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59 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A small voice of reason, 17 Mar 2004
From the first page this book promises a great deal: Francis Wheen sets out to show how society, both Western and Islamic, has determinedly squandered the benefits of the Enlightenment and has developed an astonishing hostility towards contemporary science and rational thought.Wheen paints a picture that is both amusing and chilling: our citizens and leaders are in the thrall of hocus and spin; educated people consume with gusto the diet of drivel served up in the media; an entire nation loses its grip after the death of a Sloaney princess; and post-modernists conjure with words to question the reality of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. This would have been a better book if Wheen had built on its early momentum and resisted the lure of diatribe, but there is such a surfeit of material to support his thesis, and so much nonsense routinely peddled by famous people who should have known better, that he seems unable to stop. The result is erudite and funny, but in the end this is a string of good journalism, rather than the serious manifesto that it might have been. I recommend this book, and I hope that Wheen will soon produce another edition that not only updates us on the progress of this human ship of fools (which seems daily to surpass itself in its vainglorious stupidity) but also lingers more on the questions why, and what needs to be done.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very lucid and coherent argument..., 28 Aug 2007
...but there are holes.
Yes, the author does pick some easy targets - but, then again, the King was an easy target when he was riding up the street in the buff.
I'm an Enlightenment junky and a firm believer in liberal democracy and once I heard the interview with Wheen on Resonsance FM's Little Atoms this book was an absolute must-have. And its good. Very good. So why the 4 stars? My main gripe has to do with political affiliation. In the first part of the book one is left wondering how on earth Thatcher came to power in the UK. Why on earth did anyone vote for what she was about to do to Britain (close down coal mining, stop school milk, destroy manufacturing industry, get rid of park keepers, &tc, &tc)? The answer is simple and it's one Wheen avoids:- she wasn't Labour. Let's just remind ourselves that 1970s Britain was a dire place to be in and that was thanks to Labour (believe me all you young strident left-wing politics/sociology/media studies students from De Montfort because I remember it and it wasn't nice).
In 1979 Britain would have elected a sock puppet called Bob rather than have another Labour government. The Liberals were not even on the radar. Yup, for our sins we got Margaret Thatcher. And the same argument holds with Reagan in the US. The US wanted to be led by anyone but a Democrat, given the disastrous time the States was having of it in the late 1970s (culminating, I suppose, with the Iran hostage crisis, or was it energy, or a whole host of other issues???). Interestingly Wheen acknowledges the reason why the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran is clearly because the Shah was so corrupt (the Ayatollah, like Thatcher, provided the alternative).
I also take strong issue with the author's support of conventional medicine. I do not agree that society's flight from conventional medicine is somehow purely irrational. I would suggest that society is taking a flight from drugs and not conventional medicine as a whole. And who could blame us? If I am feeling a bit down is it irrational not to pop a pill when all the scientific evidence gathered by those good people at GlaxoSmithKlyne or Eli Lilly says it is good for me. Erm... no, I'm afraid I'm going to be unscientific and irrational and stick to feeling fed up.
Life just isn't this simple. But this is what makes Wheen's argument so darn good. A good argument should sound simple. And an argument laced with humour is pretty deadly.
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25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good in parts, but flawed, 11 Jan 2005
This is a book that starts off well, with some right-on-the-button assaults on charlatans and snake-oil merchants, though in some places I feel he does not really sort out the harmless eccentrics from those who need to be stopped.This book does start to fall down towards the end. His criticism of supply-side economics and the "weightless economy" is sharp, but more political polemic than the satire he started out writing. When he gets on to 9/11, though, he shows his own susceptibility to mumbo-jumbo. in accusing all those on the left who tried to offer explanations for the attacks of sympathising with the terrorists, he betrays rationality. Though he rightly attacks Huntington's thesis in "The Clash of Civilizations", Wheen offers no better explanation. Understanding is not the same as support. Indeed, it is incumbent on us to try to understand what drives people to join organisations such as Al Qaeda (or, closer to home, the British National Party), if we do not want them to gain strength and influence. The leaders of extremist fundamentalist and far-right groups seize on the despair, alienation and anger felt by many people around the world, whip these feelings into hatred and then offer them a target for this hate. it is only with this understanding that something can be done to remedy the causes and deprive the leaders of their support.
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