In 2001, Professor Gabrielle Oettingen from the University of Pennsylvania conducted an experiment, which appeared to show that fearing the worst and hoping for the best produced a better outcome in human affairs than hope alone.

Though she is not a Marxist, so far as I know, she had rediscovered a method of thinking — dialectics — which is at the heart of Marxism, though in actuality it stems from a rabbinical teaching method that is older than Jesus.

Reading the tortuous thinking that brought the two protagonists together — one a former Jesuit priest, the other a sociologist — in their agnosticism made me want to shout at them, over and over, that the answer to their problems lay in dialectics.

As I say, it is a method they should have been familiar with, even if they had never heard of dialectical materialism, since Jesus used it all the time — he was able to issue contradictory dicta, telling his followers to sell their cloaks and buy swords and on another occasion pronouncing that they who lived by the sword would die by the sword.

Such contradictions are common to all belief systems. Marx himself famously proclaimed to Engels: “I am glad I was never a Marxist.”

Atheism, its opposite, is ever-present in monotheism, since it proclaims an absolute, albeit an absolute absence. I found it interesting that these two thinkers were not impelled towards atheism by their problems with monotheist belief but towards agnosticism: “we don’t know.” A conclusion, which is no conclusion.

Bauman describes his spiritual journey as a path “from monologue to dialogue, or polylogue, from the blind arrogance of the possessor of a single truth to the restraint of a witness to multiple human truths, from monotheism to . . . yes, exactly: polytheism.”

But rather than leading the reader to enlightenment, their conjectures confuse every question they raise. They are reminiscent of medieval debates about how many angels may dance upon the point of a pin.

Review by Karl Dallas