Just one of the problems with absolutes and the pursuit of them is what happens when they crash. Unlike the fudge of liberalism – which allows everybody to plausibly blame anything – an absolute, when it crashes, leaves everything in the wreckage: not only people and countries, but all dominant ideas and theories. From the rubble of those constantly crashing theories a certain ennui is not just likely but inevitable. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Bismarck to the Great War, Germany went through such crashes repeatedly. Not least among the catastrophes of each crash was that each made the next more likely. The British writer Stephen Spender spent part of the 1930s living in Berlin and reflected on that time in his diary in 1939. Before the ultimate catastrophe had begun he mulled on the Germans he had met while living there. As he wrote, ‘The trouble with all the nice people I knew in Germany is that they were either tired or weak.’8 Why were the nice people so tired? Existential tiredness is not a problem only because it produces a listless type of life. It is a problem because it can allow almost anything to follow in its wake.

Some people might find it unlikely that philosophy, which is never going to be a pursuit of more than the very few, could have any such widespread effects. But the failure of ideas and the systems that those ideas create do have an effect. Religious and secular ideas all start with the few, but have a way of filtering through a whole nation. A familiar attitude to questions in life is that although one may not know the answer oneself, somewhere there is someone who does. The effects when the people who know the answers, whether artists, philosophers or clergy, keep being shown to be wrong is far from energising. And while some systems may be eroded over time, as have the monotheisms in most of modern Western Europe, they may also be debunked comparatively swiftly, as eugenics and racial theories have been. Philosophical and political ideas may be dreamed up by a few but when their foundations fall away, the more popular they have been the more desolation they leave in their wake. As was the case with the most popular philosophies of all – philosophies that could be made into totalistic political visions.