Author name: Scott

Andrew (‘A.N.’) Wilson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wilson_(writer and http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/18/magazine/the-busy-busy-wasp.html) offered us, in 1999, this study in the decline of religious certainties. The book focuses on artists and intellectuals and covers Gibbon, Hume, Kant, Marx, Garibaldi, Bentham, George Eliot, Lenin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Shaw, Hardy, Hegel and Freud among others. Very good on the devastating sense of emotional loss that […]

Given that the world is imperfect and can often seem drenched in suffering and disappointment it is hardly surprising that humans have invented utopias. Some of these are located on Earth at some distant place or some distant time. Others are located in the afterlife or some transcendental realm. The term ‘utopia’ was coined from the

Anyone out there pretty much wedded to Enlightenment ideals? I hope so. Sadly, in recent decades these have come under attack from a whole slew of irrationalisms. Cults, quackery, gurus, hysterical panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo, pre-modernists and post-modernists, medieval theocrats and New Age mystics. They’re all here trying to drag us back

This is a hugely controversial thesis (1996) from Samuel P. Huntington. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington). His argument is that the fundamental source of conflict in the future will not primarily be ideological or economic but rather cultural. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future, he contends. Every fresh news story, particularly to do with