Donate NowFormer Guardian journalist, writer and political commentator, Melanie Phillips discusses the real crisis facing the West – the undoing of reason. From colonialism to the BLM movement to the breakdown of the family unit and Israel’s unequal treatment, Melanie and Peter explore the many issues facing the West that leave little room for optimism.
In what we tell ourselves is an age of reason, we are behaving increasingly irrationally. Whether its people signing up to weird cults, nursing conspiracies, or subscribing to widespread consensus on issues that take more than a google search to understand, unreason is eroding the building blocks of Western civilization. The West has replaced reason and truth with ideology and prejudice.
The exercise of reason has been fundamental to the European Enlightenment forming the spirit of intellectual enquiry. Too often rash judgments of historical western endeavours are often condemned as racist and oppressive, which has led to a new wave of anti-Semitism and historical recreations. Moreover, those who object or take issue with these ideological zealots face immediate and irreversible cancellation.