Narrator: On February 1, 1979, an Air France Boeing descended into Tehran, carrying a man who had been in exile for 14 years. On the ground, millions of Iranians awaited the return of Ayatollah Khomeini, a figure who promised a spiritual revolution against a corrupt, Western-backed regime. When asked by a reporter what he felt upon his return, he replied with a single, chilling word: "Hichi," meaning "nothing." Just a few months later, in May, another leader rose to power. In a Britain crippled by strikes and economic despair, Margaret Thatcher stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street and, quoting St. Francis of Assisi, promised to bring harmony, truth, and hope. These two figures, a Shi'ite cleric and a conservative grocer's daughter, seemed worlds apart, yet they both represented a powerful rejection of the established order. They were messianic figures for a new age, an age that, according to author Francis Wheen, was about to be conquered by a wave of modern delusions. In his book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, Wheen charts the startling retreat from reason that began in this era, arguing that the values of the Enlightenment are under a sustained and multifaceted attack.

Narrator: Before understanding the assault, one must understand what is being assaulted. Francis Wheen argues that the Enlightenment was not a rigid ideology but an attitude, a commitment to "Dare to know," as philosopher Immanuel Kant famously put it. It was the bold decision to emerge from a "self-incurred immaturity" by using one's own reason without guidance from another. This spirit championed free inquiry, subjected all traditions to the test of reason, and held that knowledge, based on evidence and observation, was the key to improving human life.

This intellectual toolkit, inherited from thinkers like Bacon and Newton, led to the decline of absolutism, the rise of secular democracy, and a profound transformation in science and society. However, Wheen posits that these foundational values are now threatened by a pincer movement of irrationality. On one side are the pre-modernists, like religious fundamentalists, who reject reason in favor of divine revelation. On the other are the post-modernists, who argue that objective truth is an illusion and reality is merely a social construct. A startling example of this is the "Coalition Against Civilisation," a group of anarchists who issued a manifesto declaring, "The revolt against reason is the seed of insurgence," advocating for a return to a pre-agrarian world. This strange alliance of primitivism and sophisticated academic theory forms the basis of the modern assault on reason.

Narrator: The year 1979 serves as the book's ground zero for the rise of new, potent ideologies. In Iran, the revolution was not simply a religious movement but a furious reaction against the brutal, US-backed Shah. Decades of suppressing democratic dissent left Ayatollah Khomeini as the only viable figure of opposition. As the writer Ryszard Kapuscinski observed, a nation trampled by despotism often undertakes a "migration in time," retreating to a past that seems like a lost paradise. This longing, combined with anti-Western sentiment, fueled the "millennial frenzy" of Khomeini's return.

Simultaneously, Britain was mired in its "Winter of Discontent." Widespread strikes and economic turmoil led to a crisis of confidence, famously captured by The Sun's headline, "CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?" after Prime Minister James Callaghan downplayed the nation's problems. Into this vacuum stepped Margaret Thatcher, a figure who, like Khomeini, promised a radical break from the past. Her creed was not religious but economic: a "voodoo economics" of free markets, deregulation, and individual responsibility. She and her American counterpart, Ronald Reagan, dismantled the post-war consensus, championing a return to "Victorian values." This new faith in the market, however, had its own dark side, leading to soaring inequality, the S&L financial crisis, and the speculative greed encapsulated by Ivan Boesky's infamous declaration: "Greed is all right, by the way... I think greed is healthy."

Narrator: The attack on reason was not confined to politics and religion; it found a powerful foothold in universities. Post-structuralism and deconstructionism, imported from France, became dominant forces in the humanities. These theories argued that reality is not reflected by language but produced by it. Objective truth was dismissed as a naive fantasy, and all knowledge was seen as a product of power structures.

