How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions

Alarmed by the crescendo of violence, Shahpour Bakhtiar announces that the country’s airports will reopen tomorrow. Americans, Europeans and Iranian Jews make plans to leave as soon as possible. At his villa in the Parisian suburb of Neauphle-le-Château, Khomeini issues a statement confirming that he will return within the next forty-eight hours. ‘If there is any blood to be shed, I want to be among my people.’

Thursday 1 February

Accompanied by a retinue of journalists and Iranian students, Khomeini boards a chartered Air France Boeing at Charles de Gaulle airport. Throughout the five-hour flight to Tehran, the black-robed, white-bearded seventy-eight-year-old reclines on a carpet in the first-class compartment. As they enter Iranian airspace, a French reporter asks: ‘What are your emotions after so many years of exile?’ The Ayatollah, who has ignored previous questions, murmurs ‘Hichi’ – the Farsi for ‘nothing’.

Khomeini steps off the plane at 9.30 a.m. to a thunderous reception from at least a million supporters, many of whom have waited all night for a glimpse of their hero. In a brief statement at the airport, he says that ‘final victory’ will come only when ‘all the foreigners are out of the country and uprooted … I beg to God to cut off the hand of all evil foreigners and all their helpers in Iran.’ He is then whisked into a limousine for a triumphal motorcade through the centre of Tehran to the cemetery of Behesht-e-Zahra, where he pays tribute to the hundreds who died in the months of demonstrations against the Shah. From there, he is flown by helicopter to his new revolutionary headquarters, a former girls’ school near the Iranian parliament.

According to the BBC correspondent John Simpson, who travelled from Paris with Khomeini, ‘a millennial frenzy took over the entire country. People wept and shouted and beat their chests in an ecstasy of hope and joy.’ Newspapers publish ecstatic poems which reflect this chiliastic optimism:

The day the Imam returns

No one will tell lies any more

No one will lock the doors of his house;

People will become brothers

Sharing the bread of their joys together

In justice and sincerity.

London, Wednesday 10 January

James Callaghan, the British prime minister, looks tanned and relaxed on his return to England after six days at an international summit in Guadeloupe, where he was photographed swimming with young air-stewardesses during a break from discussing the Soviet nuclear threat. Britain, by contrast, is freezing and paralysed: thousands of lorry-drivers are on strike, most ports and many factories have shut down, all roads into the city of Hull are blockaded by secondary pickets, hundreds of schools have closed for lack of heating oil, supermarkets are running out of food and railway workers have announced that they will begin a national strike next week. And all because of Callaghan’s insistence that no pay rise in the private or public sector shall exceed 5 per cent, at a time when inflation is above 8 per cent.

Arriving at Heathrow airport, Callaghan is asked by a reporter about ‘the mounting chaos in the country at the moment’. The avuncular smile that earned him the nickname Sunny Jim disappears at once. ‘Please don’t run your country down,’ he admonishes. ‘If you look at it from the outside, you can see you are taking a rather parochial view. I do not feel there is mounting chaos. I don’t think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.’

A few hours later the political editor of the Sun, Walter Terry, files his report of the press conference: ‘Sun-tanned premier Jim Callaghan breezed back into Britain yesterday and asked: Crisis? What crisis?… Not even the threat of up to two million people being laid off work next week worried jaunty Jim.’ The Sun’s editor, Larry Lamb, adds the coup de grâce by repeating Terry’s pejorative précis in a huge front-page headline: ‘CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?’

Wednesday 28 March

A day of high parliamentary drama. For the past couple of years Callaghan’s minority Labour government has limped from one crisis to another, kept alive by wily parliamentary manoeuvring and makeshift alliances – first with the Liberals (during the ‘Lib-Lab pact’ of 1977–8) and then with the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, who were cajoled into acquiescence by the promise of a Devolution Bill. On 1 March, however, referendums in Scotland and Wales failed to deliver the support necessary for the home-rule proposals to become law, whereupon the nationalists abandoned Callaghan.

The Ulster Unionists have also backed the government in recent months, but only in return for legislation increasing the number of parliamentary seats in Northern Ireland. When the Bill received the royal assent last week, they too decided there was no longer any advantage to be gained from propping up a wheezing and enfeebled administration. Seizing her opportunity, the Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher has tabled a motion of no-confidence in Her Majesty’s government. If passed, it will precipitate a general election.

