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

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.

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