Another Quadrant essay from the good doctor, this time dealing with Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1861), which seems increasingly relevant in our tumultuous and nihilistic times.

Perhaps one of the ironies of our present conjuncture is that, while multiculturalism is extolled and treated almost as an unimpeachable orthodoxy, so many people lack historical imagination and cannot enter mentally into a world in which people had a different scale of values from their own. The past for them is not another country where they do things differently; it is the same country where they were not as enlightened as we.