In a transactional, technological world riven by crisis, have literature and philosophy become redundant? An American academic argues that the renewal of our inner life is fundamental to preserving our humanity

Hard-boiled bookworms like myself sometimes find ourselves in a crisis of conscience when dramatic human suffering forces its way into our awareness. When I was a PhD student in philosophy, the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center shook me out of my contemplative slumber. I felt I could not live in a library: I had to “make a difference”, to help to heal the broken fragments of the world.

The desire to make a difference is not always easy to distinguish from the urge to make a splash. So, in turn, one can end up making a spectacle of oneself. We live in a social world where the thirst for justice seems to lead on to fixed and rigid pathways, and where absurd performances can take precedence over substance. This is nothing new. Caryll Houselander wrote in 1944 of an invalid lady who could not forgive God for not permitting her to be eaten by a cannibal and so achieve martyrdom. “She could not accept herself as a sick woman,” Houselander wrote. “But she would have achieved heroic virtue as a cutlet!” We prefer the fictional role of a cannibal’s dinner to the real tedium of illness.