The debate is preceded by feverish and often farcical horse-trading. Having won round three Welsh Nationalists by promising a new scheme to compensate coal-miners suffering from lung disease, Callaghan still needs to find two more votes before tonight’s division. The Labour minister Roy Hattersley gives Frank Maguire, the Independent member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, three bottles of whiskey plus the promise of an inquiry into food prices in Northern Ireland. Some Ulster Unionists try unsuccessfully to trade their votes for a pledge to build an expensive natural-gas pipeline under the Irish Sea.

Opening the debate, Margaret Thatcher says that ‘the government has failed the nation … Britain is now a nation on the sidelines. Rarely in the post-war period can our standing in the world have been lower or our defences weaker.’ Labour has ‘centralised too much power in the state’, paying ‘far too little attention to wealth creation and too much to its redistribution’.

The prime minister, who celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday yesterday, attacks the Conservatives and their ‘lap dogs’ in Fleet Street. He also sneers at the Liberals and Scottish Nationalists for allying themselves with the Tories: ‘The minority parties have walked into a trap … It is the first time in recorded history that turkeys have been known to vote for an early Christmas.’ He concludes with a surprise announcement that old-age pensions will be increased in November: ‘Let need, not greed, be our motto.’

Ill and dying members are brought from their beds, some by ambulance, to be wheeled through the lobbies at 10 p.m. But the seventy-six-year-old Labour MP Sir Alfred Broughton, who suffered a heart attack a week ago, is too weak to leave hospital. If the vote is a tie, the Speaker would be obliged by precedent to exercise a casting vote on behalf of the government. Because of Sir Alfred’s absence, however, the no-confidence motion is passed by 311 votes to 310.

Callaghan, the first British prime minister to have his government brought down by a censure motion since Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, announces that he will seek a dissolution of parliament and a general election as soon as essential business is cleared. ‘Now that parliament has declared itself, we shall take our case to the country.’

Friday 4 May

The Conservatives have won an overall majority of forty-three seats in yesterday’s general election – the biggest margin of victory by any party since 1966. Labour’s share of the poll, at 36.9 per cent, is its lowest since 1931. While Audrey Callaghan moves the family’s belongings out of the back door of 10 Downing Street, her husband leaves by the front door to ride to Buckingham Palace and hand in his resignation to the Queen. He then departs for his Sussex farm, pausing briefly en route to offer commiserations to staff at the Labour Party HQ in Smith Square.

Shortly afterwards Margaret Thatcher is summoned to the palace, where she formally accepts her appointment as prime minister by kissing the monarch’s hands. She is then driven in a black Rover to Downing Street. Looking rather subdued and slight among the swirl of reporters and burly police officers, she quotes a favourite phrase of her former colleague Airey Neave, who was killed by a car-bomb at the beginning of the election campaign: ‘There is now work to be done.’ Before disappearing through the door of No. 10 to get on with it, she also recites ‘some words of St Francis of Assisi, which I think really are just particularly apt at the moment’:

Where there is discord may we bring harmony,

Where there is error may we bring truth,

Where there is doubt may we bring faith,

And where there is despair may we bring hope.

Introduction Dare to know (#ulink_638e3c3d-b9f0-5525-9e68-b0bb1a7ec14a)

The rapid progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labour and double its produce; all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian standard. O that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity!

Letter from BENJAMIN FRANKLIN to Joseph Priestley

(8 February 1780)

In September 1784, a Berlin magazine invited several German intellectuals to answer the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ They included the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who rose to the challenge with a vigour and clarity not always evident in his lengthier works:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without direction from another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolve and courage to use it without another’s guidance. Sapere aude! Dare to know! That is the motto of Enlightenment.

The sprightly optimism of this venerable professor, then already in his sixties, derived from his belief that a revolution in human history was imminent. In the Critique of Pure Reason, which had been published three years earlier and established his reputation throughout Europe, Kant had sought to reconcile the two dominant schools of modernist philosophy – the British empiricist approach of Bacon, Locke and Hume (who held that knowledge was the product of experience and experiment, and thus subject to amendment), and the continental rationalism exemplified by Descartes and Spinoza, which maintained that certainty could be achieved by inferential reasoning from first principles. What these traditions had in common was far more important than what divided them, and by incorporating elements from both he was able to demolish the pretensions of religion to superior knowledge or understanding. ‘The critical path alone is still open,’ he announced after almost seven hundred pages, having cleared away the metaphysical obstacles.

