29June
Recently, McGazz proposed the name Itsjustanism to describe insistence on the separation of culture and politics; militant aesthetic complacency; middle-brow common-sense; anti-intellectualism; compulsory frivolity, esp. prevalent amongst Anglo-Media types. How else can we explain the obsession on very minor celebrities at the expense of actual policy – Emily Big Brother not Emily's List, the thoughts of Paris Hilton not those of Paris Gellar.
Which leads us into the book we've been reading on and off for the past few months: How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
, a 2004 work from Francis Wheen. The book is a collection of essays on the counter-Reformation. Wheen attributes the start of this process to the establishment of an islamist republic in Iran, and the seduction of psycopathic free-markets in the west. After expounding his thesis in the opening chapter, Wheen moves on to take the mick out of apocalypticals through the ages, those who believe that astrologists or creationists have any credibility, and the deconstructionist philosophy that nothing can be proven or disproven, and hence [sic] everything is valid. An updated version would surely include a decent skewering of the nonsense that is Wikipedia, the ultimate triumph of Itsonlyanism.
Wheen doesn't concentrate his fire on easy targets, saving the most pointed observation – that the economic reforms of recent years have slowed growth – to a throwaway remark at the end of the penultimate chapter. He doesn't put the other point, that slow and steady growth may be preferable to a stop-start economy. Indeed, there's very little to balance Wheen's perception of the situation, very little to suggest that he has weighed up competing opinions.
Nor does Wheen offer any solution to the problem he has identified. Would better education, at schools or through the mass media, have any effect? His book is an argument by anecdote, and works best as a collection of essays on the theme of Aren't people stupid nowadays. It's not a comedy book, and Wheen's content is dense, particularly in the chapter on post-modernist thought. The tone is light enough to make this a readable book.
It's a decent book, and we don't regret reading it. However, we cannot recommend it with tremendous enthusiasm, and it's probably not worth the £8 paperback price. If you see it remaindered for a few quid, it's worth it.
