehow risen to the level of infallible belief—a “voodoo revolution”, as Wheen calls it. Indeed, it is remarkable how religious rhetoric and narrative forms (e.g., the journey of sinning, falling, and redemption) have found their way into popular business writing to the point where some consider the market to have magical powers. Irrational speculative bubbles plague financial markets, which begin to look more like casinos. Many “New economy” firms (notably the defunct Enron) have a cult-like following, even though few fully understood what they do and can’t be bothered to find out. There is a similar incoherence among those on the other side of the ideological spectrum. These anti-capitalist pundits (such as John Pilger and Noam Chomsky) pay lip service to a vision of universal human rights while, at the same time, attacking attempts to safeguard such rights. This becomes a farce as modern Luddite activists make ever more effective use of technology to spread their views. It is no coincidence that pro- and anti-Globalists pundits talk past each other given this death-grip on dogma.
One of the greatest strengths of this book—its breath of coverage—is also a weakness in some respects. I can think of at least one other book which provides a more thorough analysis of each subject addressed by Wheen. Yet, I can’t think of a book that discusses so many different subjects. This gives How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World a text-book quality, albeit one with a polemical writing style.
The macroscopic nature of the book does leave Wheen vulnerable to the criticism of only highlighting the most obvious examples. Indeed, there is an almost exclusive emphasis on the big names and sensational cases singled out by the popular media. Are these cases representative of the larger currents of thinking that Wheen attacks? I ask because there is a pundit’s formula evident here: take a school of thought you don’t like; isolate the most controversial figures and arguments; critique those figures and arguments as if they are representative or pivotal to the school. This is probably too harsh because these cases are meant to be illustrative, not form the basis of straw-man arguments. Nonetheless, the overall effect is exaggeration. For example, Lucy Irigaray and Jacques Lacan are mostly fringe players within post-modernism. Most post-modern scholars these days take great pains to distance themselves from these eccentrics. Likewise, Fukuyama and Huntington are surely not the only examples of cretinous academic oversimplication that Wheen could find. So why not go after the more authoritative writing and arguments? Because if you are covering so much ground, criticism often gets reduced to the equivalent of a drive-by shooting.
I won’t dwell on the cursory nature of some of Wheen’s critiques. The subtitle warns that it is a ”short history”. It is enough that How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World is an excellent overview and a sobering map of popular Counter-Enlightenment thinking.
Review by Peter Stoyko
NOTES
1. Francis Fukuyama is a former U.S. civil servant who wrote a popular series of newspaper articles (turned into a book) that argued that we had reached the end of History; that is, there is no ideology-based vision of society that we can imagine ourselves trying to create other than a liberal-capitalist one. Wheen correctly points out that there are many periods in our past when we could not imagine a different plight. I do not think much of Fukuyama’s work on this topic either but I have to confess to enjoying his book Trust (1996). Samuel Huntington argued that there is a “clash of civilisations” taking place between the West and Islam. Wheen thinks this is too simplistic because of the widespread traditionalism in the West, the heterogeneity with Muslim countries, and the continual cross-fertilisation between both sets of places.
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