by Francis Wheen
IT WAS SOMETHING I could have predicted confidently without any assistance from crystal balls, tea-leaves or horoscopes: that when the hardback edition of this book appeared, the forces of mumbo-jumbo would unwittingly act as my publicists by providing new instances every day of my argument that rational thought is in retreat.
‘Madonna, Demi Moore and Britney Spears – all apparently believe that they can absorb “negative energy” by swinging a chicken above their heads’
So it proved. The schools superintendent for the American state of Georgia proposed that the word ‘evolution’ should be removed from all biology textbooks, explaining that it ‘evokes the monkeys-to-man sort of thing’ and might therefore distress pupils who believe that the earth began a few thousand years ago with Adam and Eve. Dr Percy Seymour published The Scientific Proof of Astrology, which claimed to demonstrate that our characters and destinies depend on where Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and Venus happened to be on the night of our birth. The Queen chose Dr Timothy Evans, who specializes in acupuncture and aromatherapy, to replace Sir Nigel Southward as the official royal doctor. Kabbalah was hailed by the tabloids as ‘the trendiest faith around’, endorsed by stars such as Madonna, Demi Moore and Britney Spears – all of whom apparently believe that they can absorb ‘negative energy’ by swinging a chicken above their heads, and that wearing red string knotted around their wrists will help ward off ‘the evil eye’.
Having written a book which included something to offend pretty well everybody, I also expected the publicity campaign to be assisted by a loud chorus of hostile reviews. This prophecy was less successful. Most reviewers were remarkably generous – notably Suzanne Moore in the New Statesman, who paid me several handsome compliments even though I take a swipe at her in my chapter on Princess Diana. More surprising still was a full-page eulogy in the Daily Mail, a newspaper described in my book as the chief British purveyor of mumbo-jumbo.
‘Having written a book which included something to offend pretty-well everybody, I also expected the publicity campaign to be assisted by a loud chorus of hostile reviews.’
No such surprises from Professor John Gray, the Screaming Lord Sutch of academe. His review for the Independent complained that the book was a ‘rambling and bilious tirade … against Margaret Thatcher and the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Reverend Jerry Fallwell and Professor Noam Chomsky, Milton Friedman and the New Age guru Deepak Chopra … As he flays out furiously against virtually every aspect of the current intellectual scene, one is irresistibly reminded of Victor Meldrew’s plaintive cry in One Foot in the Grave: “I don’t believe it!”’ It’s a treat to be accused of splenetic grumpiness by a man whose own jeremiads make Victor Meldrew sound like Milly-Molly-Mandy. Oddly, however, he omitted to mention that another target of ‘Wheen’s spleen’ is none other than Professor John Gray, whose bizarre intellectual odyssey is chronicled in Chapter 8.
Since the book’s publication I have spoken at dozens of bookshops and literary festivals, and one question is asked again and again: ‘What about Iraq?’ If you want a guide to the 57 varieties of human folly and idiocy, you certainly need look no further than the recent history of Iraq – or, more precisely, Western attitudes to Iraq. Before the war there were many predictions (gloomy or gleeful, according to who was making them) that the US-led forces would spend months bogged down on the outskirts of Baghdad, unable to break the defences of Saddam’s ‘elite Republican Guard’. It would, according to several pundits, be ‘another Stalingrad’. In the event, as anyone surveying the scale of the invasion force could have guessed, the coalition forces reached the capital with little difficulty.
‘Most reviewers were remarkably generous – notably Suzanne Moore, who paid me several handsome compliments even though I take a swipe at her’
But then a far greater idiocy gradually became apparent. In all the extensive pre-war planning by the finest minds in the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House, no one had paused to think about what could or should be done once the military campaign achieved its objective. I was reminded of Michael Foot’s jibe against the Tory minister Sir Keith Joseph, who presided over the destruction of British manufacturing industry in the 1980s. Foot likened Joseph to a magician who borrows an expensive watch from a member of the audience, smashes it with a hammer – and then, after much anguished brow-furrowing, confesses that he has forgotten the rest of the trick.
The catalogue of American blunders or outright crimes (including the torture and sexual humiliation of detainees) is well known, and too long to repeat here. But what of the supposedly virtuous opponents of Messrs Bush and Blair? In Chapter 4 of my book I note that Alan Sokal’s famous hoaxing of the post-modernists was prompted by his indignation, as a socialist, that the self-proclaimed Left was now championing obscurantism. This bizarre alliance between progressives and reactionaries has since reappeared in Britain’s Stop the War Coalition, which is jointly led by the Socialist Workers Party and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) – a British affiliate of the ultra-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. The MAB’s political aim is the establishment of a theocratic state in which apostasy from Islam is ‘punishable by death’.
‘It’s a treat to be accused of splenetic grumpiness by a man whose own jeremiads make Victor Meldrew sound like Milly-Molly-Mandy.’
Thus a party supposedly committed to democracy, secularism and feminism embraced a movement that is violently hostile to all these values – purely because they happen to share a hatred of American policy. As the American socialist Paul Berman wrote recently, many people are blinded by the understandable revulsion they feel towards the US president who waged the war: ‘They peer at Iraq and see [only] the smirking face of George W. Bush.’ Following this logic, veteran left-wingers such as Tariq Ali and John Pilger became cheerleaders for the so-called Iraqi ‘resistance’ – even when this resistance was perpetrated by latter-day Nazis from Saddam’s Ba’ath Party or Islamist goons from al-Qaeda, and even though its targets included UN workers, Kurdish democrats, Iraqi socialists and indeed many devout Muslims, massacred in their mosques.
The Left used to believe that liberty, democracy and human rights were the birthright of everyone. Not any more, apparently. To quote Paul Berman again: ‘Today, people say, out of a spirit of egalitarian tolerance: Social democracy for Swedes! Tyranny for Arabs! And this is supposed to be a left-wing attitude?’ Seldom has a hefty dose of rational thinking been more necessary; seldom has it been harder to find.
‘If you want a guide to the 57 varieties of human folly and idiocy, you certainly need look no further than the recent history of Iraq’