In his opposition to this assumption and the mental habit that follows from it, Barfield was at some pains to point out that the world we inhabit is not, that it cannot be, structurally different from what we think about it—that the world we perceive “is not something unshakably and unalterably given, but is largely the product of the way we collectively and subconsciously think. It is correlative to our mental habit” (HGH 71 — and not, by the way, “incompatible with deep religious conviction” [RM 190]).

This essay is not an epistemological treatise; nor do I have the space fully to trace what Barfield believed about the relationship of subject to object. This essay is a reminder from Barfield of the extent to which faith is implicit in our current view of the world. But it is necessary, I think, in the service of explaining the first feature of Barfield’s dissent from the scientific view, briefly to sketch part of Barfield’s strategy for showing how the world we perceive coheres structurally with what we think about it.

He began his book Saving the Appearances [3] with a favorite romantic image — a favorite because signal feature of the romantic dissent from the Enlightenment — viz., the image of the rainbow. A rainbow ‘exists’ because light, water, and eyesight combine to create it. Your eyes are every bit as important to the construction of the rainbow as water and light are, and you can test the extent to which you are implicated in the rainbow’s ‘existence’ by trying to find the pot of gold at the end of it. As you move, so does the rainbow. It comes to rest beyond that hill there, until you yourself climb that hill, whereupon the rainbow, together with its coveted pot of gold, has moved and now comes to rest beyond the next hill. Chase it however you may, the only thing you will have in the end is the certainty that eyesight is as important to the rainbow’s being wherever it is as light and water are… .

Barfield’s philological reflections led him to conclude that whereas we, after Descartes, perceive a world filled with things, our forbears—perhaps to include St. John the Evangelist—must certainly, at some point, have “perceived images.” Now “[t]he difference between an image and a thing lies in the fact that an image presents itself as an exterior expressing or implying an interior”—wind would be an example of this—“whereas a thing does not. When what begins by being an image becomes in course of time a mere thing, we are justified in describing it as an idol. And a collective state of mind, which perceives all things and no images, may thus fairly be characterized as idolatry” (HGH 70).

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Read the rest of this the first part of a two-part essay, in Front Porch Republic. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry is “a stunner”, as C. S. Lewis put it in a letter to Barfield.

The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with Nineteenth-Century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men. The time was ripe.

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From the novel That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research — a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.

On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of “science” and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.

That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part — the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on “restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making” — would have made me walk out.

Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.

What an outrage. Bush’s nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.

Obama’s address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the “false choice between sound science and moral values.”

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See “Obama’s ‘Science’ Fiction” in the WP

I think Lilla exaggerates the importance of Hobbes, but he is right to see him as one thinker in the chain of those who developed what I have called the modern moral conception of social order. A more apt founding figure for this outlook is Grotius. It sees human beings as both each pursuing their own goals, of life and prosperity, in potential conflict with others, while at the same time they are sociable, meant to live with others. Our social morality can be derived from this predicament. Those social rules are correct which can enable humans to live together; which can in other terms harmonize their projects, so that they become mutually strengthening, instead of causes of conflict and hence destruction. This is if you like a derivation of social rules from purely human considerations, and Grotius even makes the (in)famous claim that these rules would be valid, even if God didn’t exist. But in the way these ideas were worked out, in say, Locke, or Pufendorf, or the framers of the American Declaration of Independence, they were not disconnected from theology. The assumption was that God had made human beings so that they could achieve harmony by these rules, whether this was established by reason, often in a Deistic mode, or shown by Revelation (and for many people, of course, the fact that these truths were doubly guaranteed made them all the more credible). “We hold these truths to be self-evident….”

Where I agree with Lilla is that this new ethic of order could be detached from a theistic anchoring. It could be seen as inscribed in Nature (Jacobins), and then later as what our instincts and intuitions as they have developed in civilization suggest to us. What I cannot see is a moment of Great Separation, as it were, a crossing of a stream. Even today, our sense of this liberal order of equality, rights and democracy is sustained by what Rawls called an “overlapping consensus,” in which people support the same principles for a host of different reasons, Kantian, utilitarian, but also theological. Now in fact, it is hard to think across these gaps; for a believer to understand an atheist, and vice versa. So people always fall into imagining that their grounds for upholding the consensus are the only valid ones. Certain people on the US right think that Christianity is the only possible basis; certain members of the liberal academy think that if you aren’t some kind of Kantian you have no good reason to believe in Liberalism. These beliefs help to generate the kind of Kulturkampf from which the US suffers. But the fact is that our civilization is anchored in widely incompatible “comprehensive views,” to use Rawls’ term. Only if you forget this can you believe that “we” have crossed a deep divide, and that we are now threatened with regression. It seems to me that the reality is more mixed and less dramatic than that.

