Of course, confronted with this vacuum of meaning, many new causes have been tried. Most have failed, and all will soon fail. Marxism promised a universal escape from the material bonds of survival through the forces of history. Nazism offered a transcendent purification of the biology of the species. Environmentalism offered a reunion with nature. Humanism offered an atheist brotherhood of good intentions. Liberalism promoted the peaceful co-existence of competing absolutes. The free market offered us submission to the abstract demands of trade, capital and consumption and, most recently, evolutionary theory and genetics have proffered an earthly heaven in which an understanding of our biological inheritance will unify us in an awareness of what we truly, scientifically, are.

The problem with these is that they offer either too little or too much, or they are too demanding for the ordinary human life. The free market offers too little because it fails to account for humanity's insolent, subversive longing for a meaning beyond mere wealth. Evolutionary theory offers too much meaning: it imprisons us by limiting the terms of that meaning to biology. And the utopias of both communism and fascism demanded faith so strong that it would not flinch at the "necessary" rivers of blood.

And so, after the second world war, with the defeat of Nazism and the exposure of the iniquities of Soviet communism, the message that there was no message slowly began to sink into the popular consciousness. Political absolutes had failed. In the liberal West the authority of church and state was waning. An uneasy global peace had come, but it seemed empty. There was nothing left worth living or fighting for.

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