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Apocalyptic visions have their pleasures, and the murder of the policeman and his consort (they were not married) easily stimulates such visions. But we are rational beings as well as irrational ones, and it is incumbent on us to try to assess the situation according to the evidence. Oceans of ink have been spilt on the attempt to estimate the true extent of the threat of Islam to the West, and the attempts range from the frankly paranoid to the most supinely complacent. For myself, I veer constantly between the two, hardly pausing in between. In the last analysis, the West has all the cards, intellectual and military; but if it refuses ever to play them, they are of no account.

It is worth reading, or rereading, Huxley on Loudun. He seems sometimes to be writing about Larossi Abballa himself:

Adrenaline addiction is rationalized as Righteous Indignation and finally they [who suffer from it] are convinced, unshakably, that they do well to be angry…. Give him [such a person] a religious education, and it becomes obvious to him, it becomes axiomatic, that what he wants is what God wants, that his cause is the cause of whatever he may happen to regard as the True Church and that any compromise is a metaphysical Munich, an appeasement of Radical Evil.

It seems, then, that we are in the presence of an eternal recurrence, no doubt because human nature does not change. On the other hand, improvement, at least in externals (and which of us is completely unconcerned with externals?), is possible. The Loudun that Huxley evoked is no more:

At the city gates a corpse or two hung, mouldering, from the municipal gallows. Within the walls, there were the usual dirty streets, the customary gamut of smells, from wood smoke to excrement, from geese to incense, from baking bread to horses, swine and unwashed humanity.

No one at the time would ever have dreamed, let alone foreseen, a clean and odourless Loudun.

I veer, then, between optimism and pessimism. But pessimism is much more fun.