It does not seek to understand why people hold these ideas, it simply deplores that they hold them at all. I find this unsatisfactory because one cannot figure out why something is the case until one "gets inside the problem" and figures out what makes it work.
When Kant said that Enlightenment is about "man" escaping his own self-imposed immaturity paraphrase , he was talking, I feel, about creating critical understanding. That is, to seek to really understand what makes people and things "tick". Wheen, by contrast, is holding not to this interpretation of the Enlightenment but a rather more chauvinistic one that disparages religion and indeed anything that is not purely a product of rationality.
However, as Garry Wills has argued, "The learned have their own superstitions, prominent among them a belief that superstition is evaporating. Under God: Religion and American Politics. Simon and Schuster Wheen strikes me as profoundly conservative in this respect, wanting to bring back the 's and 's intellectual viewpoint of an ever secularizing society. What this means is that Wheen does not attempt to penetrate the phenomenology of the various "superstitions" he criticizes.
Instead he seeks to make anyone who holds these ideas seem ridiculous. While I agree that many people are "blithering idiots", I am not satisfied that this constitutes a sufficient explanation for the continuation of strange ideas in society. While I am devoted to scientific realism the view that there is a real world out there that we can understand through science , I am also persuaded that human knowledge cannot escape processes of social construction, not even for the most scientific positive researcher.
We develop knowledge socially and that often means adherence to particular ideas even when the facts seem contradictory. We can overcome bad ideas through critical analysis, but we can never escape the social component of knowledge entirely. Hence, for me, the interesting question is why, for example, various New Age beliefs exist.
Rather than see these as some sort of "betrayal" of science, I would seek to ground these ideas in particular social processes. I suspect that the answer to the question I have just posed might indict chauvinistic views of the Enlightenment as a partial cause of the move towards pseudoscience. But at the very least, I try to have a somewhat sympathetic understanding the views that people have. Whereas Wheen disdains the supernatural, I prefer to invoke the sociologist of religion Peter Berger, who pointed out that the existence of dreams are a key component of the supernatural.
My point is not to say that dreams are supernatural - I am rather more convinced that they have a conventionally scientific explanation - but that for all of us, the nature of existence is rather precarious and science does not have historically deep roots. Until one develops real sympathy for why people might feel that "superstition" has the answer, one can never really understand the existence of religion, belief in crystals, UFOs, and the like. Post Script: Upon some reflection, I am apt to think that Wheen shares many aspects with his friend, the late Christopher Hitchens, who likewise was highly adamant, difficult to pin down politically, and who was remarkably unsympathetic to the notion of religion.
I suspect that Wheen is somewhat more moderate, however, there is a certain resemblance. View 2 comments. Shelves: economics , capitalism , history , non-fiction , unpleasant-truths , english , rational-thought , knowledge. In the back of my mind, I have been thinking that this book might spark controversy as the story about the people living on Pitcairn Island did. I know what it means to me, but I suspect that the phrase represents vastly different things to different people.
It immediately conjures up thoughts of the occultism and spiritualism that was rampant at the end of the 19th and start of the In the back of my mind, I have been thinking that this book might spark controversy as the story about the people living on Pitcairn Island did. It immediately conjures up thoughts of the occultism and spiritualism that was rampant at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries.
To know that the creator of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes was susceptible to these things is abhorrent to me. In almost the same millisecond, I think of Harry Houdini , famed escapist and magician, who debunked mystics and spiritualists while honestly searching for a way to communicate with his dead mater.
These charlatans wasted his time and thus made him want to expose them. I also think of Mary Baker Eddy , founder of the Church of Christ the Scientist aka Christian Scientists , whose magnificent tomb sits less than a mile from my home in the lovely Mount Auburn Cemetery.
The legend goes that said tomb was erected with a working telephone inside so that she could call back from the other side. The telephone company eventually had to make the number unlisted to eliminate crank calls to it. This is despite my hope that some of this stuff is real and my enjoyment of The X-Files. But, I sit firmly in the camp of the rationalists and consider The Enlightenment to have been a very, very good thing. So, I am probably a perfect audience for this book.
