How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen
I recently had the pleasure of discovering I have asthma again. The hot weather brought on the worst, or at least the longest asthma attack I can remember. Besides discovering inhalers have come a long way in the past 20 years, I’ve also had a day of enforced rest. This meant sitting on the settee and not doing anything strenous. Thankfully my copy of How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World was downstairs, so I wasn’t suffering from Asthma. I was enjoying it.
HMJC tackles antiscience and its kin, but from an entirely different perspective to how I would. I’d tackle some gibberish and then say it’s important because it leads to bad things. Francis Wheen on the other hand starts from the chaos of monetarism and modern economic policy and asks where did the nonsense that caused this come from? Wheen considers economic, New Age and religious hocus-pocus as products of the same root, woolly thought.
He starts and ends with the Iranian revolution and the deposition of the Shah. He ties this in with politics in the west starting with Thatcher and later Reagan. While George W. Bush and the mullahs of Iran might seem to be at opposite poles, he shows the similarity of the decision-making process the two use. This might seem to be typical left-wing rant. Thankfully he skewers them too.
The Reagans’ use of astrologers is well-documented. I wasn’t aware of the Clintons’ use of New Age gurus. He also notes Blair’s tacit support for creationism. Noam Chomsky comes out of it particularly badly I thought. Wheen compares Chomsky’s stand against the invasion of Afghanistan with Hitchens’s more pragmatic view that if we made the mess by supporting the Taliban then there’s a moral imperative to clean up that mess. He also challenges, Baudrillard’s claim that the dead bodies Gulf War I weren’t ‘real’.
What I liked was the indiscriminate definition of mumbo-jumbo. It was anything where the idea what not supported by the facts. Hence he pillories the lack of critical thought in books like “Dare to be an Entrepreneur” or others of that type on the same terms as feel-good relationship books and New Age books. This shows that rational thought isn’t applicable to some areas but not others.
However, it’s not as good as the cover makes out. I know I shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover. If you learn to judge them by the spine you don’t even need to take them off the shelves. Anyhow there’s the quotes “Hilarious” – Jeremy Paxman and “Deliriously funny”Philip Hensher of the Spectator. It isn’t. It’s interesting. It’s referenced, though I could find those references actually in the text, only as end notes. But it’s not hilarious.
There’s another review at Crooked Timber which differs a lot from my view.
I’ve been reading Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World, which is one of the most profoundly annoying books that I’ve read in the last few years. There’s nothing more frustrating than to read a book by someone who shares several of your pet aversions (trickle down economics, Deepak Chopra, obscurantist literary theory), but who isn’t bright enough to say anything interesting or non-trivial about them. It’s a rambling, shallow book which aspires to, and occasionally even attains, the intellectual level of a middling Sunday-supplement broadside.
The comments go on (and on and on) though Henry, the author of the review, remains intelligent through them.
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