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What characterizes our era? Cults, quacks, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo, that's what. In How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, Francis Wheen brilliantly laments the extraordinary rise of superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria. From Middle Eastern fundamentalism to the rise of lotteries, astrology to mysticism, poststructuralism to the Third Way, Wheen shows that there has been a pervasive erosion of Enlightenment values, which have been displaced by nonsense. And no country has a more vivid parade of the bogus and bizarre than the one founded to embody Enlightenment values: the USA. In turn comic, indignant, outraged, and just plain baffled by the idiocy of it all, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World is a masterful depiction of the absurdity of our times and a plea that we might just think a little more and believe a little less.… (more)
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Wheen does convince me that the fog of moral relativism has spread far. all forms of objectivism seem to be under assault. Social moral and scientific values are all at times lost in the myths of relatism. Where one theory is always assumed as good as another.
Science and technology of course continues unbothered by the lack of critical thought or real peer review in other areas.
But unless critical thought is widespread society is doomed to misuse that science.
However there is no real depth just a selective list of examples of varying degrees of dubiousness, with no description of a theme, no analysis of context nor sociological impact beyond the immediate cause-effect.
Wheen starts with the proposition that Mumbo-Jumbo took power along with Khomeini and Thatcher. and has remainded ascendent ever since.
He lists examples and thats thats it.. No grand plan, No analysis of trends no real evidence evidence of its growth no distinguishing between follies. mere anecdotes. Just a list of things that he felt personally affronted or amused by. I see one of hisnewspaper reviewers summed the work up as equivilant to watching Victor Meldrew mutter I dont believe it. He was wrong. Meldrew is more amusing.
Mumbo Jumbo did not in my opinion suddenly gain ascendency. to remain in power ever since. Pivitol though that year may be in many ways. People have been battling it since time immemorial. H. L. Mencken, George Orwell, and Alan Sokal. are amongst the fighters. Indeed Sokal's success in spreading dismay amongst the enemy is documented. here evidence that Mumbo jumbo does lose that it has not cconquered the world.
There is no overall analysis. we are left to assume that Margret Thatcher's confrontational nature her inability to seek or negotiate compromise. is some how equivilent to the indescisive ambivilence of those politicans who's natural instinct on seeing a fence is to sit on it ignoring as often as not the warning signs,Danger Wolves!
Because of it's polemical nature the book lacks is balance, occasionally it would have been useful to hear the other side of an argument, and not everything he tackles is mumbo-jumbo.
Economics is the book's weak point. Wheen dismisses economists like Milton Freidman for putting forward a monetarist approach. Also, why did certain economists believe that if you taxed the rich more there would be a trickle down effect that would enrich the rest of society? Especially in light of the efforts the rich go to avoid paying tax in the first place. Was this belief political or economic, and if it was political, is that not a betrayal of the 'science' of economics? Whichever way you look at it though, holding a different economic belief is not believing in mumbo-jumbo.
There is a problem with his approach to alternative medicine, as well. Homeopathy, and a number of other 'treatments', have been proven to be bunkum as medicine but they do work as treatments because of the placebo effect. It appears in certain circumstances if a patient believes something is working then it does. Although of course, there is a limit to this effectiveness - it doesn't heal bullet wounds, for example. Acupuncture is a different matter, there are studies showing that it may have be effective in some areas - in China, you can get cheaper operations if you use acupuncture instead of conventional anaesthetics, and it appears to be working.
Other than that, the usual suspects get the treatment they deserve - alien abduction, anti-evolutionists, homeopathy, Diana worship, etc. The book can't help but highlight how gullible and foolish sections of the general public can be. Despite Chris Carter, creator of "The X-Files" stating it was only a tv show, a number of viewers were not fooled by him and realised that his creation was indeed an oracle of truth. (Carter is also quoted as saying that he wanted the show to expose hoaxes as well but that idea got shelved in the end because the paranormal explanation got better ratings - or was it because you can't hide the truth?). It is disappointing he didn't question why aliens, whose science must be significantly more advanced than humanities, keep kidnapping humans in order to anally probe them?
Of the gullible and foolish sections of society it appears that one of the most gullible, and certainly foolish, are managers, who will latch onto any theory. Jesus Christ, CEO, anyone? Tom Peters made a fortune selling the idea of excellence to managers only to made another fortune later when, after changing his mind and stating there were no excellent companies, he sold the idea of managing chaos. My personal favourite is Edward De Bono and his [[Six Thinking Hats]], which posits the idea of wearing a different coloured hat for a different style of thinking - red hat for emotions/feelings, green hat for alternative thinking, and so on. After developing this idea, De Bono then likened himself to Plato, Aristotle, & Socrates.
This book can be added to a number of recent works that are debating the enlightenment - romanticism schism, the rational against the emotional.
It's credo, and the enlightenment in general, can be found in George Santayana's "The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it".
All believers in homoeopathic medicine, post modernism, creationism, crystals, horoscopes, management gurus, Boo.com (or ANY company or market that has the words New Paradigm associated with it) prepare to be sneered at, not only that, but sneered at with
He divides his book into various targets and dissects the absurdity of this post-enlightenment age. On post-modern anti-scientific relativism he points out that a fact, once asserted to be a fact, remains a fact. The result of this 'Alice Through the Looking Glass' philosophy is that it remains a FACT that the earth is the centre of the universe until Copernicus, only post-Copernicus is it a fact that the earth rotates around the sun.
On the the new liberation-through-celebration-of-victim-hood culture he quotes Linda Holt, "That Diana's therapist victim-speak could turn her into a feminist role model is a bad joke..." and then goes on to lay waste to Elton John, Tony Blair, William Hague and all the others joining in the nauseating outbreak of fawning sycophancy over a "simpering Bambi narcissist". How I cheered, what a perfect summation of Diana "simpering Bambi narcissist" is. A little known fact is that, in the days after the crash the BBC switchboard was overwhelmed with calls from people demanding less coverage, but the media feeding frenzy had begun and this wasn't anything anyone in the media wanted to hear.
I also really enjoyed the chapter Old Snake-Oil, New Bottles. I suffer from guru management overload myself, and this, from an enquiry into the prison service, struck a chord:
"Any organisation which boasts one Statement of Purpose, one Vision, five Values, six Goals, seven Strategic Priorities and eight Key Performance Indicators without any clear correlation between them is predictably a recipe for total confusion and exasperation."
Also, in this chapter, he sets up all the famous management gurus then demonstrates how their pronouncements fail to stand the test of time (and it is remarkable how many ended up broke, in prison, or both. The pointless aphorisms of Antony Robbin come in for particular mockery, lesson 364 (in self mastery) from Giant Steps "Remember to expect miracles ... because you are one" - didn't David Brent use that one?
I liked this book, but then I agreed with it. It is not always well constructed and his targets could have been better grouped, but it is a much needed book.
Skims over such topics as Thatcherism, Self-help books, Alien spotting, The demise
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 prosecution), 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.