This includes Mr. Lewis whose phrases now often adore the local public transit buses. Having written that prelude, I must admit that as I worked my way through it, I was in agreement with much that the author stated and appreciative of how he constructed his arguments. At several points he took up some of my own hobby horses much to my satisfaction, but at others I found the topics to veer away from the key elements that I felt were the central idea.
In fact the populist view is so dim-witted on these that any statement against them often leads to extreme reactions.
I read the book in small slices; a few pages at a time. The book is very far-ranging in scope. It covers a lot of material and probably offends equally those Pinko-Commie-Leftists you know who you are as well as those Better-Dead-Than-Red NeoCons you can have your secret handshakes that seemingly dictate our political fortunes these days. In fact is very democracy offending all comers makes it much more satisfying than if it was lopsided in any direction.
Given that he is educated and obviously rational one might assume a particular bent, but the text itself seems free from overt bias. That was also refreshing to me given the subject matter. In all cases he presents historical fact to illustrate where the idiocy has been or was 10 years ago as the book was written. I suspect that subject matter aside, there are plenty of people that will not like his cutting, often snide style.
While not diluting his message, the author takes pride and a fair amount of undisguised joy in pillorying those who promulgate the lies and fuzzy thinking that offends him. If you think an author should write clearly but calmly perhaps coldly like Spock might do , then perhaps Mr. Wheen will not be to your taste. If nothing else it may leave you pondering why humans appear to need something beyond logic and rationality.
Four Stars for premise and content, but only Three for execution: Three-and-one-half 3. Mar 06, Emilia Barnes rated it it was ok Shelves: genre-non-fiction , theme-politics , rated-disappointment , star-rating-2 , rated-dnf. I grew up in a pretty superstitious country, where mumbo-jumbo is the order of the day. Yet, whatever gene you need to be able to read a horoscope with a straight face or attend to the wild ramblings of a fortune teller, I don't have it.
When people tell me of their experiences with the supernatural, it's like with people telling you their dreams. I feel like going: Francis Wheen seems to think that this phenomenon of people believing things even though they don't have a rational basis for them i I grew up in a pretty superstitious country, where mumbo-jumbo is the order of the day.
I feel like going: Francis Wheen seems to think that this phenomenon of people believing things even though they don't have a rational basis for them is some sort of new thing, the '90s equivalent of coronavirus, which just spread uncontrollably to every aspect of public life: from politics to academia to everyday people. He's not exactly wrong about the facts he presents to support his thesis, but he is wrong about the conclusions he seems to draw from it.
If he ever does. He seems much more interested in venting his grievances against the contemporary irrationality of his fellows, than he seems to be in the wider context of the phenomenon he is observing. This book was written in the early s and reading it from my vantage point, in , his concerns seem almost laughable.
Give me fringe UFO enthusiasts any day over freaking alt-righters! Perhaps at the time it was written, it offered its readers a catharsis of sorts, because Wheen is sometimes slightly amusing not HILARIOUS as the book claims on the front cover of my edition though!
But, again, here from , it offers no such comforts. The longer we live in the 21st century, the more we realise that while we are getting ever more grown-up and damaging toys to play with, our ape-brains have not really travelled as fast in their journey to maturity.
We are and always have been more prone to listen to our guts than to our reasons. We like to delude ourselves that the decisions we make are based on evidence and rational thinking but the truth is that our brains are very good at making us believe that, while they make decisions based on experience, prejudice, whether you are hungry and tired or not, your mental well-being, various other instincts and a million other factors that we are hardly aware of.
Where does this leave us? We don't freaking know! It leaves us victim to the unscrupulous and the lying and the self-interested and the malicious and the greedy and the selfish.
It leaves us prey to scams and Facebook memes. Worse, it leaves us, who don't believe in horoscopes, and don't believe in ghosts or that they've been kidnapped by UFOs or that trickle-down is such a good idea with the self-satisfied assurance that it's all the others who are insane. We are the enlightened ones who would never be fooled by- So, to sum up, where we are now in , I think this book just doesn't hold much value beyond a mildly entertaining historical account of the recent past.
Mar 16, M. Harris rated it it was amazing. Did we just imagine the Enlightenment? Because according to Francis Wheen, its enduring power to persuade might be on the wane. This is a riveting account about the 'rise' of emotion-led thinking versus rationality, as evidenced by phenomena such as the fascination with alternative medicine, happy-clappy business gurus, the enthusiasm with collective grief at the death of Princess Diana.
