Modern Mind

Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987; Noonday paperback 1989. John Brockman (editor), The Third Culture, Op. cit.
    41. Jacoby, Op.
cit.,
pages 27ff.
    42.
Ibid.,
pages 72ff.
    43.
Ibid.,
pages 54ff.
    44. V. S. Naipaul,
Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey,
New York: Knopf, 1981; Vintage paperback, 1982.
    45.
Ibid.,
page 82.
    46.
Ibid.,
page 85.
    47.
Ibid.,
page 88.
    48.
Ibid.,
page 167.
    49.
Ibid.,
page 337.
    50.
Ibid.,
page 224.
    51. V. S. Naipaul,
An Area of Darkness,
London: Deutsch, 1967;
India: A Wounded Civilisation,
London: Deutsch, 1977; Penguin 1979;
India: A Million Mutinies Now,
London: Heinemann, 1990.
    52.
Naipaul, An Area of Darkness, Op. cit., page 18.
    53.
Ibid.,
page 53. I could go on. Instead, let us turn to Nirad Chaudhuri, another Indian writer but this time born and educated in the sub-continent. Here is a man who loved his own country but thought it ‘torpid,’ ‘incapable of a vital civilisation of its own unless it is subjected to foreign influence.’ (Quoted in Edward Shils,
Portraits,
University of Chicago Press, 1997, page 83.) Chaudhuri was felt to be ‘anti-Indian’ by many of his compatriots and in old age he went to live in England. But his gaze was unflinching. Chaudhuri thought that Indian spirituality did not exist. ‘It is a figment of the Western imagination … there is no creative power left in India.’
(Ibid.).
‘Indian colleges and universities have never been congenial places for research, outside of Indological studies.’
(Ibid.,
page 103.)
    54. Octavio Paz,
In Light of India,
London: Harvill, 1997. Originally published as:
Vislumbras de la India,
Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barrai SA, 1995.
    55.
Ibid.,
page 37.
    56.
Ibid.,
page 89.
    57.
Ibid.,
page 90.
    58.
V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now, Op. cit., page 518.
    59. This later view was echoed by Prasenjit Basu. Writing in the
International Herald Tribune
in August 1999, he reminded readers that despite the fact that that week India’s population had reached 1 billion, which most people took as anything but good news, the country was doing well. Growth was strong, the export of software was flourishing, agricultural production was outstripping population growth, there had been no serious famine since independence from Britain, and Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians were collaborating to produce both nuclear power and humane laws. So maybe ‘Inner-directed India’ was at last changing. In
Islams and Modernities
(Verso, 1993) Aziz Al-Azmeh was likewise more optimistic about Islam. He argued that until, roughly speaking, the Yom Kippur war and the oil crisis, Islam
was
modernising, coming to terms with Darwin, among other ideas. Since then, however, he said Islam had been dominated by a right-wing version that replaced Communism ‘as the main threat to Western civilisation and values.’
    60. Landes, Op.
cit.,
pages 491ff.
    61. Irving Louis Horowitz,
The Decomposition of Sociology,
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; paperback edition, 1994.
    62.
Ibid.,
page 4.
    63.
Ibid.,
page 12.
    64.
Ibid.
    65.
Ibid.,
page 13.
    66.
Ibid.,
page 16.
    67.
Ibid.,
pages 242ff.
    68.
Barrow, Impossibility, Op. cit.
    69. I
bid.,
page 248.
    70.
Ibid.,
page 251.
    71.
Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modem Culture, Op. cit., page 69.
    72. John Polkinghorne,
Beyond Science,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Canto paperback 1998, page 64.
    73. Polkinghorne, Op.
cit.,
page 88.
    74. Some of these issues are considered in an original way by Harvard’s Gerald Holton in
The Scientific Imagination
(Cambridge University Press, 1978, re-issued Harvard University Press, 1998). Based on studies of such scientific innovations as Enrico Fermi’s discoveries, and high-temperature super-conductivity, Holton concluded that scientists are by and large introverts, shy as children, very conscious as adults of peer pressure and that imagination in this context is a ‘smaller’ entity than in the arts, in that science is generally governed by ‘themata’, presuppositions which mean that ideas move ahead step-by-step and that these steps eventually lead to paradigm shifts. Holton’s study raises the possibility that such small imaginative leaps are in fact more fruitful than the larger, more revolutionary turns of the wheel that Lewis Mumford and Lionel Trilling called for in the arts. According to Holton’s