This intellectual trend was famously exposed by the Sokal affair. In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal, dismayed by the decline in intellectual rigor, submitted a deliberately nonsensical paper to the prominent cultural studies journal Social Text. Titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," the article was a parody, filled with scientific absurdities and flattering post-modern jargon. The journal published it without question. The hoax revealed an academic environment so committed to its ideology that it had lost the ability to distinguish sense from nonsense. This relativism had dangerous real-world implications, as seen when some deconstructionists attempted to use theory to excuse the pro-Nazi wartime writings of the influential academic Paul de Man. As one critic noted, "Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text."

Narrator: Human societies, Wheen argues, have a deep-seated psychological need for enemies to define who "we" are. For decades, the Cold War provided a clear "them" in the form of the Soviet Union. But with its collapse, a void appeared. This led to a frantic search for a new adversary. For a time, Japan's economic power was cast as the primary threat to the United States.

This need for an enemy is often fueled by catastrophism, a public susceptibility to fear-mongering that the media is all too willing to amplify. In 1974, the bestselling book The Jupiter Effect predicted a planetary alignment would cause a cataclysmic earthquake in Los Angeles. Despite being thoroughly debunked by scientists, the scare was revived by TV stations and tabloids, causing widespread panic. A similar hysteria erupted in 1988 over a film about Nostradamus. This retreat from reason reached the highest levels of power. It was revealed that First Lady Nancy Reagan regularly consulted an astrologer to schedule President Reagan's major decisions, including the timing of the signing of a nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union.

Narrator: Wheen demonstrates how the cynical foreign policy doctrine of Realpolitik—pursuing national interest above all else—often creates disastrous, unintended consequences, a phenomenon the CIA calls "blowback." The book provides a chilling account of how the United States, in its efforts to counter the Soviet Union, actively nurtured the very forces of Islamic fundamentalism that would later become its greatest enemy.

In the 1980s, the US, along with Britain and Pakistan, funneled billions of dollars and advanced weaponry to the Mujahedin fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. A young Saudi construction engineer named Osama bin Laden was a key organizer and beneficiary of this support. After the Soviets withdrew, the West continued to arm the Islamic counter-revolutionaries, urging them to fight on. The US effectively incubated the global jihadist movement. This pattern was repeated elsewhere. The CIA provided a visa to the blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who went on to preach jihad from New Jersey and was later convicted of plotting to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. As Karl Marx once wrote, it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument is forged not by the offended, but by the offender.

Narrator: In the post-Cold War era, traditional political distinctions began to dissolve. In Britain, Tony Blair's "New Labour" rose to power by adopting the language of the left while pursuing the neo-liberal policies of the right. His "Third Way" was, in essence, Thatcherism with a friendlier face, embracing privatization, market solutions, and low taxation. Think tanks like Demos became influential by packaging right-wing ideas in progressive language, helping to shape a political consensus where the "free" market was seen as the only solution.

This convergence was mirrored in the global arena. Proponents of globalization, like columnist Thomas Friedman, celebrated a "McWorld" united by free markets. Yet, Friedman himself admitted the truth behind this vision: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist... the US Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps." This ideology fueled the dot-com bubble, where irrational exuberance replaced sound financial analysis, and enabled the massive corporate fraud of companies like Enron, whose executives preached a gospel of deregulation while engaging in deceptive accounting. The mumbo-jumbo of the market had conquered all.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World is that the retreat from reason is not a marginal phenomenon but a pervasive force shaping modern politics, culture, and economics. Francis Wheen argues that we have become dangerously comfortable with irrationality, whether it's the relativism of academia, the superstitions of the New Age, or the faith-based logic of the free market. The Enlightenment's core values—skepticism, empirical evidence, and the courage to think for oneself—are being eroded from all sides.

The book's most challenging idea is that this is not a simple battle of left versus right, but a war between reason and unreason. The ultimate question it leaves us with is a personal one: In a world saturated with comforting nonsense and profitable delusions, do we still have the courage to "dare to know"? Are we willing to do the hard work of critical thinking, or will we succumb to the easy allure of mumbo-jumbo?