Wot I am Reeding this Week...

[angelophile]

Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (re-titled for the American market as Idiot Proof) is, (as the British sub-title has it) a Short History of Modern Delusions. In this book, which is a series of humorous, but ultimately disturbing, essays on how common sense has simply faded away over the past 20 or so years.

The book is a maddening quick dash through much of the idiocy so popular in the world now. From astrology- and new-age-consulting world leaders - to deconstructionists, from doom-sayers announcing the apocalypse which still hasn't come, cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, mysticism and UFO scares, dotcom mania to New Economy defenders, Wheen shows that common sense is often in short supply - and often especially so when important things are at issue.

Wheen cuts through all the bullshit, and cites a dizzying amount of gloriously misguided nonsense: it would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic. From the leaders to the followers, the Left, the Liberals and the Right, from academia to the finance sector he skewers easy targets everywhere.

So far Wheen's book is a joy to someone as cynical as me, who finds that bullshit comes from all political quarters and in every walk of life.

A short extract from the improssive Notes section in the book follows:

Mumbo-Jumbo Never Sleeps.

IT WAS SOMETHING I could have predicted confidently without any assistance from crystal balls, tea-leaves or horoscopes: that when the hardback edition of this book appeared, the forces of mumbo-jumbo would unwittingly act as my publicists by providing new instances every day of my argument that rational thought is in retreat.

So it proved. The schools superintendent for the American state of Georgia proposed that the word 'evolution' should be removed from all biology textbooks, explaining that it 'evokes the monkeys-to-man sort of thing' and might therefore distress pupils who believe that the earth began a few thousand years ago with Adam and Eve.

Or when Percy Seymour published The Scientific Proof of Astrology, which claimed to demonstrate that our characters and destinies depend on where Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and Venus happened to be on the night of our birth.

Kabbalah was hailed by the tabloids as 'the trendiest faith around', endorsed by stars such as Madonna, Demi Moore and Britney Spears - all of whom apparently believe that they can absorb 'negative energy' by swinging a chicken above their heads, and that wearing red string knotted around their wrists will help ward off 'the evil eye'...

Since the book's publication I have spoken at dozens of bookshops and literary festivals, and one question is asked again and again: 'What about Iraq?'


If you want a guide to the 57 varieties of human folly and idiocy, you certainly need look no further than the recent history of Iraq - or, more precisely, Western attitudes to Iraq. Before the war there were many predictions (gloomy or gleeful, according to who was making them) that the US-led forces would spend months bogged down on the outskirts of Baghdad, unable to break the defences of Saddam's 'elite Republican Guard'. It would, according to several pundits, be 'another Stalingrad'. In the event, as anyone surveying the scale of the invasion force could have guessed, the coalition forces reached the capital with little difficulty.

But then a far greater idiocy gradually became apparent. In all the extensive pre-war planning by the finest minds in the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House, no one had paused to think about what could or should be done once the military campaign achieved its objective.

I was reminded of Michael Foot's jibe against the Tory minister Sir Keith Joseph, who presided over the destruction of British manufacturing industry in the 1980s. Foot likened Joseph to a magician who borrows an expensive watch from a member of the audience, smashes it with a hammer - and then, after much anguished brow-furrowing, confesses that he has forgotten the rest of the trick.

The catalogue of American blunders or outright crimes (including the torture and sexual humiliation of detainees) is well known, and too long to repeat here. But what of the supposedly virtuous opponents of Messrs Bush and Blair? A bizarre alliance between progressives and reactionaries has reappeared in Britain's Stop the War Coalition, which is jointly led by the Socialist Workers Party and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) -a British affiliate of the ultra Islamist Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. The MAB's political aim is the establishment of a theocratic state in which apostasy from Islam is 'punishable by death'.

Thus a party supposedly committed to democracy, secularism and feminism embraced a movement that is violently hostile to all these values - purely because they happen to share a hatred of American policy. As the American socialist Paul Berman wrote recently, many people are blinded by the understandable revulsion they feel towards the US president who waged the war: 'They peer at Iraq and see only the smirking face of George W. Bush.' Following this logic, veteran left-wingers such as Tariq Ali and John Pilger became cheerleaders for the so-called Iraqi 'resistance' - even when this resistance was perpetrated by latter-day Nazis from Saddam's Ba'ath Party or Islamist goons from al-Qaeda, and even though its targets included UN workers, Kurdish democrats, Iraqi socialists and indeed many devout Muslims, massacred in their mosques.

The Left used to believe that liberty, democracy and human rights were the birthright of everyone. Not any more, apparently. To quote Paul Berman again: 'Today, people say, out of a spirit of egalitarian tolerance: Social democracy for Swedes! Tyranny for Arabs! And this is supposed to be a left-wing attitude?'

Seldom has a hefty dose of rational thinking been more necessary; seldom has it been harder to find...

Comments

Interesting...

[newnumber6.livejournal.com]

Never heard that about the coalition thing. If true, of course it doesn't say anything one way or the other about the general goals of the stop-the-war crowd, it does point out that particular group to be idiots. I mean, even if, strategically, it may make sense to benefit from a group that you oppose in all other ways working towards the same minor goal even if for drastically different motives, you don't want to work _directly_ with them in cases like this, because, well, it makes you look like idiots too.

Another interesting book on a similar subject- focused a little more in general on how thinking goes wrong in people, is "Why People Believe Weird Stuff", by Michael Shermer (who was editor or something of Skeptic magazine). It's non-political (unless you consider 'anti-creatonism, pro-evolution' political), but looks into general ways people's thinking goes wrong to make them believe in various forms of pseudo-science, and specific refutations of claims. Covers various ESP/Paranormal claims, Evolution vs. Creatonism debate, and Holocaust denial.

Re: Interesting...

[angelophile.livejournal.com]

There's plenty of that in thsi book too, as well as lots of politics but I find all that pretty interesting anyway...

Unfortunately the Stop the War Coalition in the UK weren't an anti-war group. They're THE anti-war group. There may possibly be smaller offshoots but they're the group that's had the most public support. They're effectively the banner name given to every group and who is anti-war in this country and masses of celebrities, political commentators and millions of people have joined in their marches.