Elliot Smith was born in Grafton in Northern NSW, but he is not remembered there, despite being a pioneering anatomist, authority on human evolution, a renowned archaeologist/anthropologist. He held chairs in Cairo, Manchester and University College, London. He was best known for his theory of cultural diffusion, placing Ancient Egypt as a dynamic source from which major elements of civilization were spread by the migration of people and values. This theory has been widely misrepresented. Americans in particular opposed ideas of foreign influence upon Mesoamerican cultures until recently. For a full account of his life and ideas see my 2012 book: Grafton Elliot Smith: Egyptology and the Diffusion of Culture (Sussex Press).

Writing as a Washington correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, famous pundit Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in 1946:

“Every now and again all my life I’d had a sudden mood of happiness, a kind of humility, a release from all fear, an awareness of the mysteriousness of my own being in relation to the universe. In such moods I recite the Lord’s Prayer to myself, finding great comfort and delight in its words….”

(Quoted in my book, Intellectuals and the Decline of Religion, Boolarong, 2017).

The view has often been expressed that we humans possess inherent or “natural” rights (as expressed in many Bills of Rights) but this does not stand up to critical scrutiny. The English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (early 19th century) proposed that individual rights (while all very pleasing to reformers and liberals of the time fighting an unjust aristocratic British political system) were ultimately secondary to the common good or what he dubbed “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. How to decide when rights clashed with greater good or responsibility? Bentham said by empirical enquiry. If people spouting the right of free speech, for example, shouted for insurrection or this led to damaging civil disorder (as in recent events in the Trump Congress riot) this was not justifiable on Benthamite grounds. The overall good should prevail. In only there were more utilitarians around these days to counter what Jeremy called “nonsense on stilts” that we find constantly in the media. More talk of responsibility and less of “I have a right to do such and such”.

The distinguished British church historian Alec Vidler argued in his writings that religion had been undermined by naturalism and science. However, he argued that while scientific naturalism was qualified to deal with the mechanisms of nature, it was powerless to account for the deeper spiritual aspects of human existence. I discuss this in my book Intellectuals and the Decline of Religion (Boolarong,2017).

There was much talk of a great age, an opulent “belle epoch” in the generation before World War 1. But as the English New Liberal thinker Leonard Hobhouse observed, things were different beneath the surface: “The idea of violence was in the air. There was a deliberate theory of force… it was a philosophy most appropriate to a generation that was running headlong into disaster” – the apocalypse of the trench warfare of the Western Front (rarely all quiet). One might mention cults and cultural trends such as pessimism, decadence, art-for-arts sake, modernism, nihilism and existentialist power doctrines, and Nietzsche’s “God is dead”.

According to Arthur Balfour, English Prime Minister and philosopher, Man’s very existence “is an accident”, his story “a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets”, a history of “blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations”. What was our future to be? After some millions of years, “the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed”. The Earth “tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish”.

Foundations of Belief (1895)