Yet it is not only the religious tributary into our culture that has become a conundrum without answer. For many years it was the presumption of people who might describe themselves as some form of liberals that the lessons of the Enlightenment – the glories of reason, rationality and science – were so attractive that they would eventually succeed in persuading everyone of their values. Indeed, for many people in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Europe the nearest they had to a creed was a belief in human ‘progress’ – a belief that mankind was on an upwards trajectory, propelled not only by technological progress but by an accompanying progress of thought. The presumption grew that because we were more ‘enlightened’ than our ancestors and knew more about how we got here and what the universe around us consisted of, we could also avoid their errors. The attractions of knowledge acquired through science, reason and rationalism were expected to be so self-evident that, like liberalism, it was assumed that life would be a one-way street. Once people began to walk that way and enjoyed the benefits for themselves it was impossible to believe that anybody (least of all anybody acquainted with its pleasures) would choose to walk back down that street.

Yet in the era of mass migration the people who believed this began to notice before their eyes, in ones and twos and then in larger movements, that there were indeed people walking back down that street. A whole current of people were flowing the other way. People who thought that the battle to acknowledge the fact of evolution was over in Europe discovered that whole movements of people had been brought in who not only did not believe in evolution but were determined to prove that evolution was untrue. Those who believed that the system of ‘rights’, including women’s rights, gay rights and the rights of religious and minorities were ‘self-evident’, suddenly saw ever-larger numbers of people who believed not only that there was nothing self-evident about them but that they were fundamentally wrong and misguided. So the liberal awareness grew that it was possible that one day there would once again end up being more people walking against what was presumed to be the current of history than walking with it, and that as a result the direction of travel might in time change for everyone and that liberals would be outnumbered. And what then?