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According to a standard heroic secular account, at the start of the modern age and in just a few short decades, science was able to defeat religion through rigour and brilliance – and thereby forever liberated humankind from ignorance and superstition. For centuries, this account explains, religion had essentially been…
Early on in the history of melancholy, the Greek philosopher Aristotle was said to have raised a question which it’s hard to answer without sounding self-serving – or smug: ‘Why is…
There are a great many ways of handling the unhappiness that inevitably comes with being human: we may rage or despair, we may scream or lament, we may sulk or cry.…
We used to believe that life would always go on more or less as it is. It might have been grim, but it had always been thus and would be so…
The official religion of modernity is happiness. It sounds pleasant but being asked to smile is an extremely coercive requirement. There is a freedom that our age seems subtly yet horribly…
For most of history, we had no choice around most things in our lives: there was only one job we could do and it would be chosen for us by our…
The modern age has manhandled nature like none before it ever quite has. Previous eras may not have treated it with too much respect – the Ancient Greeks stripped most of…
Part of our problem as a species is that we’re troublingly good at making things perfect. We can set our minds on an extraordinary goal and – with heroic sacrifice, thousands…
One of the great generalisations we can make about the modern world is that it is, to an extraordinary degree, an ugly world. If we were to show an ancestor from…
In the last two hundred, the world has witnessed the greatest increase in productivity in the history of humanity. From 1 A.D to 1820, living standards in the West slowly doubled,…
For most of history, societies have equated good lives with active outward noisy ones: lives spent spearing enemies in battle, sacrificing oneself heroically in the name of God, achieving high office…
The world became modern when people who met for the first time shifted from asking each other (as they had always done) where they came from – to asking each other…
For most of history, work was not a topic of sustained reflection because it seemed at once so simple, so inevitable and so unpleasant. It was overwhelmingly focused on the provision…
When we think of what might have been lost on the way to becoming modern, we’re liable to think about mealtimes: how seldom they now take place communally, how rare it…
In sexual matters, the world became modern in early April 1953, on a beach in Cannes, when the eighteen year old Brigitte Bardot appeared in front of the world’s press to…
In Book 10 of the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we’re introduced to one of the world’s more curious but telling myths: a Cypriot sculptor called Pygmalion has developed a problem with…
In 1907, in Edwardian Britain, a shy hesitant boy was born to a highly disciplined and ambitious family living in Manchester Square in London. His father was a major-general and a…
When modern societies are in the mood to vaunt their advantages, there is one feature they invariably single out and refer to with special reverence: we, at least, live in democracies.…
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, artists in a rapidly modernising world began to take note of an increasingly popular activity which attracted their aesthetic attention, as much because of…