It is as well to admit when your enemies are onto something. Today the antagonists of European culture and civilisation throw many accusations at the continent. They say that our history has been especially cruel, whereas it has been no crueller than any other civilisation and less cruel than many. They claim that we act only for ourselves, whereas it is doubtful if any society in history has become so unwilling to defend its own or more ready to assume the opinions of its detractors. And we remain among the only cultures on earth so open to self-criticism and the recording of our own iniquities that we are capable of making even our greatest detractors rich. But on one single thing it is possible that our critics are onto something. They do not identify it well, and when they do identify it they prescribe the worst possible remedies. But it remains a problem worth identifying, not least in order to raise ourselves to answers.

The problem is one that is easier to feel than it is to prove, but it runs something like this: that life in modern liberal democracies is to some extent thin or shallow and that life in modern Western Europe in particular has lost its sense of purpose. This is not to say that our lives are wholly meaningless, nor that the opportunity liberal democracy uniquely gives to pursue our own conception of happiness is misguided. On a day-to-day basis most people find deep meaning and love from their families, friends and much else. But there are questions that remain, which have always been central to each of us and which liberal democracy on its own cannot answer and was never meant to answer.

‘What am I doing here? What is my life for? Does it have any purpose beyond itself?’ These are questions that have always driven human beings, questions that we have always asked and ask still. Yet for Western Europeans the answers to these questions that we have held onto for centuries seem to have run out. Happy as we are to acknowledge that, we are far less happy to acknowledge that with our story of ourselves having run out we are nevertheless still left with the same questions. Even to ask such questions today has become something like bad manners, and the spaces where such questions can be asked – let alone answered – have accordingly shrunk not only in number but in their ambition for answers. If people no longer seek for answers in churches, we simply hope that they might find sufficient meaning in the occasional visit to an art gallery or at a book club.