The Seventeenth Century in Reverse

Near the end of a recent Youtube video interview exploring identity in the digital age on Jonathan Pageau’s Symbolic World channel, Mary Harrington suggests that we are now witnessing the 17^th century in reverse. When this insightful cultural critic speaks, we ought to listen. But what could this possibly mean? She mentioned some of the odd political and religious reversals we have witnessed, such as Puritans returning to Catholicism and Republicans, to Loyalists (or perhaps Roundheads, to Royalists, closer to Harrington’s home). I believe she cited J. D. Vance as a high-level exemplar of a religious reversal. She may be right about the reversal Vance represents, or about what the return of power from the commons to the new techno-aristocrats like Elon Musk indicates. Time will tell. I, however, am more interested in the philosophical/metaphysical underpinnings of what a reversal of the 17^th century might mean. And it all depends on what one assumes as given.

Take those subscribing to what Charles Taylor dubs modernism’s “subtraction narrative,” the view that the 17^th-century’s scientific revolution progressively stripped away all the accretions of superstitious nonsense that had built up over the ages, leaving us with the cold, hard—purely quantitative—facts. Two of Aristotle’s four types of causation were discarded in the process: formal and final, leaving only the material and efficient. Francis Bacon’s decision frequently to translate the Latin word for “form” as “law” perfectly captures the mood of the 17^th-century revolution. Gone were all causes that provided meaning/quality, leaving us with precise quantitative descriptions of a world now open to our quantitative manipulation. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities of objects popularized by John Locke again encapsulates this shift. Essentially, for the modernist revolutionaries of the 17^th century, only the primary qualities are really there. The secondary qualities are “added” by the perceiving subject and exist only in the skull of the Cartesian homunculus directing the meat suit it happens to inhabit.

Those who subscribe to this subtraction narrative must understand any “reversal” as illusory, in the sense of not truly changing what is there. Evolutionary biologists or anthropologists might read the attempt to return to a pre-scientific world as having some kind of evolutionary advantage, even though based in illusion. This is the sort of strategy they use to account for the fact that those with religious hope often fare better than those given to secular despair.

I sense that part of Paul Kingsnorth’s objection to those urging a return to Christianity in order to recover and bolster Western civilization comes from his recognition that they are engaged in a kind of category error. It is a means-end confusion. Western civilization may indeed have arisen largely from Christianity, but it did so because people believed it was true—not useful. Had the reverse been true, we would have had neither Western civilization nor Christianity.

What then of those who reject the subtraction narrative, those, for example, who hold that the qualitative world remains unchanged despite science’s refusal to recognize it? C. S. Lewis, a scholar of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, provides a paramount example of such a thinker, and his continued extraordinary popularity speaks to the deep need he is addressing. In his uncannily prophetic The Abolition of Man, he argues for the truth (as well as the necessity) of objective aesthetic and moral qualities existing in nature. These transcendentals require appropriate human responses. When we fail to give these responses, we fail—and risk losing—our humanity. For these Christian Platonists, and Lewis proudly wears the badge, the reversal of the 17^th century would simply be a return to eternal verities.

But what of those like Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield, who regard the 17^th-century scientific revolution as a necessary evolutionary stage? How might they understand this reversal? For starters, he would regard the attempt to recover the pre-scientific worldview as profoundly misguided. Indeed, even if it were possible, which it isn’t, he would regard it as ill-advised. He argues that scientific modernism helped scour away the last vestiges of a crippling paganism, crippling because until the complete separation of humans (as subjects) from nature (as the sum of all non-factitious objects), we could not achieve moral independence, and hence individual identity. Of course, he also argues that this separation leaves us disastrously bereft of meaning, both in the world and in ourselves. So, there is no question of a true reversal for Barfield. To “recover” meaning, we must move ahead to a world that shares certain features of its pre-scientific past, but one in which the source of meaning has shifted from the external world to the internal. Pan, as he puts it in one place, has gone indoors.

Thus, the reversal Harrington describes could mean very different things to different people. And I have certainly not provided an exhaustive taxonomy of potential candidates. What to make, for example, of those like Rupert Sheldrake, who are now attempting to reframe discussions of causation by equating “fields” (central to his new science of life) with now defunct formal and final causes? His Youtube video with David Bently Hart is most instructive. In a sense this is an attempt to recover qualia, but that of a person reaching forward while looking back over his shoulder.

I suspect that the reversal Harrington astutely describes—or perhaps more accurately, attempted reversal—testifies above all to the metaphysical bankruptcy at the heart of our digital age: a bankruptcy many are now apparently desperate to escape.