If the reader has had the courtesy and patience to accompany me along this path, he may now judge for himself whether, if he cares to lend his aid in making this path into a high-road, it may not be possible to achieve before the end of the present century what many centuries have not been able to accomplish; namely, to secure for human reason complete satisfaction in regard to that with which it has all along so eagerly occupied itself, though hitherto in vain.

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is hard not to smile at the suggestion that the forces of reason might achieve ‘complete satisfaction’, and humanity grow out of its ‘self-incurred immaturity’, some time before 1800. ‘I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood,’ Michel Foucault wrote in the 1980s, reflecting on the 200 years that had passed since Kant’s famous essay for the Berlinischer Monatsschrift. ‘Many things in our experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet.’ Foucault himself fiercely opposed the Enlightenment’s universalism yet even he conceded its ‘importance and effectiveness’, arguing that it should ‘be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.’

Just so: the Enlightenment was not so much an ideology as an attitude – a presumption that certain truths about mankind, society and the natural world could be perceived, whether through deduction or observation, and that the discovery of these truths would transform the quality of life. The foundations on which it built were those laid by the empirical philosophers and natural scientists of the seventeenth century – most notably Francis Bacon (1561–1626), John Locke (1632–1704) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727) – and the debt was fully acknowledged: Thomas Jefferson described them as the ‘greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception’, while d’Alembert and Diderot dedicated their Encyclopédie, that great monument of the French Enlightenment, to the trinity of English patron saints. (Rather less credit was given to Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher who is only now beginning to receive his due. A recent study by Jonathan Israel presents him as the architect of the Radical Enlightenment –‘the chief challenger of the fundamentals of revealed religion, received ideas, tradition, morality and what was everywhere regarded, in absolutist and non-absolutist states alike, as divinely constituted political authority’.)

According to d’Alembert, ‘once the foundation of a revolution has been laid down, it is almost always in the next generation that the revolution is accomplished’. The eighteenth century had no scientific advances comparable with those of Newton and Galileo, but the philosophes were standing on the shoulders of giants – and could therefore see further. ‘By separating theology from natural philosophy, or by ingeniously arguing that natural philosophy supported theology, seventeenth-century scientists concealed from themselves, as much as from others, the revolutionary implications of their work,’ the historian Peter Gay writes. ‘Geniuses from Galileo to Newton lived comfortably with convictions that eighteenth-century philosophes would stigmatise as incompatible … For Newton, God was active in the universe, occasionally correcting the irregularities of the solar system. The Newtonian heavens proclaimed God’s glory.’ The achievement of the eighteenth century was to detach Newton’s God from his physics, teasing out the implications of discoveries from the age of genius and pushing them to their logical conclusion: the professed aim of the Scottish philosopher David Hume was to be ‘the Newton of the moral sciences’. As one modern commentator has said, the originality of the Enlightenment:

lies not so much in what was preached as in the fervour of the preacher and the beneficial effects expected of the sermon. What distinguished the Enlightenment above all was its determination to subject all received opinions to the test of reason, to apply this test especially to views on human behaviour, to ethical and political theory, and to extract from the knowledge thus won whatever could be useful in improving the human lot.

Of course there were many different Enlightenments, each with its distinctive style, and scholars still argue about which was the real torch-bearer. Local particularities had a strong influence: in Germany and Scandinavia, characteristically, progressive thinkers sought to enlighten absolutist monarchs and create a modern, efficient polity; the French philosophes were more preoccupied with challenging aristocratic feudalism and the Roman Catholic church; in Britain, where a settlement of sorts had already been reached with both clerisy and monarchy, more attention was paid to the nature of liberal capitalism. Any movement which traced its ancestry to both Cartesian rationalism and Lockean empiricism could never be homogeneous. The Enlightenment encompassed optimists and pessimists, deists and atheists, democrats and elitists, Voltaire and Rousseau.

