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How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World:
A Short History of Modern Delusions
Francis Wheen

Amol Rajan
posted 1 December 2005

Imagine the scene: after centuries of scientific progress, after two world wars, and in the midst of the Cold War, the world's gone mad. Or at least, the people who run it have. They're suffering from a kind of institutionalised irrationality and paranoia, and basic rules of logic and common sense have been suspended - only to be replaced by an immovable faith in the unseen.

This may appear an unlikely premise for a book labelled a short history, and which lays great emphasis on the meticulous research of facts. But Francis Wheen's victory in this cogent and compelling diatribe, published last year to some acclaim, is the conviction with which this seemingly eccentric view is initially stated, and the breadth of evidence which is then drawn upon in support of it. Modern delusions, or mumbo-jumbo, are in his view the ambassadors of a highly dangerous movement - one that has abandoned the values of the Enlightenment and come to dominate recent public life in the West. 'The sleep of reason' as he puts it, referring to Goya's famous capricho, 'brings forth monsters'.

And so does Wheen. The first two are Margaret Thatcher and the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose return to Iran as Supreme Leader in 1979, after 14 years of exile, was followed swiftly by the election of Mrs Thatcher's government in Britain. Thus were the Orient and the Occident both colonised by the clueless in what Wheen labels 'the voodoo revolution'. Thatcher would have Britain return to 'Victorian values'; Khomeini would restore Iran to its heyday of some 1300 hundred years ago. Both actively sought to return their dominions to supposed past glories; both justified their wish to do so through appeal to nothing more solid than pure wind.

From this point in history - which is presented as if it were of absolute centrality to the health of mankind - Wheen swoops through the next two decades, bringing forth monster after monster, only to lash each one in turn with his relentlessly rational pen. Here we are in Reagan's America, where economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek have convinced the president of the need for, and efficacy of, anti-Keynesian 'supply-side' economics, despite the country's conversion from the largest creditor in the world to the largest debtor during Reagan's reign. Here we are at the end of the 1980s, when two barely known academics Paul Kennedy and Francis Fukuyama suddenly make personal fortunes because of their novel predictions of the end of history, feeding a swelling public appetite for imminent apocalypse. Here we are a decade later, when England football coach Glenn Hoddle is forced to resign after asserting his belief that people with disabilities are paying off the bad karma they built up in previous incarnations.

What is not immediately clear is how any of this was really new even in the period Wheen describes. Aren't these delusions just modern replays of ancient silliness? The year 1979 is (justifiably) taken as a starting point for structural purposes, but the veiled suggestion that modern history can be split into a period in which Enlightenment values reigned and a separate, more recent period beginning in 1979, in which they failed to excite popular culture, is restrictive. Mumbo-jumbo, loosely defined, has prevailed in all cultures at some point. Wheen's title implies that it has proliferated recently - indeed, that it has conquered the world - and this is convincing in proportion to the evidence of such a proliferation that he cites. But because he does not at any point outline precisely what mumbo-jumbo means, he is susceptible to the accusation that what he is documenting is not really a specific and recent phenomenon. How do these modern delusions differ from their ancient predecessors?

The ambiguity of mumbo-jumbo as a term comes to good use, of course, because it allows Wheen to take a swipe and so many different aspects of modern culture. There are times, such as in his lengthy discussion of the Enron scandal, when the book feels without proper focus. In time, and with powerfully understated prose, Wheen shows Creationism, postmodernism, post-postmodernism, New Labour, public hysteria after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, management consultancy, and the foreign policy of George W Bush (amongst other things) to all stem from some basic suspension of rational thought, and from a willingness to propagate irrationality for political purposes. According to Wheen we are, by implication, under a spell, and those responsible for its success have tended to be those who profit most from the spell's success.

There is an urgency about this work that can be felt in every one of its 312 tightly argued pages. Bring back the men who spoke truth, who had faith in the power of reason, who understood history was a process and not merely an industry, Wheen can be heard saying. Abandon quackery, superstition, and hollow social panics. 'Come over to my side' is the call, 'it's lighter over here'. It is a feature of his argument that from very early on he takes it as given that empirical knowledge - that is, knowledge based on evidence obtained through observation - is superior to unempirical knowledge, which is knowledge based on an appeal to the unseen. For support in this claim he invokes the spirit of the Enlightenment, quoting Immanuel Kant and labelling his introduction with the motto of that revolutionary period: 'sapere aude', 'dare to know'. But Wheen is not at pains to justify his faith in the Enlightenment; he presents this book as a catalogue of modern errors, not as popular philosophy. The movement from his introductory remarks about the Enlightenment to his discussion of Thatcher, Khomeini et al is therefore abrupt, but it is preceded by the only genuine philosophical discussion in the entire book - albeit a brief one.

In citing men such as the philosophers John Locke and Francis Bacon, and the scientist Isaac Newton - collectively the heroes of Thomas Jefferson - Wheen explains that 'knowledge that is the product of experience and experiment…is thus subject to amendment'. That is, new experiences can affect the status of that knowledge, determining its truth or falsity. By implication, empirical knowledge, despite having the authority of experimental observation, still promotes philosophical scepticism, or doubt. Doubt is a force for good - 'dare to know', as Kant had said, might just as well have been 'dare to doubt'. Divine knowledge, by contrast, promotes allegiance, deriving its authority not from actual, observable results, but from 'higher powers', as Wheen labels them. Allegiance to higher powers - who, as Wheen tells us, have historically tended to acquire those powers undemocratically - does not promote doubt or free enquiry. Rather it promotes subservience. In general, men do not enjoy subservience, because those to whom they are subservient hold power over them in such a way as to make them weak.

By logic of this kind Wheen comes to the conclusion, very early in the work, that empirical knowledge is closer to true knowledge than any other. He says it with conviction, and quotes severally from men of history who did the same. The remainder of the book (that is, almost all of it) is devoted to an explanation of how the demise of empirical knowledge is in direct proportion with the rise of mumbo-jumbo. As he delightfully points out, some of this is 'merely comical', 'harmless fun', yet elsewhere 'the proliferation of obscurantist bunkum and the assault on reason are a menace to civilisation'. And one can't help but feel that having let the philosophers speak for him in defence of reason and Enlightenment values, Wheen does the work of a loyal and able archivist, in producing reams of evidence in support of their faith in values which endless modern mumbo-jumbo seeks to destroy. Such is the nature of his work, and his success; he adds detail to an argument already made, so that the irrational foppery of the short history he chronicles seems at once comical, silly, and threatening.