This year marks the 150<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the publication of Count Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, arguably the greatest of all novels. Among the book’s central motifs is the fragility and contingency of human knowledge, and the subsequent futility of trying to create a social science. In an eternal warning to central planners everywhere, Tolstoy portrayed human beings as existing in a world of contingency and immediacy, continually forced to answer to events entirely unheralded and unexpected. Ultimately, humans need to be guided by something deeper than what can be found through an examination of the empirical world. Gary Saul Morson, writing in The New Criterion, shows how Tolstoy used his literary gifts to show the absurdity of what would become known as scientism, or any other reductionist account of the human.
Yay Brexit!
Brendan O’Neill in Spiked enthuses that Brexit is superior to just about anything else in the world. “There should be street parties” on the 10th anniversary of the popular vote to withdraw from the EU, he writes. “Let the bells peal for that momentous day when in our millions we said No to globalism.” The continuing surfeit of saboteurs and naysayers among Britain’s “idiot elites”, O’Neill snorts, are gripped by Brexit Derangement Syndrome.
