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"The quality of the world we live in," Barfield
cautions us to remember in History, Guilt, and Habit,
is determined not only by what we perceive but also by what we fail to
perceive" (HGH 71).
Historical blind-spots occlude our vision:
When we look back on past periods
of history, we are often confronted with inconsistencies and blind spots
in human thinking, which to us are so palpable
that we are almost astonished out of belief. We find it hard to credit
the inescapable fact that they remained, for decades or for centuries,
completely invisible not only to the generality of men but also to the
choicest and wisest spirits of the age. (SA 167)1
Our own worst blind-spot is easily identified:
I believe that the blind-spot which
posterity will find most startling in the last hundred years or so of Western
civilization is, that it had, on the one hand, a religion which differed
from all others in its acceptance of time, and of a particular point in
time, as a cardinal element in its faith: that it had, on the other hand,
a picture in its mind of the history of the earth and man as an evolutionary
process; and that it neither saw nor supposed any connection whatever between
the two. (SA 167)
And, as Burgeon realizes in Unancestral Voice,
we need not look far to understand the cause of this puzzling lacuna in
our understanding:
It was hard indeed on the human mind
that the moment at which it first began to entertain the idea of transformation
should also be the moment at which it was itself in the act of becoming
the transforming agent! No wonder if it had failed, as yet, to understand.
No wonder if was still looking desperately round outside for that which
it was itself just beginning consciously to be. (71)
See in particular "The Coming Trauma of Materialism"
(RM 187-200); Worlds Apart,
passim. |
1Barfield offers
the following examples: "the Athenian emphasis on liberty-with the system
of slavery accepted as a matter of course; the notion that the truth could
be ascertained and justice done with the help of trial by battle; the Calvinist
doctrine of pre-election for eternal damnation; the co-existence of a Christian
ethic with an economic doctrine of ruthless laissez-faire . . . " (SA
167). |
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