In a previous life I used to work in a bookshop. It's a fairly well known and relatively reputable bookshop in Dublin city centre. It aims for your better read reader. The MBS or Mind Body Spirit section was one of the more profitable sections in the shop. Self help manuals, diet books, hidden prophetic codes in the bible, aromatherapy a-zs, Diana biographies, 10 secret business steps to success, that kind of thing. MBS basically means masses of bull shit.

This all seems harmless enough at first glance. Nobody really believes that any of it is really true, it is just a bit of harmless fun, a way to unwind. And the people who browse the MBS section are not dippy hippies or silly billies. They look just as normal, focused and intelligent as everyone else in the shop. Yet they spend their hard earned cash on books that are all a load of codswollop. And then they read them. It was hard to understand.

There is a widespread assumption that the last three hundred years or so have seen the victory of reason and empiricism. Enlightenment has rushed into all our lives and slayed the dragons of myth and superstition. Science has kicked religion's ass. Modernity is about the triumph of clear thinking and the dispelling of bogusity and stupidity. Bully for us.

Francis Wheen is worried that this is not so much the case. In his recently published book 'How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World: A short history of modern delusions' he argues that bogusity and stupidity are alive and well.

Wheen reckons that 1979 is a most important date in world history. The twin fundamentalist revolutionaries of Britain's Margaret Thatcher and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and both decided to return their societies to simpler, more traditional values. The miraculous power of the free market and the literal word of the prophet both spelled trouble for reason and rationality. Next came Ronald Reagan who combined rampant capitalism with simplistic Christianity. And from then on we were in trouble.

Horoscopes became vitally popular in even the most serious of newspapers. Alternative [i.e. unproven in accepted medical trials] medicines like acupuncture and aromatherapy were all the rage. Self help and business gurus like Deepak Chopra and Anthony Robbins became millionaires and government advisors. Princess Diana died for us. UFO sightings and alien abduction numbers rocketed. Academics like Samuel Huntingdon and fanatics like Osama Bin Laden appeared with their easy to follow guides to the clash of civilisations and lots of people believed. In 1999 the British government hired a feng shui consultant to improve the quality of life in inner city housing estates. "Red and orange flowers would reduce crime and introducing a water feature would reduce poverty," went the report. She was paid handsomely for her advice. Something had gone seriously haywire.

The supposed links between reason and perceived economic wisdom were severed. By connecting the irrationality of Reagan's voodoo economics, the dot com bubble madness, and the one size fits all IMF blueprints for running an economy, Wheen argues that capitalism itself became a faith. Charismatic leaders such as Enron's Kenneth Lay acted like rockstars or even messiahs, speaking of vision, mission and destiny. Like in the Simpsons when Hank Scorpio sets up Globex Corp and says he doesn't like to call it work. It couldn't, and didn't, last.

Wheen doesn't just pour scorn on right wing prophets, he keeps plenty of ridicule back for the lefty likes of John Pilger and Noam Chomsky too. For him they believe only in the fundamental truth that the West can never be right, and wonder whether Osama Bin Laden supports the equitable redistribution of Iraqi oil revenues and universal acceptance of the Kyoto Protocol. Which is silly.

Of course Wheen also chooses his targets carefully to make his points, and to get laughs. He is being wilfully entertaining and argumentative, and as sociology books go Mumbo Jumbo is pretty funny. He does, in the end, have a serious point though, and one that is well made. While discussing the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in American schools he quotes 1920s outspoken journo HL Mencken:

"The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex - because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meagre capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. They are idiotic, but they are simple - and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him. The popularity of fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmologies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse to hate his betters."

Mencken was obviously pretty snobbish, and I had to look up cosmogony, but he has a point. There is too much to know, so lots of people just take a step backward and refuse to even try and learn. It happens in schools and universities and it happens in the real world too. Wheen's point is that there is a link between alternative medicine and creationism, blind faith in free markets and horoscopes, postmodernist relativists and martian invaders. They all allow the faithful to abdicate responsibility and to not bother thinking for themselves. And they are all, in the end, bad for everyone.

There is a link between those who believe that God put dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith and believing in feng shui, free trade and fundamentalist religions of any stripe. This link is neither fun nor harmless. Wheen argues that the new popularity of irrationalism grows out of a general feeling of impotence. It suits political leaders to use the general mumbo jumbo as a screen and to move debate away from proper politics, and towards side issues like say the smoking ban. "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," he writes.

Or to sum up lots of smart people just find it easier to act stupid. And lots of smarter people get rich and powerful off of their stupidity. It's a shite state of affairs. But it's an excellent book. Makes you think. So the next time you are browsing around the MBS section then hang a left and pick up some Mumbo Jumbo instead. It's been out in hardback a while, and will be out in paperback in October.

first published on oxygen.ie