Monsters galore as reason sleeps

Society: Francis Wheen is the small boy standing on the street-corner tugging at his father's sleeve. "Daddy," he is asking, "why is the emperor wearing no clothes?"

The Guardian columnist, in his new book on the humbug that has increasingly passed for political and economic debate in the last two decades, has produced an at times hilarious, at others scary, compendium of collective madnesses. It is a joy, a tour-de-force polemic against the willingness of supposedly intelligent people to embrace fin-de-siècle dreams of "new paradigms" which promise to upend the laws of nature, history and economy. Perpetual motion on tap . . .

Wheen's targets range widely, from creationists in the US to the fetishisation of Princess Diana, from the proliferation of self-help panaceas to New Age gurus - he quotes approvingly Peter Drucker's suggestion that people use the word "guru" because "charlatan" is too long - to the greedy, wilful denial of the laws of the market that brought about the dotcom and Enron crashes.

And he does not spare from his dissection the left's icons, not least the moral relativism of the trendy Noam Chomsky, "more quoted than Cicero and gaining on Freud".

Above all, the book is an appeal, in some ways old-fashioned, for a return to the ideas of the Enlightenment - not, he adds quickly, in the "self-discovery" sense - and to the primacy of reason over feeling in public discourse.

He acknowledges the philosopher Roger Scruton's des- pairing view that "reason in retreat puts our entire tradition of learning in question".

Wheen, whose last book, a wonderful biography of Marx, rediscovered a sense of the man, wears his own erudition easily, has a magpie's eye and hoarding instinct for gems of quotes and bizarre connections, and writes in a deceptively easy language, very much in the literary and political tradition of George Orwell.

His thesis is that although mumbo-jumbo and snake medicines have always thrived, the coming to power of both Margaret Thatcher and the Ayatollah Khomeini, more or less together, a generation ago, two sides of a fundamentalist coin, seemed to give a new, official imprimatur to an anti-scientific backlash and marked a significant halting-point in the ongoing march of rationalism. Leaders would once again invoke God on their side, or dabble in spiritualism, or, like the Reagans, even star-gazers.

Wheen points out that in 1922 Woodrow Wilson, asked for his thoughts on evolution, was able to declare: "Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this date such questions should be raised." Yet George Bush during his 2000 campaign argued that creationism should be taught alongside evolution as "the jury is still out". Even Al Gore, who prided himself on being the science candidate, the man who "invented" the Internet, would boast of the framed maxim on his desk that guided his every action: "WWJD?" ("what would Jesus do?").

What is remarkable is that such reversions to public piety in the US were in a tradition of Biblical literalism that rejected the reconciliation that either sophisticated Catholicism or Episcopalianism has made with science, and that the new religiosity was not confined by any means to one side of the political divide. The Blairs and Clintons have both flaunted their faith and embraced completely zany lifestyle gurus.

The Blairs spent time on their Mexican holidays just weeks before 9/11 experiencing Mayan rebirthing, a bizarre ritual involving praying to the four winds, smearing themselves in mud and papaya followed by uninhibited screaming to recall the pain of birth.

"And although Mayan rebirthing rituals are not available through the National Health Service, others of Cherie Blair's peculiar obsessions have been adopted as official policy," Wheen writes, pointing, for example, to the hiring of feng-shui expert, Renata Wickmaratne, by the government to advise on problem housing estates. She recommended red and orange flowers to reduce crime and water features as a cure for poverty.

Edward de Bono, the celebrated lateral thinker, was hired to make the civil service more effective. His solution was similar. Civil servants could put on red hats when talking about instincts or hunches, yellow if listing the advantages of a project, black when playing devil's advocate.

"Without wishing to boast," the modest de Bono claimed, "this is the first new way of thinking to be developed for 2,400 years since the days of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle."

This is the age of consultants, gurus on rock-star salaries.

Yet Wheen's argument is more substantial than I am perhaps suggesting in this list of manifestations of kookiness. Intellectual life, too, has been contaminated, with a rash of theorists spreading notions about civilisation reaching the end of art, of science, of history - in the latter case, the preposterous Francis Fukuyama:

"What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period in postwar history," he opined to the applause of pundits, "but the end of history as such; that is the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

And then came 9/11.

Meanwhile postmodernist writers, in obscurantist language brilliantly satirised by the physicist, Adam Sokal, were dragging politics into the mire of cultural and intellectual relativism and their sister, the very PC "non-judgmentalism" which gives a cover to dictators and pre-feudal theocracies in the name of "self-determination" and "cultural autonomy". The attempts to reduce everything to socially determined constructs, from political regimes to the classics of literature and even e=mc² (one respected feminist philosopher described the equation as fundamentally sexist because it privileged the male "e" at the expense of the female "m"), stripped everything of intrinsic moral worth and led many on the left to a deadly political flabbiness and quietism summed up in the strident slogan: "Only America can do wrong, and everything America does is wrong."

Just as obscurantist language could be used to cloak facile inanities, so could the language of advertising rebrand politics - Wheen also takes effective swipes at the vacuousness of the Third Way.

"The sleep of reason," he complains, "brings forth monsters, and the last two decades have seen monsters galore." Amen.

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions By Francis Wheen  Fourth Estate, 338pp. £16.99

Patrick Smyth, a former Washington and European Correspondent of The Irish Times, is the newspaper's Opinion Editor