Pink Floyd gave musical form to the anxieties of modern society: conformity, surveillance, war, education, commerce, madness and isolation. Their music reached millions through its atmosphere, virtuosity and emotional force; their words, for those who attended to them, offered a bleak diagnosis of a civilisation whose machinery shapes human beings while calling the process progress. Yet Pink Floyd offered no cure. Their criticism remained inside the system it condemned, leaving the listener to decide what responsibility should follow recognition.
This morning’s Thought for the Day, given by the Revd Dr Michael Banner of Trinity College, Cambridge, used the death of Desmond Morris to raise an old question in a new form: are human beings fallen angels or risen devils? That reflection led me back to the postwar cultural watershed and to a select list of books that challenged inherited ideas about religion, science, human nature, and modern civilisation.