On foot from Edinburgh to Canterbury for a once-in-a-decade conference on ‘What It Means to Be a High-Functioning Humanzee in a Mythological World’, we are discussing the cultural fallout of ‘phase three scholasticism’, which has rocked the academic world and the Catholic Church in Ireland, and is responsible for the suicide of at least five university deans and three bishops, as well as the war between the Irish and the Brits. The discussion is heated and many of us are on t

The Humanzee  In the heat of a celluloid American night, Doctor Franklin Ahab — host to a crowd of forty souls — walks in a stately manner through the upper rooms of his Massachusetts mansion. He descends the wide staircase, smiling and reeling off witty one-liners. An orchestra plays The Rite of Spring  in the enormous dining hall. For a few minutes Ahab casually mingles among his guests, then calls for the conductor to settle down. Hester, his life partner in a transparent