How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
-Charles McKay, Preface, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)
“Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.”
-Bertrand Russell, 1959
There’s an interesting perspective put forth here, covering Reaganomics/Thatcherism, post-modernism, cults, quakery, etc., etc., essentially referring to it all as “Mumbo-Jumbo”. There’s a deluge of history related, presumably diffracted through the author’s lens.
The topics range so widely and in almost a stream-of-consciousness manner such that I can’t really give a general opinion. Some of this book rang true, some didn’t, some gave me stuff to think about.
I read with most interest the Reaganomics/Thatcherism part, largely because we are poised to try and solve this Second Great Depression issue, and there are some loud voices endorsing some trickle-down methods of stimulus (which the author puts in the Mumbo-Jumbo category). I’m becoming motivated to read more about the economic theory of Keynes and Friedman, which is not a sentence I ever thought I’d write.
Overall, I thought it was an interesting book, though not overwhelmingly clear in its presentation. It felt more like a description of a bunch of wacky stuff that happened, rather than an organized argument. Which is odd, since this is a book about a supposed decline of rational thought in modern times.
The U.S./Canada title of the book is Idiot Proof: A Short History of Modern Delusions, which calls to mind the 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions, a classic work that I’ve read about half of1. This book is not quite as scholarly as that work, but informative nevertheless.
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1 I got really bogged down in the chapters relating the Crusades in Volume II, and haven’t gotten back to it.