Back in the 1950s, Jacques Barzun wrote an essay, “Swift, or the Capacity for Reason,” that continues to astonish me.

When in our weariness we look back to the great ages shining in history by their art, science, and the merged glory of worthy lives and deeds, we long for their clear outlines and envy their unchallengeable merit. They seem both the product and the evidence of order, of reason; particularly so if Reason was one of their slogans and historians have turned the word into a descriptive tag. Actually, no generation of men has set out to be unreasonable. And if the Age of Reason, the age of classicism, the age of order, hierarchy, and monarchy looks to us like a haven for our distraught selves, it is only another mirage induced by distance and........

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