Idiot Proof: Deluded Celebrities, Irrational Power Brokers, Media Morons and the Erosion of Common Sense

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Francis Wheen presents a polemical demonstration of the rise of irrationalism. From Middle Eastern fundamentalism to the rise of lotteries, astrology to mysticism, poststructuralism to the Third Way, Wheen shows that there has been a pervasive erosion of Enlightenment values, which have been displaced by nonsense. And no country has a more vivid parade of the bogus and bizarre than the one founded to embody enlightenment values: the USA.

SYNOPSIS

Wheen, a columnist for the London Guardian, evokes the key personalities of the post-political age, including Princess Diana, Deepak Chopra, Osama bin Laden, and Nancy Reagan's astrologer, to lament the rise of superstition, relativism, and emotional hysteria over the last 25 years. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Chris Lehmann - The Washington Post

Both the glib title and long subtitle of Francis Wheen's new book might lead casual browsers to expect an indecorous, invective-filled rant, of the sort lucratively sent down the publishing pipelines by Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Al Franken and other outsize dispensers of televisual wisdom. Yet Idiot Proof, while certainly given to extended bouts of polemic glee, is actually a pretty sober work of criticism masquerading as a rant -- which, when you think of it, is itself a sobering criticism of what it takes for reasoned debate to get noticed in our new millennial literary marketplace.

Financial Times

One of the best reads you are likely to have this winter, full of spark, fine writing...

The New Yorker

Looking back on the last quarter-century, Wheen, a British journalist, sees a disturbing recrudescence of irrationalists, including “holy warriors, antiscientific relativists, economic fundamentalists, radical postmodernists, New Age mystics.” American politicians routinely resort to “intense sentimentality” to sway voters; C.E.O.s lure investors with talk of “faith” in place of assets; Christian evangelists opine that September 11th is “probably what we deserve” for allowing feminists and the A.C.L.U. to flourish. In perhaps the silliest example, a consultant advises British civil servants to wear different colored hats for different tasks: red for developing hunches, yellow for cheering, black for questioning. It’s hard to quarrel with the foolishness of some of Wheen’s targets. But his larger thesis—that Ayatollah Khomeini and Margaret Thatcher spearheaded a retreat from the values of the Enlightenment back toward those of the Middle Ages—is so thinly reasoned as to seem to warrant its own entry in Wheen’s encyclopedia absurdica.

Publishers Weekly

British columnist and satirist Wheen presents an exhaustive but ultimately exhausting full-frontal assault on the past 25 years of "Counter-Enlightenment idiocy." His fencing dummies include Margaret Thatcher, Reaganomics, the Iranian Revolution, the Christian Coalition, Deepak Chopra, post-modernism, Francis Fukuyama, creationism, conspiracy theorists, people who believe in UFOs, astrology, the military-industrial complex, Cherie Blair and Hillary Clinton's fondness for New Age philosophy, Noam Chomsky, Enron, suicide bombers and much, much more. Wheen skewers his targets with the kind of rapier-like wit the world has come to expect and enjoy from British masters of the tuperative arts. But there's an awful lot of bloodletting here, and much of it is directed at bestselling authors, whose sales numbers Wheen bitterly notes as a way to quantitatively measure the reading public's stupidity. Worse, he burdens his book, which is best read as a series of essays, with a to-hell-in-a-handbasket hypothesis that the level of attack on Enlightenment rationality has increased dramatically in recent years, going so far as to assign a date to the inflection point: 1979, when Thatcher and the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. Some readers may bristle at Wheen's idea that right-wing economic policy is inextricably tied to anti-rational, religious fundamentalism, and the author's increasingly stretched attempts to prove this relationship begin to slip into the same realm of conspiracy theorizing he mocks in others. As an exercise in knocking down sacred cows left, right and center, this book proves that at the end of the satirical road lies nihilism. Agent, Pat Kavanagh. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

In his controlled pyrotechnic against idiocy, Wheen (Karl Marx, 2001) trots forth its champions, from Deepak Chopra to Thomas Friedman, and douses them with flammable liquid. The author's concern here is the application of the Enlightenment 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." Wheen is rarely so stuffy, but he is a serious citizen amidst all the ripe ironies as he demands "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," just as Bacon, Locke, or Newton did and just as Tina Brown's Vanity Fair, "a parish magazine for the new plutocracy," never did. Wheen sometimes takes a little too long to make a point, and he does like the sound of his own voice, even when it is luxuriating in facile trumpings like "money is power, and power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. The logic is inescapable: Rich people are sexy." But he also has a handle on other obvious points that seem to have escaped general notice: for example, that "globalism doesn't necessarily require or promote democracy," or that the bleeting of Samuel Huntington "sounds eerily like the specious inductive reasoning that was once deployed to explain why the suffrage would not be extended to females, or the population of India, or black South Africans." Call Wheen on points when aggravated, but he'll make you think hard. "Where can we look for assurance that it's still the same reliably inevitable old world weloved to hate?" asked Russell Baker. Look no further. Agent: Pat Kavanagh/PFD

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

The Boston Globe