After the fall of the Soviet Union the French philosopher Chantal Delsol came up with the most haunting analogy for the state in which modern Europeans now found ourselves. In Le Souci Contemporain (1996), translated into English as Icarus Fallen, she suggested that the condition of modern European man was the condition that Icarus would have been in had he survived the fall. We Europeans had kept trying to reach the sun, flew too close and hurtled back down to earth. We may certainly have failed, and we may be dazed, but we somehow survived: we are still here. All around us we have the wreckage – metaphorical and real – of all our dreams, our religions, our political ideologies and a thousand other aspirations, all of which in their turn have proved false. And though we have no more illusions or ambitions left, yet we are still here. So what do we do?

There are a number of possibilities. The most obvious is that the fallen Icaruses could give themselves over to lives devoted solely to pleasure. As Delsol observed, this is not a rare resort among people who have lost their gods. ‘The great collapse of ideals often draws in its wake a kind of cynicism: if all hope is lost, then let us at least have fun!’ As she points out, it is what, among others, the Soviet leaders did once they lost faith in their particular utopian ideal. When they saw that the system they were meant to have absolute faith in, and had devoted their lives to, was not just unworkable but a lie, an elite caste within the Soviet Empire coped, despite the unimaginable wretchedness outside, by enjoying an existence devoted to their own personal comfort and enjoyment. Yet as Delsol points out, our situation is beyond even that of the Soviet leaders who chose to live only for pleasure once their god had failed. ‘For us it is not only the impossibility of achieving our various certainties that led us to abandon them,’ she stresses. We have not become ‘absolute’ cynics, but we have become deeply ‘suspicious’ of all truths.11 The fact that all of our utopias failed so terribly did not only destroy our faith in them. It destroyed our faith in any and all ideologies.