I was standing by a swimming pool in Australia in 1993, entangled in a rapidly degenerating politico-philosophical argument, when my interlocutor saw the light. I was, she said, a humanist. I thought this was a nice thing to be (still do), but she emitted the word with anger and derision and took it to end the argument in her favour. I discovered that humanism is a term of heavy moral opprobrium in fashionable, post-modern, politically correct areas of the academy; a term of abuse that denotes someone like Winston in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four - someone who believes in a...