It does seem, living in any Western European society today, that this particular world-view has caught on. Not only the entertainment industries but also the information industries speak to populations intent only on a fairly shallow kind of personal pleasure. In the words of a famous atheist bus campaign slogan in Britain: ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ The question of how we are to enjoy that life is answered only with, ‘However you see fit.’ Who knows what will step into this void, but for the time being the consensus appears to be that the answer lies in enjoying our consumerist culture, frequently buying things that do not last and then buying newer versions of the same to replace them. We can go on holiday, of course, and generally try to have as nice a time as possible.

Whatever its advantages, such a lifestyle is reliant on a number of things. One is the maximum possible number of people in a society feeling fulfilled by it, and seeking no other meaning. Another is that it must go on indefinitely, for it is almost certainly sustainable only so long as the economic tide is rising. If one of the prerequisites for avoiding political extremism is to ensure that the economics do not go wrong, then Europeans are going to have to work exceptionally hard to ensure the economics go right. This is one explanation for why the argument of mass migration as a net economic gain is so popular. If migrants do keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed, by providing us with a constant supply of young and cheap labour, then we may be willing to put up with a lot of potential downsides. If the economics do not go well and the standard of living for Europeans drops, then any wise political leader must know the number of depths that could be visited or revisited. However, for the time being, skating on top of these fears and trying to enjoy ourselves is one answer, if not exactly the most interesting our species has come up with.

It may be a terrible generalisation to say this, but beneath this surface existence everything else in European thought and philosophy is a mess. So much so, that even whilst seeing where some of those nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers went wrong, it is possible to look back on their ideas with something like envy. How certain they were. How infinitely surer still seemed their predecessors. The vastness of the gap between them and us strikes at sudden moments. Consider Izaak Walton’s life of John Donne (1640). At the end of this brief work Walton speaks of his friend’s last days and describes his body ‘which once was a temple of the Holy Ghost and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust’. And then the last line: ‘But I shall see it reanimated.’