being there by David Hochman

A review of How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, by Francis Wheen

If there’s one book you read this year, make it Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. I don’t say that lightly. The older one gets, the more discerning one becomes. Time presses itself, seemingly unlike in one’s youth, upon one’s choices, and one is less apt to be frivolous with it.

Wheen, a journalist and writer, has that wonderful English flair for cutting through gibberish, decimating nonsense with humorous relish.

Imagine thoughts invading you, regularly and with frequency and some urgency, over time. Thoughts of a similar nature, yet wholly diverse. Imagine, too, trying to one day put them into one book, and not knowing where to begin, or how to do it. Imagine then one day picking up a book, and that book having done precisely that: taken those same thoughts and put them into a coherent, decisive and brave cohesion.

Simplifying: imagine living in a world where 2+2=4 is a given. Over hundreds or thousands of years, debate has raged and many a mind and not a few lives have been shed to ascertain that fact at last. It has become commonplace. And then, suddenly, like an outcast, you hear voices on the fringes, like dogs nipping at your heels, first innocently, then more ferociously. You hear them say, 2+2 may not be 4 after all. People laugh and scoff. What a bunch of buffoons. But the more you hear it, the louder it becomes. Suddenly the voices are closer still, and louder. Now you hear it all around you: 2+2 may not be 4. In fact, 2+2 may be anything you want it to be. And why stop there? Who says 2 is 2? All rational thought goes out the window. Nothing is real. The masses revel. Some fairly smart people, not wanting to be seen as not being part of the masses, begin to spew the same nonsense. They are accepted by the masses. And their accepting the nonsense makes the nosense more legitimate. That makes the masses stronger still. And soon, 2, or whatever 2 may be, plus, or whatever plus may be, 2, equals, or whatever equals may be, 4—you guessed it—whatever 4 may be. This, to the masses, is liberating. Because no one needs to study, to work hard, to prove anything, to attain this—in their voices—“spiritual” “enlightenment.” And there, in simple terms, you have enlightenment—or at least what enlightenment has truly been over centuries, the quest for rational thought and scientific understanding—trampled.

And so here we are: all around us you hear these masses clamouring to be heard. I once wrote that in America, anyone with money has the right to an opinion. I take it one step further: today, anyone has the right to an opinion. You can have minions in the streets arguing with a mathematician that has taken years to study his or her craft about the simple formula mentioned above. And that is the world we live in today. An era heading back in time with reckless abandon; an era of new age this and holistic and spiritual that; of hacks and pretend-to-bes; of nonsensical and mediocre TV personalities taking themselves way too seriously as the new authorities on just about anything, and recommending their all too hollow and cheap views and sadly, the TV-drugged masses lapping it up, sitting like lizards under neon light, or like zombies under hypnosis. It is a frightening world, one where any simpleton can say anything he or she wants and be believed; one, where any simpleton can be president and can shape and destroy the world in any way he or she wants; one where the masses have lost all sense of reality (indeed, have been happy to accept a sense of liberating non-reality to satisfy their stupidity and laziness, for isn’t it far easier and simpler to say something frivolous may be so, then to spend years of education and hard work to prove it so? One where we prefer to have “a guy next door, a guy I can have a drink with” a preferable President than a learned, aloof-seeming academic. I, for one, don’t want to see my neighbor Fred—no matter how much I enjoy having a beer with him after work, and no matter how similar are his inanities to mine—as a leader of the local SPCA, let alone a nation.

And therein you have Wheen’s eloquent and brilliant work. One may argue with his beginnings: he attributes society’s decline to the Iranian revolution and Margaret Thatcher’s and Reagan’s coming to power. For me and many others, the beginning of the West’s intellectual decline is arguable. For me, I believe it to be somewhere between 1900 and the advent of Television. Wheen reminds us that “Henry Mann might seem to have been right in arguing that the 1800 election ‘marked the real end of the Enlightenment in America.” What we do agree on, however, is that a dangerous decline there has been, straight back into a world of superstition, where anyone can say anything he or she wants and be seen as an expert, heedless of any sense of knowledge or expertise in that arena.

Wheen does all this decisively and bravely, and more often than not, humorously. Clearly, in the end, one cannot but help be demoralized in the onslaught of such nonsense and gibberish; in being outgunned and outnumbered and often just silenced in a sea of absurdity. Which wouldn’t be so bad were not everyone at risk, everyone endangered by such simple thoughts and actions. But alas, such is the world we live in and perhaps it’s just nature’s way to get us back to basics. Perhaps it is merely mental entropy, not unlike other forms of entropy. Just as any metal must break down and return to its original state; so then must human thought perhaps come down from a peak and plunge back heedlessly into nonthought or ignorance. Or what Milan Kundera refers to as nonthought: “This cannot be translated as ‘absence of thought.’ Absence of thought indicates a nonreality, the disappearance of reality. We cannot say that an absence is aggressive, or that it is spreading. ‘Nonthought,’ on the other hand, describes a reality, a force; I can therefore say ‘pervasive nonthought’; ‘the nonthought of received ideas’; ‘the mass media’s nonthought’; etc.” Or, to take it one step further, the destructive “nonthought of the masses.”