The darker side to this is the rise of religious fundamentalism. Written in whilst the world was still r Did we just imagine the Enlightenment? In fact it seems rather prescient.
The swivel-eyed thinking of the financial markets are touched upon, but even Francis Wheen didn't anticipate how far and how disastrously 'mumbo jumbo' thinking would go on to affect the world. Read it and weep More than two hundred years after the Enlightenment, have we become any more rational? Sects and cults, crystal balls, herbs, astrology and other silly multiplying nonsense are quite amusing when they serve some of our celebrities' ego.
However, when it comes to inspiring some of our politicians or being a backbone to our management culture not devoid of some New Age theories it becomes far less funny Having said that, are such proliferating superstitions a surprise?
They shouldn't be. Afte More than two hundred years after the Enlightenment, have we become any more rational? After all, referring back to the so-called 'Sokal affair', Francis Wheen here shows that the triumphing postmodernism we are now living in could only have damaging consequences -both for abusing science reduced to a subjective way to understand the world around us!
In our time of pseudo-science alternative medicine, creationism and ID The topics at hand are certainly too wide, the targets too many, and, at times, maybe surprising the author attacks also free market ideology and the 'invisible hand', I don't understand quite why -what we have now surely is a twisted version of Adam Smith's original philosophy, but Smith himself was quite rational Nevertheless, cleverly funny, such a slap into absurdity's face is more than welcomed!
Although he duly skewers UFO abduction tales, postmodernist irrationalism, New Age quackery and dotcom madness, Wheen's primary target is the mumbo-jumbo of the both the Right and Left or rather what passes for the Left in contemporary politics.
It is not always clear, however, that what he identifies as mumbo-jumbo isn't, from time to time, a political prescription that works. But at least he's fair-minded; both sides get an equal dose of the rod. Wheen's basic thesis is that modern western ci Although he duly skewers UFO abduction tales, postmodernist irrationalism, New Age quackery and dotcom madness, Wheen's primary target is the mumbo-jumbo of the both the Right and Left or rather what passes for the Left in contemporary politics.
Wheen's basic thesis is that modern western civilization, the product of a worldview born of the Enlightenment--a period that gave us science, the concept of human rights, secular polities and much of the other social and intellectual furniture of our world--is now threatened by a popular reaction against rationality and common sense, a reaction that politicians, the media, public 'intellectuals' and others with a profit motive are happy to capitalize on--and catalyze.
A good read, certainly, although it's getting rather old now. Since its publication in , mumbo-jumbo has gone from strength to strength. Irrationalism is now rampant and widespread, particularly in America, a nation with a historical weakness for it. This book, written by an Englishman with a transatlantic outlook, could profitably be issued in a new edition that covers the madness of the last few years: the housing-price bubble, creationism, and so on.
It could also profit from a broader survey of the landscape of American delusions. Apr 12, Baba rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction. Great concept, but the middle section where Wheen talks about economic theory made my eyes glaze over. Was hoping for more discussion about how pop culture has become dumbed down. Sep 25, Mark Love rated it really liked it. I first read this book in about , soon after it came out.
Reading it again now in the wake of the financial crisis, and in an age of Tory austerity it has depressingly familiar feel. Wheen's thesis is that we are slipping back from an age of rational enlightenment into a p I first read this book in about , soon after it came out.
Wheen's thesis is that we are slipping back from an age of rational enlightenment into a post-modern age of moral relativism where 'all views and interpretations are valid'.
And whether it's allowing the teaching of creationism in schools, homeopathic medicine, or anti-Americans justifying Al-Quaeda this is a worryingly regressive step, and one that can directly be traced back to the election of Margaret Thatcher and the return of Ayatollah Khomeni to Iran in Francis Wheen has a mighty intellect and forensic talents for spotting contradictions and u-turns by journalists and public figures, with which he is able to rapidly fill pages in Private Eye 'over lunchtime' according to Ian Hislop and this book has it in spades.
