After the Great Metaphors

some respects, the twentieth century is less attractive intellectually than the nineteenth. The entrenched enemy that Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud each battled in his own fashion, the bigoted ignorance and superstition that masks as religion, has survived their onslaughts and is apparently stronger than ever. It is not that there has been a religious revival so much as an obscurantism revival, a disinterest in knowledge as a good in itself, perhaps a new failure of nerve. Where the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud have been embraced by the church, it tends to be the embrace of the folklore witch, an embrace that castrates. Apart from the influence of religious obscurantism, our century generally seems less interested in ideas than the last, seems to care about them less and to take them less seriously. Some of this is an unfortunate effect of the discounting Marx and Freud have taught us; it is so easy now to dismiss any idea as an ideology or a rationalization. Some of it is due to the fact that our sciences have become