All of this helped to produce the modern, secular zealot: the revolutionary who seeks to create heaven on earth. Science, psychology, politics, economics, education—any of these disciplines might be enlisted in the cause. At universities such as Oxford, where Tolkien and Lewis established themselves in the 1920s, a cocktail of experimentation and existential doubt was the order of the day. Pacifism was all the rage. Patriotism was out, replaced by contempt for all the old virtues. For the intellectual class as well as the ordinary man on the street, the Great War had defamed the values of the
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