Refusal to face reality is destructive: Why do we fudge the big issues?

It’s almost 80 years since TS Eliot published his searing Four Quartets.

One of their often hijacked lines seems more relevant today than it did when the poet, born in 1888 on the banks of America’s Mississippi River — the red heartland of Trump country — wrote it.

Eliot observed during the early years of the Second World War that “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”.