Hugely funny, enlightening and impressive in turns, it lays into nearly everyone - including a devastating critique of the revered Noam Chomsky in the final chapter. The trouble is that the thesis feels like a flimsy cover for Wheen's skillful storytelling, and that consequently the book doesn't really flow, or reach much of a conclusion. Politicians and businessmen have always used spin and lies and I'm not sure there ever was a true age of enlightenment - rationalism has always had to battle the realities of power, politics and commerce to get it's voice heard, and these days are sadly no different.
Dec 16, Howard rated it it was ok. This is a difficult book, which took me quite a long time to read. It has a highly intellectual, philosophical style, rather than the more journalistic style which I had expected. It covers a lot of ground, from political mumbo-jumbo such as the claims about how neoliberal economics is supposed to work to the benefit of all of society, to the likes of astrology and conspiracy theories.
Being a sceptical sort of person myself, but not, I hope, to the extent of having a closed mind, I was broadly This is a difficult book, which took me quite a long time to read.
Unfortunately, I found that the many changes of subject in each chapter left me floundering a bit, as it was difficult to get a coherent feel for any kind of theme. I know they are not the done thing in this kind of text, but some subheadings would have helped. Finally, the references at the back were too sparse. Many of the points made were not referenced. This is in stark contrast to Naomi Klein, a very different kind of journalist, who rigorously attaches footnotes to almost every claim that she makes.
I do not deny that Wheen is correct in his assertions, just that it would be nice to know the sources of some of them. Dec 15, S. Apr 02, Eddie rated it it was amazing. The Enlightenment was an attitude rather than an ideology. View more libraries An entertaining, impassioned polemic on the retreat of reason in the late 20th century.
In two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In Britain, an era of weary consensualist politics was displaced by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, whose ambition was to reassert 'Victorian values'. In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1, years ago.
Between them they succeeded in bringing the twentieth century to a premature close. By , Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonised the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo. Here are the Reagans taking guidance from their astrologers; and the Clintons with their woolly advisers and their conversations with the late Eleanor Roosevelt; and the Blairs with Carole Caplin and co.
Some of the evidence Wheen quotes here goes way beyond parody: Hillary Clinton, for instance, telling the New York Times she was seeking a theory which would "marry conservatism and liberalism, capitalism and statism, and tie together practically everything: the way we are, the way we were, the faults of man and the word of God, the end of communism and the beginning of the third millennium.
Crime in the streets and on Wall Street, teenage mothers and foul-mouthed children and frightening drunks in the parks, and the cynicism of the press and the corruption of the press and the corrupting role of television, the breakdown of civility and the loss of community. And here are the deconstructionists, preaching the truth that there are no truths, in language so dense and obscure that when one sceptical academic wickedly parodied it, they at first hailed his insight and then tried to maintain that they hadn't been hoaxed.
And here are the management gurus, promulgating new age formulas some of which would hardly look out of place in the output of the Raelian movement, interspersed with plonking platitudes marketed for hundreds of guineas per paragraph. As the book develops the mood grows darker. Here now is Tony Blair listening not to lifestyle advice but to political guidance every bit as frothy and vacuous.
Here too is Blair condoning the wholesale rejection of overwhelming evidence in favour of mumbo-jumbo: his support for schools where creationism is taught alongside or even ahead of Darwin. Here too are American politicians such as Bush and Gore disputing the job for which Jefferson once fought his friend John Adams: the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences versus the president of the American Philosophical Society. And the too-much-forgiven Clinton: a sexual predator and a man "of no discernible moral scruples" who in hastened back to Arkansas to execute a brain-damaged black man to forestall any claim he was "soft".
And beyond all these, a chain of deluders and the deluded, stretching into the distance through the dotcom boom and the rise and fall of Enron and the witch doctor economics of the IMF.
But the distribution of drubbings goes even wider than that. Some who salivate over Wheen's maulings of those they despise will find the smiles wiped off their faces when they turn the page and find him turning his merciless eye on the "squishy progressives"; people whose rigid fundamentalist anti-Americanism caused them to hail the advent of Ayatollah Khomeini, or who used to defend Pol Pot, or who blinded themselves to the ugliest truths about the Soviet Union; or who argued after September 11, not least in the Guardian, that the victims had brought their fate on themselves.
0コメント