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

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

by Francis Wheen (Author)

Synopsis

In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next 25 years. In Britain, an era of weary consensualist politics was displaced by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, whose ambition was to reassert "Victorian values". In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the 20th century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonized the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo. Modernity was challenged by a gruesome alliance of pre-modernists and post-modernists, medieval theocrats and New Age mystics. It was as if the Enlightenment had never happened. Francis Wheen, winner of the George Orwell prize, evokes the key personalities of the post-political era - including Princess Diana and Deepak Chopra, Osama Bin-Laden and Nancy Reagan's astrologer - while charting the extraordinary rise in superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria over the past quarter of a century. From UFO scares to dotcom mania, his impassioned polemic describes a period in the world's history when everything began to stop making sense.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 352
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Published: 02 Feb 2004

ISBN 10: 0007140967
ISBN 13: 9780007140961

Author Bio
Francis Wheen is the author of the bestselling biography Karl Marx, a Guardian columnist and a regular contributor to Private Eye. He has written several books including the highly acclaimed biography of Tom Driberg MP, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread prize.