Millennial Seduction - A Skeptic Confronts Apocalyptic Culture (Hardcover, illustrated edition)

The author investigates how anxiety about the arrival of the new century has cast everything from El Nino to sheep cloning in apocalyptic terms, simultaneously fuelling panic and fostering unfounded hope for a perfect world. Millennial rhetoric is both pervasive and persuasive, Quinby argues, because it operates with mutually reinforcing doses of fear and hope. Religious and secular anxiety erupts over charged issues such as sex education, the regulation of cyberspace and the Christian masculinity of the Promise Keepers. Quinby exposes the dangers of millennialist solutions, which link misogyny, homophobia and racism with absolutist claims about truth, morality, sexuality and technology. It is the absolutism of apocalyptic thought - not an impending apocalypse - that poses the more serious threat to society, Quinby maintains. Her work advocates a form of scepticism that challenges absolutism and encourages democratic participation.