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So far it doesn't look like they've done anywhere near as much harm as Rose's novel-reading Socialists or poetry-loving Communists.

Perhaps you should tell that to the two million people a year in Africa who die of malaria thanks to DDT being banned at the instigation of environmental groups. Stalin only managed to kill a half a million a year at the hight of his killing spree.

Tied up with that fervor for education, there was also a passion to remake the world, to get it to conform to ideological notions that did much ill.

And even more good. Is the world more free now or was is more free before? The answer is that it is more free now. Your argument of maybe they did not do much harm in Britain but they did elsewhere is invalid because it is because it was there that the reading occurred and there that the damage was less. In parts of the world where reading and studying for the common man was not promoted (China, Russia and so forth) the damage was greater.

There is something to be said for not seeing life through such idealistic glasses.

Except for the fact that it is human nature especially young human nature to do so. You might as well as us to quit breathing. You throw out idealism and you throw out all desire to advance. We go back to scraping under logs for grubs.

And of course there is reason to mistrust what is commonly taught. Not reading, learning and questioning leads to great social ills. The difference is today that it is being taught in such a way that reading learning and questioning are discouraged. George Orwell had it right in Animal Farm. The Sheep knew only one thing and that one thing was the wrong thing. Because they never read thought or questioned they became a force for great destruction.

Now days in the Environmental movement you find the same sheep and they are spouting the same unthinking line. "Four legs good, two legs bad." It is present in video games, movies and TV shows. It is swallowed with little or no thought because of the medium in which it is presented. Far more destruction has come of it and it has the potential to be far more deadly then anything we have faced in the past because it is a suicidal philosophy.

In Islam you find much the same destructive force and much of the same lack of thought, studying and questioning. It is also a suicidal philosophy. For all of it's deadliness communism never was suicidal.

Germany was widely said to have been the most educated country in the world in the early 20th century. Culture and education were certainly held in higher esteem in Germany than in Britain. Yet this did Germany little good in resisting tyranny in the 20th century. To be sure, the masses in Russian and China were uneducated, but intellectual elites there had a fervor and passion for abstract ideas that outstripped what one found in Britain or America.

You appear to assume that I am against the diffusion of information. I don't think I am. But I point out that a society with widely dispersed information or access to learning may not approach culture and education with the kind of passion or veneration that Rose applauds.

Once people have access to something they don't crave it and exaggerate its value as they once did. That's only human nature. The world of learning and ideas is a part of our life -- or it isn't -- but it doesn't become such a focus as it was for some in the last century or two. And I don't think that's such a bad thing.

It may be that we do owe something to nineteenth century workers who wanted greater access to learning and culture. And there is something to be said for young people who seek such things passionately.

But I can't help noticing a darker side to some of the phenomena Rose applauds -- a dangerous utopianism, an impatient or uncompromising expectation of perfection in human affairs. He doesn't prove to me that that loss of that passion was a wholly bad thing.