Will a new Age of Reason ever dawn?

AS THE title of Francis Wheen's latest collection of essays implies, the purpose of the book is to debunk various modern beliefs, schools of thought, social cults, myths and specious social and economic theory, from the "voodoo economics" of Thatcher and Reagan to the Diana cults of the 90s. An arsenal for the modern cynic, it will delight anyone who's ever wanted to punch Tony Robbins in the mouth or burn a copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

One of the most enjoyable flayings couldn't have happened to a nicer group: CEOs and the self-styled corporate gurus who tell them what and how to think. The second chapter, titled "Old Snake Oil, New Bottles," details how corporate leaders allowed books like The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, If Aristotle Ran General Motors and Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive to shape their thinking and wreak havoc on their companies. Wheen, a columnist at the Guardian and Private Eye, has a talent for distilling hilariously ludicrous lines from these "treatises," such as this one from Attila: "When the consequences are too grim to bear, look for another option." One has to wonder how many Kenneth Lays and Richard Scrushys might have taken this very line to heart.

In "The New Romantics," which decries the triumph of emotion over reason, he deals sharply with Britain's reaction to the death of Princess Diana, characterized as the "anguished and lonely pleas of an atomized populace." He likens Tony Blair's promotion of Britain's irrational grief to Al Gore's maudlin speech at the 1996 Democratic Convention, in which he described his sister's death from lung cancer. While Blair is merely accused of "governance by raw emotion" (which Wheen calls tyranny), Gore is exposed as a fraud. Wheen points out that a few newspapers reported that four years after his sister's death, Gore gave a speech to tobacco farmers in North Carolina, claiming that he was one of their brethren. "No mention there of his heart-and-soul struggle against the evil weed," notes Wheen with characteristic sarcasm.

In "The Catastrophists," Wheen goes after herbalists, natural healers, UFOlogists and catastrophists with one swing. And here the reader gets the sense they've chosen to sit next to the stodgy blowhard at the party. He rips through any form of natural healing by criticizing most of the remedies without any serious inquiry into their effectiveness. Shortly after, he begins debunking UFO sightings mainly by virtue of their incredible frequency. It's unclear whether he believes in extraterrestrials, but when he begins to criticize the X-Files, pointing out the legions of fan websites, the argument takes a marked downturn. There are also hundreds of websites devoted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Does that mean that millions of Americans believe in vampires? The uncharacteristically weak arguments are compensated for, however, by one of the best Briticisms ever put to paper: "mendacious codswallop."

After having practically every social and political trend, theory and belief spanked on its ass and sent crying home to mama, the reader is left hungry for something, anything, in which to believe. In "Voodoo Revisited," the final chapter, Wheen instead breaks in on new topics and comes back to arguments made in the first chapter concerning economics. The statement "Truth is great and will prevail" is Wheen's only prediction for how America and Great Britain can cut the fog, and his overly alarmist warning that the followers of bunk philosophy "wish to consign us all to a life of darkness" seems more appropriate coming from one of the Chicken-Lickens he derides rather than from Wheen himself.