The bunkum stops here

A new book on doing combat with post-modern irrationality.

"One of the questions his book raises is where the battle lines should be drawn against the enemies of reason. Wheen allows that the gravest danger to our civilisation comes from religious totalitarianism, but while it finds its extremes in al-Qaeda, he exposes it, too, in the hierarchy of Western governments, and in populations that show an evaporation of empirical certainty. In 1993, for examples, a Gallup poll revealed only 11 per cent of Americans believed in evolution, and that 47 per cent maintained that God created human beings within the last 10,000 years. Even more alarming, perhaps, are the 2 per cent (3.7 million people) who claim that they have at one time in their lives been abducted by aliens. As one commentator pointed out, this should, if nothing else, signal a crisis for air-traffic control."

One uncomfortable possible conclusion to Wheen's argument is the notion that logic alone cannot satisfy us and that, further, its presence appears to give rise to an urgent hunger for the irrational, whether it be playing the lottery or believing in little green men. Around the edges of this book, therefore, lurks the unspoken suspicion that a rational world would be a duller one: the conmen and the hucksters have all the best stories. Wheen counters this by allying all his considerable wit and logic to the Enlightened cause: he is, in this respect, bullshit's enema number one.