The following article was first printed in the 2005 edition of The Golden Blade, an annual anthroposophical publication which survived until 2009. It was written as the draft of a lecture ultimately given in the English Auditorium at the Goetheanum on Thursday 7th August 2003. As Simon Blaxland de-Lange wrote in a footnote to its appearance in The Golden Blade, “the actual lecture took into account what had been expressed during the preceding days of the second ‘English Week’ conference, and was strongly based on Barfield’s remarkable text of the modern mysteries, Unancestral Voice, from which several quotations were taken. However, the general drift of the argument remained as given here.” It is republished here with the kind permission of Simon Blaxland-de Lange. 

In 1995 a book was published by the American firm of O’Reillys who, by publishing The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog by Ed Kroll in 1992, were the first to draw the reading world’s attention to the Internet. However, this book, The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in our Midst by Stephen Talbott, was no celebration of this new technological innovation but a very balanced and measured analysis of its limitations, drawbacks and dangers. And the book’s hero, the thinker and writer whose ideas were reckoned by its author as having a deeper relevance to future cultural and social developments, was the subject of this talk, a 96-year-oId Englishman who had been born at the end of the previous century, Owen Barfield.

At the time it seemed a bold step to publish a book questioning certain fundamental aspects of the so-called Information Technology revolution (although Talbott is no computer-Luddite). What Talbott is essentially doing in his book is, however, to examine this whole phenomenon from the standpoint of the evolution of consciousness, a field which Barfield made his speciality. Drawing extensively upon Barfield’s books, articles and lectures, Talbott makes an extremely good case for the idea that this much-trumpeted Information Technology revolution is, in terms of the evolution of consciousness, not really a revolution at all but is, rather, the reflection of a determined attempt on the part of modern humanity to avoid taking a step beyond the present narrowly individual, spectator-consciousness which is assumed by modern reductionist science to be not merely the culminating point in human evolution but one beyond which it is impossible to go. If this is so, it becomes clear that, far from paving humanity’s path towards the future, Information Technology systems are stifling or even actively inhibiting the endeavour to develop new supersensible faculties of knowledge and, in particular, social insight.

Referring thus to Stephen Talbott’s notable book – and it was warmly welcomed by Barfield himself when it appeared – may serve as a means of introducing the theme of the present lecture; for in many ways what follows will be an attempt briefly to append a personal up-date to what Talbott has presented in the pages of his fairly lengthy study. I shall endeavour first to say something about my own thoughts and feelings regarding life at the beginning of the 21st century. I shall then speak in general terms about Owen Barfield, bearing in mind that there may be some of you who know very little about him. Finally, I shall attempt to convey why I have chosen to refer to Barfield in my title as a “Harbinger” of this new century, as one who – while he did not live to see it – prepared the way for it in a manner that perhaps few others have done.

At first sight this latter thought would seem to be a somewhat daft and certainly misguided notion. How could an English lawyer with a spare-time interest in etymology and semantics, who – quite apart from his overriding preoccupation with the ideas of a thoroughly heterodox Austrian-born philosopher and seer – was not even a member of an academic body and of whom, moreover, hardly anybody has heard possibly be regarded as one who has paved the way for a century seemingly dominated by technologies and mechanical artifacts largely irrelevant to, and quite probably antithetical to, his life’s work? The eight years that have elapsed since the publication of Talbott’s book would appear to confirm that the computer, Internet and mobile phone are, whatever one may think of them, here to stay and that we should at best regard Barfield as the quaint representative of a bygone age.

But is Information Technology really what our age is about? Is the driving-force of the modern world indeed the general wish to have more and more sophisticated machines to replace the human element in our lives? Of course, there are individuals whom one might describe as genuine computer enthusiasts; but I doubt that there are any more of these than there are of enthusiasts for many other forms of human activity. What tends to happen much of the time is that people are told that they need to accommodate themselves to new technologies or new versions of the same technology. This is currently being driven very strongly by governments, for whom Information Technology is an essential means of trying to keep control of their citizens. But the source of this unprecedented need for such sophisticated systems of information, monitoring and regulation does not lie with government either. The true driving-force for this entire scenario lies in the ethic of individualism, of personal autonomy, of the cult of the separate self; and it has been fuelled especially strongly over the last few years by the assumption that there is nothing further that human beings can aspire to other than this goal of becoming increasingly autonomous, separate and governed by a spectator-consciousness which gives rise to what is in plain terms a monstrously egotistical relationship towards one’s human and natural environment. The information machines that impinge their influence so forcefully into our lives are, therefore, not in themselves the cause of anything but are the symptom of very powerful forces deriving from each one of us.

