When Reason Sleeps, Mumbo-Jumbo Frolics

"Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education, I do believe in organic evolution," he replied. "It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised."

Now imagine Wilson's downright astonishment had he been informed that in 2004, more than eight decades later, the state schools superintendent in Georgia would propose excising the word "evolution" from the biology curriculum.

There are few backers these days for the argument that we have reached "the end of history." However, a glance at some of the dominant ideas of the last couple of decades raises an even more startling possibility: that history, far from halting, has gone into reverse gear.

This may explain why so many of the case studies in Charles Mackay's classic 1841 history of human folly, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," are reflected in the more recent episodes I've been studying.

The dot-com lunacy of the late 1990s, for instance, when companies with no discernible income achieved higher market valuations than big and well-established industrial corporations, was eerily reminiscent of previous investment manias such as the South Sea Bubble and the Dutch tulip craze, both of which were recounted at length by Mackay.

Mackay also mocked Nostradamus, observing with amused incredulity that this 16th century astrologer still had some followers in "the Walloon country of Belgium," among "old farmer-wives." Yet the self-same Nostradamus raced up the bestseller lists in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and few if any of those 21st century readers could be classified as "old farmer-wives."

Charles Mackay's book is largely a history of the pre-Enlightenment -- an age of witch hunts and holy relics, alchemy and geomancy. But we've grown out of that now, haven't we? Apparently not.

Over the last 25 years or so, after two centuries of gradual ascendancy, Enlightenment values of reason, secularism and scientific empiricism have come under fierce assault from a grotesquely incongruous coalition of radical deconstructionists and medieval flat-earthers, New Age mystics and Old Testament fundamentalists.