I can’t have been the only person disappointed when Francis Wheen’s column in the Guardian ended a year or so ago. The brief period of Rod Liddle really didn’t make up for it.
OK, so his biography of Marx still stares at me guiltily from one of my bookshelves unread, and there’s been his collection of journalism.
But now we have something new, and very worthwhile – How Mumbo Jumbo Changed The World. I haven’t read it yet, only the two extracts published in The Guardian. Skeptics of the world rejoice!
Francis Wheen
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3 responses to “Francis Wheen”
John Gray (Independent 30.1.04) is not so enthusiastic:
“Yet Nietzsche loathed Rousseau precisely because he exalted feeling over reason in this way, and was an intense admirer of Voltaire. To think of Nietzsche as a
Romantic is at best a crude oversimplification. To represent him as an anti-Enlightenment thinker is simply wrong.
“As this example shows, Wheen hardly measures up to the standards of intellectual rigour he defends so severely. Despite his scorn for the culture of feeling that
has emerged in Britain of late, this is an intensely emotional book: a personal confession rather than a coherent argument. Only someone badly rattled could write that postmodernists threaten to “consign us all to a life in darkness”, as he claims in the book’s mawkishly gloomy closing lines.
“No doubt postmodernism is often silly and at times harmful, but I have yet to hear of a regime that invokes the works of Derrida to justify mass murder.”
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=485862&host=5&dir=207
I have admired Wheen’s earlier work, but, having flipped through this book and read the bits on Chomsky, which are quite wrong, and seem to be wilfully so, I tend to agree with Gray this time.
Ted Welch
Thanks for the comments.
As I’ve only read The Guardian’s extracts at the moment, I can’t really comment on the whole book. I suspect that 1979 as a jumping off point is rather spurious, and I certainly couldn’t comment on either Nietzsche or Chomsky. I’ve read a solitary book by the latter.
My feelings on the subject come from the mass market acceptance of some quite preposterous superstitious nonsense – new age mysticism, and horsoscopes; homeopathy and feng shui. The fact that my Sunday newspaper of choice, The Observer carries both a column by the self-styled “Barefoot Doctor” and horoscopes.
I have read Francis Wheen’s new book, as I have very long train journeys every day. He is spot on about large numbers of shibboleths of both the left and right wing, and as a consequence, is bound to offend nearly everybody.
I suspect John Gray is desperate to score some points against Wheen since Wheen trashes rather spectacularly Gray’s own pretentions by comparing him quite accurately as yet another purveyor of old snake oil in new bottles. That John Gray feelds the need to justify Derrida on the grounds that no-one has been inspired to kill because of Derrida is entirely beside the point. The point is of course that Derrida spouts nonsense, dangerous because he spouts fatuous nonsense that people confuse with historical comment and criticism, and hence with any semblence of reality.
That no-one has yet been inspired to kill because of Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky or Stephen Covey or Anthony Robbins or quite a few people mentioned in this book is not a testament to their veracity nor anything else for that matter.
In the middle of the chapter which mentions Derrida and the postmodernists is a rather impassioned plea that a denial of objective reality and wilful denial of historical evidence together with a willingness to obfuscate is tantamount to a denial of anything except the author’s narcissism. Wheen quotes Richard Evans as pointing out that the Holocaust, for example, was not a “textual discourse”
“How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the world” is a great book for people like me who feel betrayed by Tony Blair’s New Labour, betrayed by America’s lurch to the fanatical right and its President’s betrayal of the Constitution and the principles of freedom, betrayed by the Left’s betrayal of reason and the Enlightment, and skeptical that the politics of emotion will lead anywhere except downhill.
Also trashed: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s “New Right” thinking and economics, American foreign policy and the “Blowback” phenomenon, the emotionalism that swept around the world on the death of Princess Diana, and lots more besides.
I have no idea (having not studied Chomsky too closely) whether what Wheen says about Chomsky not acknowledging the reports coming out of Cambodia to be true until well after the event, but I would suspect that Chomsky, like a lot of others, protests too much.
It is a book for sceptics and civic republicans who simply can’t swallow the junk food of modern politics and postmodern discourse.