Welcome to the information age. Data, data, everywhere, but no one knows a thing.

It is significant that the socialist mentality is usually also an atheistic mentality, where atheism is understood not so much as the disbelief in God as the hatred of God˜an attitude as precarious logically as it has been destructive in practice. There is an important sense in which religion as traditionally understood reconciles humanity to imperfection and to failure. Since the socialist sets out to abolish failure, traditional religion is worse than _de trop_: it is an impediment to perfection.

We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some hideous wallpaper we have lived with for years.

Welcome to the information age. Data, data, everywhere, but no one knows a thing.

What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" - that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization - everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.

Our complexity is much more likely to lead us astray than any simplicity we may follow.