It is no overstatement to say that for many people the collapse of this dream is, or will be, just as painful as the loss of religion is to those who lose it. The liberal post-Enlightenment dream always had about it a slight aura of religion. Not that it made the same claims for itself, but that it adopted some of the same tropes. It had its own creation myth, for insistence (a ‘big bang’ of intellectual awakening as opposed to the long and messy emergence of particular schools of thought). And most importantly it had its own myth of universal applicability. Many people in Western Europe today have been taught these myths or taken them on because of their quasi-religious attraction. They provide not only something to believe in and to campaign for but something to live for. They give a purpose and an organisation to life. And if they cannot provide the afterlife promised by religions they can at least suggest – almost always erroneously – a veneer of immortality suggested by the admiration of your peers.

In other words the liberal dream may prove as hard to wrench out of people’s hands as religion was, because it shares the same irreplaceable advantages. In an age of peace and tranquillity such people’s religion might be deemed harmless and those who do not believe in it may still permit the others to believe it unmolested. But the moment when such beliefs harm the lives of everyone else is perhaps the moment when a less generous and ecumenical attitude towards such believers will arise. In any case, the vast hole already left by religion may yet be opened up still further by the gap left by Europe’s last non-religious dream. And after that, deprived of any dream, but still searching for answers, all the urges and questions will still remain.

THE LAST ART

Today the most obvious answer to this – the nineteenth-century answer – is most notable by its absence. Why can art not take over, without the ‘encumbrances’ of religion, from where these religions left off? The answer lies in the work of those who still aspire to this calling. It nearly all has the aura of a destroyed city. Such felled predecessors as Wagner seem to have made the idea of any similar aspirations seem futile when not dangerous.