ABSTRACT
It is strange to note how quickly the figure of spiritually-minded thinker disappeared from the mainstream of the modern West, to live on precariously in underdeveloped societies like India. It is too easy to blame millenarian Christianity for the ideological fanaticism that led powerful individuals in the Bush administration to try to remake the reality of the Middle East. But many liberal intellectuals and human rights activists also supported the invasion of Iraq, justifying violence as a means to liberation for the Iraqi people. Faced with increasingly bad news from Iraq and Afghanistan, such aspiring reality-makers as Ferguson appear to have faltered briefly before clamouring even more loudly for an assertion of American military might. Many British and American intellectuals today help the reality-makers draw lessons' for the present and future from the facts' of history. Economic globalization has knit the world even tighter, and many people feel the interdependent nature of the world in their hearts.
