Books
Personal growth, mission statements and other voodoo
by Philip Temple
HOW MUMBO-JUMBO CONQUERED THE WORLD: A short history of modern delusions, by Francis Wheen (Fourth Estate, $54.99).
The pop title and jacket of Guardian columnist Francis Wheen’s latest book belie its serious intent. You can laugh at the anecdote that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity has been described as based on a “sexed equation” – meaning, too male and therefore invalid. Or that an English professor believes postmodern critical theory relieves him “of the obligation to be right … and demands only that I be interesting”. But the smile on your face begins to freeze as you continue to read through Wheen’s accumulation of the nonsense and absurdities that have issued from the mouths and pens of academic and political leaders in recent times.
Wheen posits that there has been a wholesale retreat from Reason and the values of the Enlightenment before an invading alliance of pre-modernists, post-modernists, medieval theocrats and New Age mystics. The road back to the future began in 1979, when Iranian fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime last seen 1300 years ago, and Margaret Thatcher took office with the fundamentalist capitalist plan of returning Britain to Victorian values. “The Imam and the grocer’s daughter represented two powerful messianic creeds whose ‘conflict’ … found its most gruesome expression some 22 years later,” Wheen writes, referring to the attack on the World Trade Center by Islamist martyrs.
Wheen tracks the course of voodoo economics, the abandonment of hard-won Keynesian welfare states and interventionist government in favour of unregulated free markets, where many could get rich and there were the benefits of trickle-down for those who couldn’t. And although his stories and people are mostly American and sometimes British, one can still hear in the echo chamber of memory the chants of Thatcher’s disciples in New Zealand – St Roger, St Richard and St Ruth. Thatcher, Reagan and their disciples ignored the wild speculation fuelled by the voodoo, the crash of ’87 and the fact that wholesale recession of the American economy was avoided only by the direct intervention of the Federal Reserve Board – no market corrections there. Yet the Think Tanks
survived: “We propose things which people regard as on the edge of lunacy.
The next thing you know, they’re on the edge of policy.”
Reagan retired saying he wanted America to remain “a country where someone can always get rich”. And boy, were there plenty of people ready to tell you how, with mumbo-jumbo books on personal growth, spirituality and wealth accumulation. Like Chicken Soup for the Soul, God Wants You to Be Rich, If Aristotle Ran General Motors – oh, yes, and Moses CEO, which declared the 10 Commandments as the world’s first mission statement. The great guru of the new capitalist mysticism, Deepak Chopra, proclaimed that, “People who have achieved an enormous amount of success are inherently very spiritual … Affluence is simply our natural state.” Both wealth and health are self-generated, so that, “Ageing is simply learned behaviour.”
New Age theories and counsellors on personal growth and self-healing joined forces with New Age free-market managers, the proliferation of consultants to government and the mumbo-jumbo of the mission statement. A 1995 inquiry into failures within the semi-privatised British prison service concluded: “Any organisation which boasts one Statement of Purpose, one Vision, five Values, six Goals, seven Strategic Priorities and eight Key Performance Indicators without any clear correlation between them is producing a recipe for total confusion and exasperation.” Does that remind you of a company or a department near you? Wheen describes the fatal combination of Christian fundamentalism and unregulated capitalism. (“Jesus was a freedom lover. He wanted people to have the freedom to make choices,” intoned Kenneth Lay of Enron.)
Wheen deals with the Us and Them hysteria in the US, the need for enemies – from Russia, Asia, Outer Space, anywhere, to justify the mad expenditure on massive armaments. The constant slippage from reality into fantasy that causes many to think The X-Files are real. He spares no one: not such postmodernists as Foucault, not counselling academics who peddle feelings over rationality, not even Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, whom he lambasts for their perverse inability to find anything good in America. Wheen’s deepest regret is that the America of Jefferson and Franklin, rational, humane and scientific in their thinking, has given way to the corrupt empire of the Bush dynasty.
Wheen tends to confuse economic and spiritual mumbo-jumbo with just plain old political manipulation, corruption and ruthlessness that have been around since the first group of hunters gathered at the fire and argued over how to divvy up the mammoth steaks. But he also tells us we should find our own way in this world and beware the hard sell, the manipulating patronage and, yes, the mumbo-jumbo of the rich beyond the ditch. Let alone the so-called world leadership of the man who, not so long ago, said: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and we knew exactly who the ‘they’ were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who ‘them’ was. Today, we are not so sure who the ‘they’ are, but we know they’re there.”
