We have various panics about ‘the threat to reason’, which often are may be as irrational as the trends they purport to take on. Some of these are fevered jeremiads against religion, which have emerged in the past couple of years. Typically these champion a one-dimensional version of Enlightenment values in counterposition to crude caricatures of religion.

Dan Hind in his The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim It describes this unsophisticated counterposition of the rational to the irrational as ‘Folk Enlightenment’, noting that: ‘Enlightenment is normally invoked in the context of a conflict with its external enemies: reason is threatened by faith, science is threatened by superstition, and so on.’ Crucially, this casts Enlightenment as a kind of heritage to be defended against external threats rather than something to be developed in opposition to the conventional wisdom and established orthodoxies of our own time.

Hind agues that although modern science is one of the great legacies of the Enlightenment, we should be wary of what has been described elsewhere as ‘scientism’, the elevation of science to the status of a pseudo-religion in itself. This is especially true at a time when science is often invoked as a source of authority that is beyond question, rather than an open-ended endeavour based on radical scepticism.