- Wheen, Francis. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the
World. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. ISBN 0-00-714096-7.
- I picked up this book in an airport
bookshop, expecting a survey of contemporary
lunacy along the lines of Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and
the Madness of Crowds or Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of
Science. Instead, what we have is 312 pages of hateful,
sneering political rant indiscriminately sprayed at more or
less every target in sight. Mr Wheen doesn't think very much of
Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher (who he likens repeatedly to
the Ayatollah Khomeini). Well, that's to be expected, I suppose,
in a columnist for the Guardian, but there's no
reason they need to be clobbered over and over, for the same things
and in almost the same words, every three pages or so throughout this
tedious, ill-organised, and repetitive book. Neither does the author
particularly fancy Tony Blair, who comes in for the same whack-a-mole
treatment. A glance at the index (which is not exhaustive) shows
that between them, Blair, Thatcher, and Reagan appear on 85 pages
equally sprinkled throughout the text. In fact, Mr Wheen isn't very
keen on almost anybody or anything dating from about 1980 to the
present; one senses an all-consuming nostalgia for that resplendent
utopia which was Britain in the 1970s. Now, the crusty curmudgeon
is a traditional British literary figure, but masters of the genre
leaven their scorn with humour and good will which are completely
absent here. What comes through instead is simply hate:
the world leaders who dismantled failed socialist experiments are
not, as a man of the left might argue, misguided but rather Mrs
Thatcher's “drooling epigones” (p. 263). For some months, I've
been pondering a phenomenon in today's twenty-something generation
which I call “hate kiddies.” These are people, indoctrinated in
academia by ideologues of the Sixties generation to hate their
country, culture, and all of its achievements—supplanting the
pride which previous generations felt with an all-consuming guilt.
This seems, in many otherwise gifted and productive people, to
metastasise in adulthood into an all-consuming disdain and hate for
everything; it's like the end point of cultural relativism
is the belief that everything is evil. I asked an exemplar of this
generation once whether he could name any association of five or more
people anywhere on Earth which was not evil: nope. Detesting his
“evil” country and government, I asked whether he could name any
other country which was less evil or even somewhat good: none came
to mind. (If you want to get a taste of this foul and poisonous
weltanschauung, visit the Slashdot site and read the
comments posted for almost any article. This site is not
a parody—this is how the young technological elite really think,
or rather, can't think.) In Francis Wheen, the hate kiddies have
found their elder statesman.
July 2004 