The next step is to ask whether people in general are content with the manifestations and tangible expressions of this narrowly individual moral and social stance. It is not difficult to see – in Britain, at any rate – the extent of the longing that a great number of people experience to do something to change the way we behave individually and how we live socially with others. I was recently present at a very well attended meeting in Forest Row Village Hall about GM crops in Sussex. Every individual but one of the 300 or so people present (plus one of the three speakers) was firmly opposed to GM crops and was completely unconvinced by the scientist speaking in favour of them. There is throughout the country an overwhelming sense that this new technology represents a degree of clinical manipulation of nature that exceeds even the very tolerant standards of Britons in this respect. Equally, big corporations of all kinds, with their typically aggressive profit-making ethos, are increasingly resented, in that what they are doing ostensibly on our behalf no longer represents our inner aspirations. It is a similar story with governments, whose assertions that they alone know what is good for us are less and less appreciated. The most striking recent example of this resentment has been the vehement protest against the Iraqi War. I took part in both the big London Marches (in February and March) myself, and felt that something had fundamentally changed in my country’s relationship with its government.

But whereas the shackles of separate selfhood are wearing thin amidst the growing aspiration towards individual responsibility or ethical individualism, it is difficult in a world where there is a surfeit of information but precious little insight to engender sufficient cultural vision to penetrate the binary fog of computer-thinking. Most especially, many of us find it difficult to see what alternative vision there could be for a cultural and social future. That is, I firmly believe, where Owen Barfield could help us to a far greater extent than he has been allowed to do so hitherto.

Owen Barfield, born in London in 1898, died in his hundredth year in December 1997. Already during his undergraduate days in Oxford shortly after the First World War, he had become fascinated with words and their origin; and in 1922, in a short article on the historical journey of the word “ruin”, from the cascading activity inherent in its Latin meaning to the fossilised metaphor of modern times, he gave a foretaste of what was to become his thesis on the great mystery of poetic inspiration Poetic Diction, published in 1928. Barfield’s starting-point is the delight that one may derive from poetry (in his case it was pre-eminently the work of the English Romantic poets). He then explores what lies behind this delight, while never losing sight of it. What emerges from this quest is the realisation that, through language, we have a last fading connection with the spiritual world of our origins, an insight which – both during this highly creative period in his twenties and subsequently – Barfield found vastly illuminated by the spiritual-scientific research of Rudolf Steiner. Barfield subsequently developed these thoughts about words and their meaning into a treatise on the evolution of human consciousness, Saving the Appearances (1957). Here we find an evocation of mankind’s journey from the distant past to the present, expressed in terms of the ways that human beings have perceived or experienced the world around them. Building solidly upon the insights afforded by his studies of words and languages, Barfield describes this story as a journey from “original participation” (or paganism), where man was to varying degrees united with the gods and their creation, to the spectator-consciousness of modern times, brought about by man’s growing self-consciousness and aspiration towards individual freedom.

Barfield expended a colossal amount of energy on challenging the assumptions and prejudices of reductionist materialism or positivism, the solidly protective armoury of separate selfhood. Nor was he unaware of how entrenched these dogmatic assumptions are, as is evident from his coining of the terms “unresolved positivism” and “residue of unresolved positivism” or RUP. At the very heart of his endeavours to challenge these assumptions of scientific materialism lies Rudolf Steiner’s insight – as expressed pre-eminently in his Philosophy of Freedom – that whether we know it or not we participate in the evocation of the phenomena around us, that we are their co-creators and are, therefore, co-responsible for them.

In this respect, he differed from the other members of the Inklings circle, that group of Christian mythmakers (including C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien) who shared his reservations about modern scientific reductionism but not his solution. As has been pointed out by more than one student of these inspirational writers, Barfield’s answer to the modern dilemma was far and away the most original and far-reaching; for rather than seek to create a new mythology or, indeed, fiction of any kind (he himself disliked novels), his answer to the romantic longing for a world other than the one we have was to enable this longing to come of age by bringing it to actual earthly reality.

