Progressive, modern societies hold the promise of the triumph of reason and the banishing of primitive, religious impulses to a bygone age. If this statement is orthodoxy to much of Western liberal thought, then Gordon Lynch's On the Sacred is heresy. Challenging the myth of the idealized rational society, Lynch argues that emotionally-charged forms of the sacred remain an inevitable foundation of social life. Modernity has not rid us of the sacred, but merely presented us with new sacred forms focused around humanity, nature and the nation. Drawing on examples from the changing status of the British monarchy, the growing influence of humanitarian NGOs and moral justifications for the invasion of Iraq, On the Sacred presents a compelling account of what the sacred is and why it still matters for us today. By the end of the book, Lynch calls us to a new understanding of our moments of deep moral certainty, challenging us to think about the harm we do in the name of what we call sacred.

Renowned philosopher, Mary Midgley explores the nature of our moral constitution to challenge the view that reduces human motivation to self-interest. Midgley argues cogently and convincingly that simple, one-sided accounts of human motives, such as the “selfish gene” tendency in recent neo-Darwinian thought, may be illuminating but are always unrealistic. Such neatness, she shows, cannot be imposed on human psychology. She returns to Darwin’s original writings to show how the reductive individualism which is now presented as Darwinism does not derive from Darwin but from a wider, Hobbesian tradition in Enlightenment thinking. She reveals the selfish gene hypothesis as a cultural accretion that is just not seen in nature. Heroic independence is not a realistic aim for Homo sapiens. We are, as Darwin saw, earthly organisms, framed to interact constantly with one another and with the complex ecosystems of which we are a tiny part. For us, bonds are not just restraints but also lifelines.