In my darker moments, it sometimes seems as if the entire world is in the middle of a fierce backlash against the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the ideological challenges they posed to the old belief systems. The forces of fundamentalism and obscurantism appear to be on the march everywhere – even as the moral and technological challenges posed by a global industrial civilization grow steadily more complex.

It is this view of the state of the world (which cannot be far from wrong, given the evidence before us) which provokes my darkest and most defeatest thoughts, encouraging me to run and hide, hoping that the chaos will pass over me, instead of fighting back with everything I've got.

Of course, it's first things first. The danger of continued Republican political hegemony needs first to be overcome, but at some point, we're going to need an entirely new Age of Reason and a renewed Enlightenment, one that will hopefully take in the Muslim world as well. How that will happen, I'm neither enough of a historian nor politician, philosopher, social psychologist, sociologist or anthropologist enough to fully grok, but it must happen if we're ever going to recapture what we once had, and now have lost.

Addendum: More dark thoughts from Publius:

[W]e tend not to realize it because we live with an illusion of eternal stability, but civil order is precarious, and we’re always in danger of falling back into chaos. Indeed, the political and social structures that we take for granted (the Lieberman-Lamont primary for instance) are built upon an invisible foundation of social stability. That debate wouldn’t be happening if, for instance, the Greenwich clan was pulling the Hartford clan out of their cars and beheading them. But that’s not happening here, at least not since 1865. But that can all change quickly. A terrorist attack here, a hurricane there, a constitutional crisis in a society riven by class — all of these things can make the precarious and invisible foundations that we take for granted come flaming a’ground.