This article builds on earlier research, which concludes that societies cannot sustain themselves without cultures of optimism. These cultures are reproduced by a complex of ‘optimism promoters’, all of which can be seen to be engaged in a kind of unstated or ‘implicit’ cultural policy, with the production of optimism as one of its goals. The institution of religion is part of this complex. Its...

The transition from the real to the digital requires a shift of consciousness that can be theorised with recourse to the concept of liminality, which has multidisciplinary currency in psychology and other disciplines in the social sciences, cultural, and literary theory. In anthropology the notion of liminality was introduced by the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in the context of the developme...