So on “our” (modern liberal) side of the river, “political theology” has never been wholly absent, and has often been very prominent. Unless we choose to forget abolitionists in Britain and America, the Civil Right movement, all the Second World War rhetoric about “defending Christian civilization,” etc. It is more or less prominent at different times and in different milieu, but it is always there.

And symmetrically, the kinds of philosophical considerations which we rely on today were very present on the “other” shore. One has the impression at times that Lilla sees the pre-modern age as dominated by the Guises and the Münzers. There were far too many then, but then we’ve seen quite a few in our day, not just those with a “theological” outlook, but also Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Lilla never undertakes to describe the “other shore”, but the odd hints he does offer make me wonder. He speaks of contemporary recurrences to political theology as being unlike those of earlier days; they don’t “appeal to miracles, or biblical inerrancy, or divine providence, or sacred tradition.” Later he mentions “fanciful cosmologies.” But Biblical inerrancy is an invention of modern evangelical Protestantism; miracles were not standardly appealed to in political theory, even with a “divine nexus” (it’s true that they became very important in apologetics in the 18th Century, hence the punch in Hume’s deflationary arguments on this score); providence played a big role for thinkers of “British and American Liberalism,” of which Lilla says that for two centuries they “stayed well within the philosophical orbit that Hobbes had circumscribed.” This would certainly have surprised many of them.

Charles Taylor, on Mark Lilla’s *The Stillborn God*. The rest is at The Immanent Frame.

There are lots of cases where we know more about how the world works than we do about how we know how it works. That’s no paradox. Understanding the structure of galaxies is one thing, understanding how we understand the structure of galaxies is quite another. There isn’t the slightest reason why the first should wait on the second and, in point of historical fact, it didn’t. This bears a lot of emphasis; it turns up in philosophy practically everywhere you look.

For example, nobody is really a solipsist about other minds; everybody knows that everybody else has beliefs and desires out of which they act, just as one does oneself. But it’s a serious question how one knows that other people have minds; and it’s not a question that psychologists are able to answer to anybody’s satisfaction. Is it an inference from, as one says, one’s own case? Or is it a kind of belief that one is simply born with? Or did one learn it at granny’s knee? (If so, where did granny learn it?) The fact is, we don’t know. But that we don’t doesn’t matter if the question is, say, whether people drink because they are thirsty. In particular, your being thirsty doesn’t depend on whether I have a story that says that you are. Of course it doesn’t: your being thirsty is about you, not about me. It wasn’t me who ate the salted peanuts; you did. People say: ‘Is there anything to drink? I’m thirsty.’ Why would they say that they were if they weren’t?

So one thing that’s wrong with Frayn’s arguments is his partiality for inferences from epistemic premises to metaphysical conclusions. Frayn isn’t alone in this of course; quite a lot of 20th-century anglophone philosophy made it a matter of principle to make this mistake. It turns out, at the limit of this sort of philosophical nuttiness, that it takes two to see a tree; you can’t see one unless there’s somebody around (actually or counterfactually) to interpret you as seeing one. But surely this is back to front? Surely it’s the seeing that warrants the interpretation, not the other way around? Stories are made to conform to the world, not vice versa.

Another thing Frayn gets wrong (and here too he doesn’t lack for company) is his persistence in what I’ll call ‘all or nothing’ arguments. So, for example:

What, for example, could have more gratifyingly distinct spatial frontiers than a car? . . . But now follow it through time, from its beginnings in vague discussions between designers and sales directors [to when it] undergoes compression, meltdown, absorption into the fabric of other cars, into tin cans and bicycles. When did it start being a car . . . ? Somewhere this side of the preliminary discussions, certainly. When did it cease? Somewhere before its transmutation into cans of baked beans.

The implication is that, since there’s no fact of the matter about when a thing starts to be a car (or ceases to be one), there is likewise no fact of the matter about whether a thing is a car; it may be a car according to your story but not according to mine and, in principle, there’s nothing to choose between the stories. So, it’s all or nothing: if there’s no matter of fact at the margins, there’s none in the middle either.

I look out of the window . . . I tell you that the sun is setting . . . But, even here, in this simple factual report of what is before my eyes . . . there is also a performative element . . . I am deciding that the sun is setting . . . even though we have no agreement on what precise relationship between sun and horizon constitutes the sun’s setting . . . All narration and description . . . is indissolubly subjective because it involves selection.

I’m not saying the bridge is open because it is; it’s open because I say it is.

And finally, with a flourish: ‘The story is the paradigm. Factual statements are specialised derivatives of fictitious ones.’

