Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (179 page)

41.
Jacoby, Op.
cit.,
pages 27ff.

42.
Ibid.,
pages 72ff.

43.
Ibid.,
pages 54ff.

44.
V. S. Naipaul,
Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey,
New York: Knopf, 1981; Vintage paperback, 1982.

45.
Ibid.,
page 82.

46.
Ibid.,
page 85.

47.
Ibid.,
page 88.

48.
Ibid.,
page 167.

49.
Ibid.,
page 337.

50.
Ibid.,
page 224.

51.
V. S. Naipaul,
An Area of Darkness,
London: Deutsch, 1967;
India: A Wounded Civilisation,
London: Deutsch, 1977; Penguin 1979;
India: A Million Mutinies Now,
London: Heinemann, 1990.

52.
Naipaul, An Area of Darkness, Op. cit., page 18.

53.
Ibid.,
page 53. I could go on. Instead, let us turn to Nirad Chaudhuri, another Indian writer but this time born and educated in the sub-continent. Here is a man who loved his own country but thought it ‘torpid,’ ‘incapable of a vital civilisation of its own unless it is subjected to foreign influence.’ (Quoted in Edward Shils,
Portraits,
University of Chicago Press, 1997, page 83.) Chaudhuri was felt to be ‘anti-Indian’ by many of his compatriots and in old age he went to live in England. But his gaze was unflinching. Chaudhuri thought that Indian spirituality did not exist. ‘It is a figment of the Western imagination … there is no creative power left in India.’
(Ibid.).
‘Indian colleges and universities have never been congenial places for research, outside of Indological studies.’
(Ibid.,
page 103.)

54.
Octavio Paz,
In Light of India,
London: Harvill, 1997. Originally published as:
Vislumbras de la India,
Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barrai SA, 1995.

55.
Ibid.,
page 37.

56.
Ibid.,
page 89.

57.
Ibid.,
page 90.

58.
V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now, Op. cit., page 518.

59.
This later view was echoed by Prasenjit Basu. Writing in the
International Herald Tribune
in August 1999, he reminded readers that despite the fact that that week India’s population had reached 1 billion, which most people took as anything but good news, the country was doing well. Growth was strong, the export of software was flourishing, agricultural production was outstripping population growth, there had been no serious famine since independence from Britain, and Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians were collaborating to produce both nuclear power and humane laws. So maybe ‘Inner-directed India’ was at last changing. In
Islams and Modernities
(Verso, 1993) Aziz Al-Azmeh was likewise more optimistic about Islam. He argued that until, roughly speaking, the Yom Kippur war and the oil crisis, Islam
was
modernising, coming to terms with Darwin, among other ideas. Since then, however, he said Islam had been dominated by a right-wing version that replaced Communism ‘as the main threat to Western civilisation and values.’

60.
Landes, Op.
cit.,
pages 491ff.

61.
Irving Louis Horowitz,
The Decomposition of Sociology,
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; paperback edition, 1994.

62.
Ibid.,
page 4.

63.
Ibid.,
page 12.

64.
Ibid.

65.
Ibid.,
page 13.

66.
Ibid.,
page 16.

67.
Ibid.,
pages 242ff.

68.
Barrow, Impossibility, Op. cit.

69.
I
bid.,
page 248.

70.
Ibid.,
page 251.

71.
Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modem Culture, Op. cit., page 69.

72.
John Polkinghorne,
Beyond Science,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Canto paperback 1998, page 64.

73.
Polkinghorne, Op.
cit.,
page 88.

74.
Some of these issues are considered in an original way by Harvard’s Gerald Holton in
The Scientific Imagination
(Cambridge University Press, 1978, re-issued Harvard University Press, 1998). Based on studies of such scientific innovations as Enrico Fermi’s discoveries, and high-temperature super-conductivity, Holton concluded that scientists are by and large introverts, shy as children, very conscious as adults of peer pressure and that imagination in this context is a ‘smaller’ entity than in the arts, in that science is generally governed by ‘themata’, presuppositions which mean that ideas move ahead step-by-step and that these steps eventually lead to paradigm shifts. Holton’s study raises the possibility that such small imaginative leaps are in fact more fruitful than the larger, more revolutionary turns of the wheel that Lewis Mumford and Lionel Trilling called for in the arts. According to Holton’s evidence, the smaller imaginative steps of science are what account for its success. Another response is to find enchantment in science, as many – if not all – scientists clearly do. In his 1998 book,
Unweaving the Rainbow
(London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press), Richard Dawkins went out of his way to make this point. His title was taken from Keats’s poem about Newton, that in showing how a rainbow worked, in terms of physics, he had removed the mystery and magic, somehow taken away the poetry. On the contrary, said Dawkins, Keats – and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Sitwell and a host of other writers – would have been even better poets had they been more knowledgeable about science; he spent some time correcting the science in the poetry of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth. He mounted a ferocious attack on mysticism, spiritualism and astrology as tawdry forms of enchantment, sang the praises of the wonders of the brain, and natural history, including a detail about a species of worm ‘which lives exclusively under the eyelids of the hippopotamus and feeds upon its tears’ (page 241). This book was the first that Dawkins had written in response to events rather than setting the agenda himself, and it had a defensive quality his others lacked and was in my view unnecessary. But his tactic of correcting great poets, though it might perhaps be seen as arrogance, did have a point. The critics of science must be ready to have their heroes criticised too.

75.
Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, Op. cit., page 564.

76.
Ibid.,
page 536.

77.
Ibid.,
pages 546–548.

78.
One man who has considered this issue, at least in part, is Francis Fukuyama, in
The Great Disruption
(The Free Press, 1999). In his view a Great Disruption took place in the developed countries in the 1960s, with a jump in levels of crime and social disorder, and the decline of families and kinship as a source of social cohesion. He put this down to the change from an industrial to a post-industrial society, which brought about a change in hierarchical society, to the baby boom (with a large number of young men, prone to violent crime), and to such technological developments as the contraceptive pill. But Fukuyama also considered that there has been a major intellectual achievement by what he called ‘the new biology’ in the last quarter century. By this he meant, essentially, sociobiology, which he considered has shown us that there is such a thing as human nature, that man is a social animal who will always develop moral rules, creating social cohesion after any disruption. This, he points out, is essentially what culture wars
are:
moral battlegrounds, and here he was putting a modern, scientific gloss on Nietzsche and Hayek. Fukuyama therefore argued that the Great Disruption is now over, and we are living at a time when there is a return to cohesion, and even to family life.

79.
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

80.
Also cited in: Neil Postman,
The End of Education,
New York: Knopf, 1995; Vintage paperback, 1996, page 113.

81.
Edward O. Wilson,
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge,
New York: Little, Brown, 1998.

82.
Ibid.,
page 220.

83.
Ibid.,
page 221.

84.
Ibid.,
page 225.

85.
Ibid.,
page 297.