Wheen, in the face of this overwhelming nonthought, thankfully tackles all that rankles anyone with rationale. To him, no one is beyond rebuke and reproach: all the mediocrities are fair game. And so he tackles mercilessly and factually and as I mentioned, humorously, all those that find conservative “voodoo,” “cut taxes at any cost,” and “trickle down” economics acceptable; all the “posts” of the world from post-modernism to post-feminism, etc, and their founders, from Foucault to Derida to their disciples; Carnegie, Chopra and Robbins and all the self-help gurus and “spiritual, holistic and new age” “writers”; Boesky and Milken and similar figures of greed and corruption; “intelligent design” purveyors; all those that mourned Princess Diana’s death more than the passing away of their own loved ones; Oprah’s drivel—and all TV celebrities like her; etc, etc.

Some examples:

“Like Reagan, Thatcher often implied that most public welfare provision was unnecessary: it the nation had enough millionaires, their natural benevolence and wealth-spreading talents would suffice. (Alas for the theory, charitable giving by Americans with annual salaries above $500,000 actually fell by 65% between 1980 and 1988”—the Reagan years and the beginning of Voodoo economics so blatantly relished by Bush today—“the real Good Samaritans, who raised their donations by 62%, turned out to be humbler souls earning between $25,000-$30,000. Even more remarkably, the poorest in the land—those earning $10,000 or less—gave 5.5% or their income to charity, a higher share than anyone else.)”

“For public intellectuals in the early 1980s, one little prefix was obligatory. Post-modernism, post-feminism, post-Fordism and ‘post-culture’ all joined the lexicon of modish discourse. Within a few years, however, even these concepts had been superseded. When the economist Lester Thurow said that the ‘sun is about to set on the post-industrial’ era, James Atlas of the New York Times posed the obvious question: ‘What follows ‘post?’”

“Chopra: ‘People who have achieved an enormous amount of success are inherently very spiritual…Affluence is simply our natural state.’ Vain tycoons and holistic hippies alike can take comfort from Chopra’s flattery (‘You are inherently perfect’), and from his belief that the highest human condition is ‘the state of “I am”’; since we reap what we sow, both health and wealth are largely self-generated. Following this logic ad absurdam, he argues that ‘people grow old and die because they have seen other people grow old and die. Ageing is simply a learned behavior.’ Demi Moore was so impressed by the apercu that she named him as her personal guru, announcing that ‘through his teachings I hope to live to a great age, even 130 years isn’t impossible.’ Chopra himself, rather more cautiously, says that ‘I expect to live way beyond 100.’ Why the longevity formula failed to work for Princess Diana, with whom he lunched shortly before her death, remains a mystery.”

“Steven Covey asks in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, ‘how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer, and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow.’ The echo of Chauncey Gardiner, the idiot savant who dispensed horticultural wisdom in Jerzy Kosinski’s satire Being There, is presumably accidental.

“Anthony Robbins prefers to take his imagery from the kitchen rather than the farmyard. ‘A nice metaphor for the components and use of strategies is that of baking,’ he observes in Unlimited Power. ‘If someone makes the greatest chocolate cake in the world, can you produce the same quality results? Of course you can, if you have that person’s recipe…if you follow the recipe to the letter, you will produce the same results, even though you may never have baked such a cake before in your life.’ This weary analogy clearly had a profound effect on at least one reader. ‘There is no better metaphor for the products of knowledge economy than the recipe,” the British guru Charles Leadbeater writes in Living on Thin Air: the New Economy. ‘Think of the world as divided up into chocolate cakes and chocolate-cake recipes…we can all use the same chocolate-cake recipe, at the same time, without anyone being worse off. It is quite unlike a piece of cake.’”

“Robert’s book The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun appeared in 1991 and soon found its way on to the bookshelves of every middle manager in the United States. Described as a ‘fantastic’ guide which ‘will help you to make the most of your leadership potential,’ it vouchsafed these truly fantastic discoveries: ‘You must have resilience to overcome personal misfortunes, discouragement, rejection and disappointment’; ‘When the consequences of your actions are too grim to bear, look for another option.’ Could anything be sillier? You bet: other authors have since come up with Gandhi: The Heart of an Executive, Confucius in the Boardroom, If Aristotle Ran General Motors, Make it So: Management Lessons from “Star trek the Next Generation,” Elizabeth I CEO: Strategic Lessons form the Woman who Built an Empire and Moses: CEO. The ten commandments, we now learn, were the world’s first mission statement.”

And so on and so forth. Each one a jewel. Each one decimating the hodgepodge of the dangerous nonthought that pervades our everyday space. As mentioned, the book would be far funnier, if the inherent dangers of such nonthought didn’t lead to the destruction of the environment, greater gaps between rich and poor and useless wars.

One may summarize his work with the following quote:

“The new irrationalism is an expression of despair by people who feel impotent to improve their lives and suspect that they are at the mercy of secretive, impersonal forces, whether these be the Pentagon or invaders from Mars. Political leaders accept it as a safe outlet for dissent, fulfilling much the same function that Marx attributed to religion—the heat of a heartless world, the opium of the masses. Far better for the powerless to seek solace in crystals, ley-lines, and the myth of Abraham than in actually challenging the rulers, or the social and economic system over which they preside. Ever since idealist philosophers such as Hegel and Schopenhauer denounced the demythologising spirit of modernity, empirical analysis has always been opposed by those who fear that the stripping away of illusions can only end in miserable disillusion.”

As for me, I am just trying, like a man barely bobbing in the waters of a vast, dark and dangerous ocean, to stay above the fray. And while so, I am grateful for a man like Wheen to have thrown me, and those like-minded, if not a lifeline, then at least a sign from a lighthouse that there are others like us who see through the nonsense and passionately continue the against-all-odds fight.