Without rhyme or reason

Francis Wheen's book 'How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World' could be justly described as an angry polemic. But if you're getting images in your head of 'Grumpy Old Men' and Jeremy Clarkson perched atop his metaphorical soapbox pontificating pompously about speed cameras, then you're way wide of the mark. These are not the half-baked rantings and ravings of a belligerent moron, but the articulate and well-researched arguments of an erudite author.

What I was expecting was a light-hearted dissection of the modern propensity for "mumbo-jumbo" in such spheres as business and alternative therapy - and, true enough, there is for instance a chapter dedicated to the legions of books with titles like 'Moses: CEO' and 'The Leadership Secrets Of Attila The Hun' which claim to contain the secrets of corporate success but which are in fact stuffed with meaningless or hackneyed platitudes. What I actually got was a complex and fiercely impassioned debunking and denunciation of what Wheen labels “the new irrationalism” in all its many manifestations – Reaganomics, catastrophists, New Age quackery, creationists, UFO fanatics, conspiracy theorists, the War On Terror – and a corresponding call for a return to reason and Enlightenment values.

For Wheen there are no sacred cows. Ronald Reagan is memorably described as an "incorrigible fantasist", while it’s made abundantly clear that the author is not a member of the Cult of Diana: “In Britain, the undisputed champion of implausible self-pity was Lady Diana Spencer. At the time of her engagement to Prince Charles in 1981 she was just another dim, round-faced Sloaney girl of the kind you could see on almost every street in Pimlico, Kensington or Earl’s Court, clad in the unprepossessing uniform that prompted some observers to liken her, cruelly but accurately, to a stewardess from Air Bulgaria. By the time of her funeral sixteen years later she was routinely if ludicrously described as one of the most beautiful women in the world, and the most saintly”.

Wheen’s targets might generally be found on the Right of the political spectrum, but he has no qualms about taking those on the Left to task too. Noam Chomsky, for instance, finds himself in the firing line, guilty – in Wheen’s eyes, at least – of always assuming that everything comes down to American imperialism and for automatically assuming that his enemy’s enemy must be his friend.

Of course, the fact that Wheen’s subject matter is the "the sleep of reason" means that very often he has very little to do other than to give the perpetrators of irrationalism enough rope with which to hang themselves, something he does deftly and to hilarious effect. On guru and New Labour adviser Edward de Bono: "In unboastful fashion, de Bono often says he invented 'lateral thinking' - which is like claiming to have invented poetry, or humour, or grief". And in the chapter on postmodernism: "Luce Irigaray, a high priestess of the movement, denounced Einstein's E=mc² as a ‘sexed equation’, since ‘it privileges the speed of light over other [less masculine] speeds that are vitally necessary to us".

I found the latter chapter particularly interesting, Wheen arguing that postmodernism’s “enfeebling legacy” is “a paralysis of reason, a refusal to observe any qualitative difference between reasonable hypotheses and swirling hogwash”. It’s a bit of a caricature but certainly not a wholly undeserved one, and the section in which he illustrates postmodernists’ predilection for "babbling impenetrability" by quoting from Gilles Deleuze had me chuckling and nodding my head in agreement. (Wheen does seem a little over-reliant on Terry Eagleton’s critique of postmodernism, though – ironic in that Eagleton himself is not always the most lucid of critics…)

At every turn the text seems to throw up clay pigeons for Wheen to shoot at. If I had a criticism, though, it would be that the book is somewhat scattergun. The chapters which confine themselves to a single issue work well, but others range across several topics, shifting uneasily from postmodernism to creationism and from a robust defence of the Enlightenment project to the sentimentalism of the public reaction to Diana’s death (“Diarrhoea”). In the interview at the back of the book in which he discusses its reception, Wheen dismisses John Gray’s criticism of it as “a rambling and bilious tirade” on the grounds that Gray is just nettled at being singled out for vilification in its pages – in reality, there is an ounce of truth to the comment.

There are also occasions when Wheen is perhaps guilty of rather overstating the case: “For the American defence industry, which had spent the past decade fretfully calculating the consequences of a ‘peace dividend’, the identification of Islamic terrorism as the latest globe-threatening force was very good news indeed”. And: “Those who defend horoscopes as harmless fun never explain what is either funny or harmless in promoting a con-trick which preys on ignorance and fear”.

But these are minor quibbles which hardly detract from what is a bold and intellectually rigorous book that’ll have the level-headed sceptic in you alternately chuckling and snorting in bewilderment at the absurdities of twenty-first century Western society.