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How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions (Hardback)
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Short Description for How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the WorldIn 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next 25 years: the arrival of Margaret Thatcher and the restoration in Iran, by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, of a regime that had last existed over 1000 years before. The author explores the post-political era and the rise in relativism.
Full description- Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd
- Published: 02 February 2004
- Format: Hardback
- See: Full bibliographic data
- ISBN 13: 9780007140961 ISBN 10: 0007140967
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Full description for How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World
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.