Piffle. Much of what we know is organised around clear cases, so what’s indeterminate about the marginal Xs can be a plain matter of fact about the paradigms. How many legs can Bossie have before she becomes not a funny kind of cow but a funny kind of centipede? How small can Bossie be before she’s too small to be a cow? (As small as a bread box? As small as an atom?) How big can she be before she’s too big to be a cow? (As big as Australia? As big as the universe?) And what if she walks upright and serves tea to friends? And what if she speaks Latin? What if she turns on and off on Tuesdays? Search me. Or search a biologist; if he doesn’t know, nobody does. But that Bossie as she stands, in full sunlight with four legs and flies, is a cow: that isn’t up to me, or to you, or to anybody else. Bossie is a cow without caveats, a cow sans phrase, a cow tout court. Nor is her being such merely the asymptote that the indeterminate cases converge towards; that gets things backwards: cows grade off from Bossie, not the other way around. That Bossie is a cow is story-independent.

Frayn is the kind of philosopher who can’t quite believe that what he believes is mostly true; that, by and large, things are much as we all suppose them to be, and that we suppose them to be that way mostly because that’s the way they are. And yet, on the face of it, that’s surely the view that has much the most to recommend it. As a matter of fact, there’s no competition; it’s the only story that anybody has a glimmer of how to tell. It’s one thing to remark that there could be other stories; it’s something quite else actually to tell one that is remotely plausible. No doubt, there’s plenty to worry about at the fringes of what we believe; quantum entanglement really is hard to swallow, and I, for one, can’t get my head around black holes. But Bossie? And the car in the garage? What’s the likelihood that we’ve got it all wrong about them? How could we have? What on earth would conceivably explain Bossie being in my story if not Bossie being in the world?

I will tell you a philosophical joke. Once upon a time, a visiting scholar presented a lecture on the topic: ‘How many philosophical positions are there in principle?’ ‘In principle,’ he began, ‘there are exactly 12 philosophical positions.’ A voice called from the audience: ‘Thirteen.’ ‘There are,’ the lecturer repeated, ‘exactly 12 possible philosophical positions; not one less and not one more.’ ‘Thirteen,’ the voice from the audience called again. ‘Very well, then,’ said the lecturer, now perceptibly irked, ‘I shall proceed to enumerate the 12 possible philosophical positions. The first is sometimes called “naive realism”. It is the view according to which things are, by and large, very much the way that they seem to be.’ ‘Oh,’ said the voice from the audience. ‘Fourteen!’

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Jerry Fodor, Reviewing Michael Frayn’s book The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe, in the LRB

If antiquity was the childhood of civilization, then modernity is adulthood.

Modern man outgrew old myths and elevated science to a position of supremacy; he ditched his lyre and donned the lab coat. The modern world is a world of facts. It is a bourgeois world, a busy and business-oriented world, a place where poetry and art sit quietly at the margins of day-to-day life.

Whereas the child assumed the posture of nature’s student and admirer, the adult fancies himself teacher and master over nature. He concerns himself with grown-up things: money, security, the latest news, the latest studies. The earth is not a mother but a reserve of manipulable resources. Snow is a cluster of crystallized molecules; it is also a nuisance.

The modern world did show signs of longing for its days of youth (see: Romanticism). But the inexorable passage of time could not be thwarted, and gray hairs began to grow. Old age brought senility: incoherence, confusion, forgetting the function of toilets. It’s called postmodernism.

The irony is that postmodernists think they are riding the cusp of all that is fresh and new. Really they are suffering — some of them, anyway — from the gerontic afflictions of cataracts, memory loss and dementia. They’re stuck in solipsistic language games. Who can say what “the Earth” is? How could we pretend to know anything “true” about snow?

The extent to which we have progressed beyond modernity into postmodernity, beyond adulthood into old age, remains debatable. In any case, death is lurking. Birth rates are absurdly low; Western economies are surviving on an influx of immigrants. Europe’s identity has been almost entirely effaced. America is following suit.

But maybe it is just here that the analogy breaks down. Maybe an aged civilization, unlike an aged human being, can find fresh springs of rejuvenation and continue far into the future. Are there such springs?

It seems clear from our past that neither myth nor fact, by itself, can satisfy us for long. The realist in man, the scientist, will always rebel from a world of pure myth. And the dreamer, the poet, will always rebel from a world of pure fact. We will be satisfied only when we can embrace myth and fact together, when we can marvel at beauty and revel in truth, when we can enjoy the wonder of childhood and the knowledge of adulthood at one and the same time.

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Bryce Taylor, my son Gabriel’s friend and Silliman suite-mate. See the complete column in today’s YDN