How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World

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 U.S.A. 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.

Harkening back to the ideals of the Enlightenment, Mr. Francis Wheen points out the nonrational follies of the powerful, the rich, the media and the ordinary person. As he suggests in the book, this will be humorous . . . when it's someone else's folly . . . and not so humorous when it is your own.

Those who do not care for Senator Hillary Clinton, Mrs. John Major and Deepak Chopra will probably find this book the most amusing. They come in for frequent ribbing about their "spiritual" beliefs.

Now that free market economics are so popular, many people will feel gored by the analyses in the book describing how free market economics aren't the solution to all world problems.

Mr. Wheen seems to be most outraged when such bad decisions are allowed to harm others (a sentiment I'm sure you share) . . . and when people make money from peddling their unproven solutions (a sentiment that you may or may not agree with).

Why, by the way, did I rate the book at 4 stars rather than 5? It's pretty simple. Mr. Wheen didn't do his homework in many areas. For example, he condemns all forms of alternative medicine . . . even though some obviously work well. For instance, in China acupuncture is used in many forms of painful surgery. Although no one has done (to my knowledge) a double-blind test costing $100+ million to prove this, I think we can safely assume that acupuncture can reduce pain. You can even do the experiment yourself for very little money by getting a treatment.

As another example, Mr. Wheen doesn't seem to like any management theory that sells a lot of books (including those by Dr. Stephen Covey and Tom Peters), yet many people will tell you they have learned important lessons from those books. I know that I have. What he seems to miss is that many of these books contain case histories of successes that we can model ourselves after. That's helpful information. I agree that it would be better if business book authors did research on which to base their findings . . . but most will not do that. They will simply repackage other resources.

At the end of the book, if you are like me, you will have had quite a few good laughs . . . and a few sobering thoughts that will serve you well in being more rational.

IDIOT PROOF is an extraordinarily difficult book to categorize, in part because it feels like it was written by an ADHD sufferer. The book skips wildly from philosophy to economics to pop culture to globalization to Marxism to Islamic fundamentalism to the dot.com bubble to the sins of left-wing liberalism and the IMF to Enron. In the end, it is difficult to know who the idiots are and what their delusions are, since the only common thread seems to arise out of a specious argument that Margaret Thatcher led a revolt against the rational principles of the Age of Enlightment. So Americans can apparently blame Dame Maggie for everything from irrational exuberance to Paris Hilton, from aromatherapy to UFO sightings at Area 51.

Following an opening discourse on Immanuel Kant, Chapter 1 traces the new Victorianism of Margaret Thatcher's ministry. The next chapter deals with the inflated importance of gurus from Tom Peters, Stephen Covey and Deepak Chopra to Anthony Robbins, John Gray, and Jeffrey Robbins, a subject that seems consistent with the book's title and cover depictions.

The next chapter jumps to a bizarre discourse on Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, followed by a chapter on structuralism, deconstructionism and the post-modernist critics from Derrida to Lacan to Stanley Fish, wrapped up with a riff on creationism in Kansas.

Chapter 5 gets seemingly back on point with an amusing discussion of popular delusions and quackery, ranging from Nostradamus to homeopathy to UFO's and the Book of Revelation. Much of the remainder of the book wanders through religious fundamentalism, the military-industrial complex, Al Gore's tobacco farm, Lady Diana worship,Thomas Friedman, the East India Company, the World Bank, Enron, Islamic fundamentalism, and finally to Pol Pot and Noam Chomsky. The wrap-up says it all -- those who reject rationalism and the Enlightenment live in darkness and threaten to take the rest of us with them.

Individual chapters in IDIOT PROOF are generally interesting in themselves, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. In the end, this book lacks a strong enough connecting thread to tie together such wildly disparate topics and their odd juxtapositions. It hardly seems necessary to use 287 pages to make the point that rationalism is more rational than religious fundamentalism and New Age mumbo-jumbo, and in the end, there appears to little notion as to what to do about it. The author offers little hope, and the dust jacket lamely suggests that "we might just think a little more and believe a little less." Yeah, I guess that pretty well solves the problem, doesn't it?

IDIOT PROOF is less than its cover suggests, but also more than the puffery displayed in the cover design. Buy this book for its depth of thought on some complex intellectual topics and its deft puncturing of cults, spiritualism, self-help, and a host of left-wing shibboleths. But don't buy this book as a trashing of pop culture, and definitely don't buy it as a companion piece to Michael Moore.

While I enjoyed the book and Mr. Wheen's commentary, I don't personally agree with everything in the book. Still, I recognize the importance of having people like Mr. Wheen occasionally point out the contrasting side of a belief. The way we grow and refine our beliefs requires that we keep an open mind and examine all sides. Mr. Wheen serves this purpose of presenting the opposing viewpoint very well. Then again, if we have learned anything from history it is that science can lead us down the wrong path just as easily as any superstition. There was a time when doctors lost their jobs and were subject to ridicule if they believed in germs. The whole concept was nonsense and against logic and current knowledge.

With plenty of notes and cross-references at the end of the book, "Idiot Proof" is a recommended read and sure to be enlightening to everyone on at least a few fronts.