Have we all gone mad?

HOW MUMBO-JUMBO CONQUERED THE WORLD: A Short History of Modern Delusions by Francis Wheen (Fourth Estate, £16.99)

Has the whole world gone stark staring bonkers? Yes! - claims author, newspaperman and quiz-show panellist Francis Wheen. Over the past 25 years, ever since the virtually simultaneous rise to power of Margaret " Victorian values" Thatcher and the Ayatollah "Islamic fundamentalism" Khomeini, our planet has been getting madder. The evidence is overwhelming.

In How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, Wheen spells it out. Leadership gurus, self-help manuals, management consultants, thinktanks, alternative medicine, postmodernist academics who say all truth is relative, creation science, horoscopes, Holocaust-deniers, "trickle-down" economists, paranoid Yankee imperialists, paranoid anti-Americans, al Qaeda and its Western fellow-travellers, The Third Way, globalisers and anti-globalisers, apocalyptic world-history trendspotters, therapy-addicts, Di-mania, Bible Code crackers, New Agers, paedophile-phobia, people who think they've been abducted by aliens, the National Lottery, the dotcom bubble - these are just some of the manifestations of the crazy irrationality that, Wheen reveals, has run rampage over the modern world.

His message is: stop this madness now. These people "wish to consign us all to a life in darkness".

Yes: which might lead you to feel that maybe Wheen and his book should be on that list, too - alongside The End of History and The Clash of Civilisations and other works of daring apocalyptic prophecy.

Of course, it is fine and true and salutary to observe that people often behave in a variety of ways that are not very sensible, sometimes harmlessly, sometimes dangerously, and Wheen gathers many choice current examples. It is another thing to announce, on this basis, that mumbo-jumbo has conquered the world - because then you'd need to ask whether these diverse irrationalities really add up to a single madness, and whether things have recently got a lot worse on this front, and if so why?

I'm not sure if Wheen is just assembling a debunking round-up of contemporary crackpottery, or if he has a crackpot theory of his own to offer, about how the world has got more than usually crackers within living memory.

Occasionally he seems to say that up to the 1970s we all believed in reason and social progress, but after Thatcher and Khomeini we didn't, and started to put our faith in more ridiculous things. But this theory is pushed so lightly and sporadically that I suspect Wheen doesn't really credit it himself. It certainly sounds implausible. After all, the 1960s would supply an equally colourful and deranged witches' Sabbath; any decade would.

No, the theory is only a decorative binding to hold this lively miscellany together. In fact, the book has no argumentative structure; example follows example on the simple principle of "And another thing".

The best bits concern the cluelessness of power. The obvious lay quest ion about people who run governments or businesses - how on earth do they know what to do? - has a simple, cheering and alarming answer: mostly they don't.

But because they have to do something, they are ready to believe anything, and turn for guidance to think-tanks, pundits, prophets, gurus, who don't have a clue either, but they have a nerve, and are ready to dispense the kind of clueless wisdom encapsulated in one press agency headline (it's the best line in the book): "Order, Chaos, Vie to Shape 21st Century".

BUT if you tried seriously thinking about irrationality, and how to remove it from our world, I don't know where you would begin, or end up. There are so many much bigger fish in the sea than any Wheen finds to fry. What do you call an advertising industry whose more or less misleading messages are the air we breathe? What do you call a press whose circulation requires a continuous supply of artificial excitement and outrage? What do you call an economy that depends on an unflagging pursuit of mostly futile possessions?