Hi Raff

I think one needs a balance between recognising the crimes and abuses of ones civilisation and being entirely against it and seeing it as fundamentally evil – the latter attitude (which one occasionally sees on the radical left) fails to recognise the virtues of our liberal democratic civilisation or the evils committed by other civilisations (especially supposedly liberationist ones like Maoist China and Soviet Russia, which were far more violent and oppressive than western liberal democracies).