The Booker Prize winning author Yann Martel wrote in The Life of Pi that reason was the fool’s gold of the intelligent. It seems apt in our times as a humiliated intellectual class ponder the prospect that Enlightenment values are on the decline.

The Indian author Pankaj Mishra wrote last month in the Guardian that the central place of reason in the organisation of Western societies was an inaccurate assessment of human motives.