Comment on The Belmont Club,"Do no harm"

My hope for Iran is that after the sturm and drang of the revolution will come a Thermidor and then a swing to normalcy. The risk is that they might swing to far, like France did between revolution and counter-revolution. A better option to hope for is that the Iranians are blessed and get to follow the English model. Remember that the English in the 16th to 17th centuries had a religious experience at least as dramatic as that which has consumed the Iranians for the last thirty years. The result was the Restoration which manifested itself in a thoroughgoing rejection of all enthusiasms, especially religious, that did them well for two hundred years. That this has now left the moribund Church of England vulnerable before Islam's religious passions is an unfortunate byproduct. Perhaps within a few years the world will be astonished at an Iranian secular flowering.