We are living with the long, final slump of sixties stupidity; schools which foster ignorance; hospitals which infect; doctors who kill; governments which surrender to foreign powers and open their borders to invasive levels of migration. Worse than all these is an intelligentsia which calls itself "liberal" and surrenders to vicious clerical reactionaries. I can only conclude that this arises from a species of undiagnosed self-hatred which lives at the heart of the left, our political master. Revolutionary history is soaked in the blood of radicals turning on each other. Several times a situation has arisen in which a succession of forces, each more ruthless and more crazy than the last, has butchered its immediate predecessors. So Feuillants gave way to Girondins who submitted to Jacobins. Thus did the Provisional Government of Prince Lvov fall to Kerensky who in turn made way for Lenin. Equally remarkable is the way in which the softies have concurred in their own deposition and death - the old "darkness at noon" trick - for they seem to think their murderers and assailants purer than themselves. Whence this notional purity? Is it, in turn, a corruption of that "critical" spirit which seems so innocent in the mouth of an Arnold or a Sainte-Beuve? For if "criticism" is the high way to objectivity then we are at risk of undermining those crooked, arbitrary, inexplicable structures which make up not only society but the foundation of the mind itself. Without some assumed loyalty to, or tolerance for the impurities and peculiarities of the personality, "criticism" becomes self destruction. At the very least, we are reduced to W.S.Gilbert's "idiot who praises, in enthusiastic tone / All centuries but this and every country but his own." And so we have the strange spectacle of a self-consuming variety of liberalism - like a mind alienated from its supporting and inevitably conservative personality - with nothing left to criticise and destroy but its own regulations. It seems too bitter for this "liberalism" to return to its old, Tory or Christian parent and so little by little it finds itself embracing Islam, like a frail addict falling into the manipulative embraces of a brutal, bigoted and narrow minded nurse: a tragic spectacle.