Despite their quarrelsome diversity, however, most Enlightenment thinkers shared certain intellectual traits – an insistence on intellectual autonomy, a rejection of tradition and authority as the infallible sources of truth, a loathing for bigotry and persecution, a commitment to free inquiry, a belief that (in Francis Bacon’s words) knowledge is indeed power. That phrase is sometimes used by Machiavellian politicians to justify the restriction of valuable information, but for the philosophes it was a slogan of emancipation, a declaration of war against the impotence of ignorance. ‘Enlightenment’ had two meanings, both evident in the Encyclopédie: the discovery of truth and its subsequent diffusion. The purpose of the Encyclopédie, Diderot said, was to ‘change the general way of thinking’; and it succeeded. The Enlightenment had many critics, but its illuminating influence and achievements were apparent in the history of the next two centuries – the waning of absolutism and superstition, the rise of secular democracy, the understanding of the natural world, the transformation of historical and scientific study, the new political resonance of notions such as ‘progress’, ‘rights’ and ‘freedom’.

Does that light still shine today? If you type ‘The Enlightenment’ into a search engine at the online retailer Amazon, more than 1,500 books are listed. Look more closely, however, and you’ll notice that many of them have nothing in common with what Kant, or indeed Foucault, meant by Enlightenment: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment; The Secrets of Kung Fu for Self Defence, Health and Enlightenment; Crystal Enlightenment: The Transforming Properties of Crystals and Healing Stones; The Rosicrucian Enlightenment; The Tibetan Art Colouring Book: A Joyful Path to Right Brain Enlightenment; Awakening the Buddha Within: Eight Steps to Enlightenment; and Golf for Enlightenment: Playing the Game in the Garden of Eden, a recent title from the entrepreneurial mystic Deepak Chopra. ‘The Enlightenment made explicit what had long been implicit in the intellectual life of Europe: the belief that rational inquiry leads to objective truth,’ the British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote in 1999. ‘Even those Enlightenment thinkers who distrusted reason, like Hume, and those who tried to circumscribe its powers, like Kant, never relinquished their confidence in rational argument … For the ensuing 200 years, reason retained its position as the arbiter of truth and the foundation of objective knowledge. [But] reason is now on the retreat, both as an ideal and as a reality.’

For Scruton, this counter-revolution ‘puts our entire tradition of learning in question’. Its leaders may seem an incongruous coalition – post-modernists and primitivists, New Age and Old Testament – but they have been remarkably effective over the past quarter-century. Nor are they merely dunderheads or fanatics who argue that ‘ignorance is bliss’ to assuage any prickings of guilt at their own imbecility: those who may know no better have been aided and abetted by a latter-day trahison des clercs. We have now reached the point at which a British prime minister who styles himself as a progressive moderniser (and recites the mantra ‘education, education, education’) can defend the teaching of creationism rather than evolution in school biology classes, with no apparent shame or embarrassment. Even intellectuals who respect Enlightenment values often seem reluctant to defend them publicly, fearful of being identified as ‘liberal imperialists’ or worse.

The sleep of reason brings forth monsters, and the past two decades have produced monsters galore. Some are manifestly sinister, others seem merely comical – harmless fun, as Nancy Reagan said of her husband’s reliance on astrology. Cumulatively, however, the proliferation of obscurantist bunkum and the assault on reason are a menace to civilisation, especially as many of the new irrationalists hark back to some imagined pre-industrial or even pre-agrarian Golden Age. (‘Where We Stand. The revolt against reason is the seed of insurgence,’ declares the manifesto of the Coalition Against Civilisation, a group of rural anarchists. ‘We believe that through the invention and use of agriculture, certain people were able to force their lifestyles upon the rest of the world. What was being pushed is civilisation, the state of society that forces all to become domesticated and thus mediated from the natural world.’) My purpose in this book is to show how the humane values of the Enlightenment have been abandoned or betrayed, and why it matters: those who rewrite or romanticise history, like those who rejoice in its demise or irrelevance, are condemned to repeat it. The story begins a quarter of a century ago, in 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini inaugurated an Islamist project to turn the clock back to medieval times, and Margaret Thatcher – who posed as a disciple of the Enlightenment giant Adam Smith – set out to re-establish ‘Victorian values’. Neither could have dared imagine just how successful they would be.

1 The voodoo revolution (#ulink_d2cdb2e0-9eb0-5fc4-88fb-abdda54a40bc)

Why might not whole communities and public bodies be seized with fits of insanity, as well as individuals? Nothing but this principle, that they are liable to insanity, equally at least with private persons, can account for the major part of those transactions of which we read in history.

BISHOP JOSEPH BUTLER (1692–1752)