At the end, after an enervating exchange with his estranged pubescent son, now living in foster care with well-meaning but simple Christians, Bit's enlightenment leaves him longing for death, believing all anyone becomes is "a twitching bunch of memories and mistakes, regrets".
But as Christos and his neighbours will tell you, the politics of austerity can boost the thuggish right as well as the post-enlightenment left.
So the book is not only a moral polemic, but a powerful argument in support of the resources that these Enlightenment figures left us.
In fact, he argues, attempts to replace God with reason alone can create disaster, whether through Marxist dogma that lead to communist states, scientific progress that could destroy the world or an Enlightenment that left man alone in the universe — without real hope.
That history has driven us toward moral enlightenment -- and then left the final choice to us, with momentous stakes -- is scary but inspiring.
After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle.
Now enlightenment need not be left to chance.
For Plato, enlightenment came when prisoners left the cave and saw things in greater light.
2018-19 Topic: "Enlightenment liberalism and its critics, left and right" The topic for 2018-19 will be "Enlightenment liberalism and its critics," the critics coming from both the left and the right.
A son of the enlightenment to the last, Nineham left his brain to the project on cognitive function and ageing studies at the John Radcliffe hospital, Oxford.