Far from hearkening back to a lost mythological age, to what he termed original participation, Barfield’s solution was to reach forward to an entirely new kind of relationship between the free and fully self-conscious individual human being and the Gods, namely final participation. In a lecture that he gave in 1972 called “Participation and Isolation: A Fresh Light on Present Discontents”, he came about as close as he ever did to giving a brief definition of his way of understanding how the narrow dogmas of the spectator-consciousness of the present can and must be replaced by a new form of participation on the part of the individual human being with the world around him:

“How I should like to see [the cosy old twentieth-century image of history as the meaningless and absurd, and therefore of life itself as meaningless and absurd] beginning to be replaced by the image of history as a process of transition from original to final participation: from the individual being shaped by the community to the community being shaped by the individual, just as evolution for me is a process of transition from man being shaped by nature to nature being shaped by man. I should like to see, before I go the way of all flesh, the beginnings of both an ecology and a sociology based, not on ingenious abstraction, but on the concrete realities of nature and human nature”, a vision whose fulfilment depends on “infring[ing] the taboo… on admitting that the so-called inner world of human consciousness is as real and as old as the so-called outer world of nature”.

But this is merely a brief summary in Barfield’s own words of a whole wealth of instances in his writings where he evokes a picture of how a spiritual-scientific consciousness might work in a radically transforming way upon our cultural and social environment. It is impossible here to do more than refer briefly to some of these. His book Unancestral Voice (1965) is his most sustained evocation of a modern cultural landscape as seen by one who is following an anthroposophical path of knowledge, and in the context of a sustained dialogue with the supersensible being Anthroposophia – including a debate on sexuality in the aftermath of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover appeal case, a discussion about the relative merits of punishment and psychological understanding as a means of dealing with crime and delinquent behaviour, debates about evolution, the study of history and modern physics, and an analysis of the antecedents of materialism – all of which elements are couched initially within a framework of opposites and then resolved through the mediatory and ultimately redemptive quality of a third transformatory, supersensible power in the form of the being referred to above. (The book needs to be read in its entirety to do it justice.) His lecture on “Evolution” (1980) is one of several instances where he seeks to prise us apart from the so-called scientific prejudices which prevent us from engaging in an open-minded, spiritual-scientific relationship to the natural world. While his essay “Equity between Man and Man” (1932, revised 1961) reminds us of the true significance for human social affairs of what was gradually happening in England over the years prior to and immediately subsequent to the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, namely, the transition from land-based property relationships to equity relationships between one individual human being and another. Barfield makes it particularly clear in these latter two examples how our relationships in both the dimensions of time and space are subverted by delusions that incarcerate us in a prison of our own making. Finally, and perhaps most pointedly for our present context, Barfield clearly indicates in his extended essay “On the Consciousness Soul” (1928/29) that the particular genius of the English mind’s contribution to the age of the consciousness soul – whose challenges the 21st century should be taking us forward in an endeavour to fulfil to the best of our ability – lies in its inability “to write well and truly of death without suggesting the Resurrection”. This essay culminates in a moving description of “two divinely tall spiritual forms” engaged in a graceful dance. This description represents Barfield’s earnest impulse to build a bridge of mutual understanding and interaction between the cultures of England and Germany, with the object of enabling the spiritual impulse of Anthroposophy, as the crowning fulfilment of Central European culture, to inspire and awaken the full potential of the economic activity arising out of the distinctive genius of the Anglo-Saxon race.

I was recently privileged to experience Sergei Prokofieff leading a workshop day at Rudolf Steiner House, London, on the Foundation Stone Meditation in eurythmy. If this meditation, with its threefold call to the soul of man to awaken its connection to the divine-spiritual hierarchies and to forge a transition from the five (pentagram) of our present epoch to the six (hexagram) of the ensuing one, can represent for us the essence of what we would seek to nurture in these initial years of the 21st century, we can indeed find in Owen Barfield’s legacy the insight that we need to form an alternative vision for our cultural and social future, a vision which, moreover, addresses very explicitly the English-speaking peoples of, or affiliated to, the European West. Whereas what we may observe vaunting its hegemony in the cultural and political trends ostensibly dominating our modern world would appear to me to be wholly stuck in the narrowly egotistical spectator-consciousness which has already long achieved its very necessary culmination. If we were organising a cultural and social order to be a suitable vehicle for “final participation”, computers and Information Technology would have only a very limited place in it. As Stephen Talbott rightly attests in the title of his book, “the future does not compute”. Finally, it is necessary, I think, to ask what has become of the stately dance imagined by Barfield as taking place between the cultures of Central Europe and the Anglo-Saxon West. I personally believe that this image – as with so much that was conceived in the period between the two World Wars of the 20th century – continues to be a valid picture of the relationship between these cultures, and that since the Second World War America has been allowed – and now insists or assumes that it has the right – to subvert this dance into a sort of marionette show operated by the puppet-masters in Washington, who are in their turn propped up by Hollywood and Disneyland. It is in this context impossible to evade the urgent necessity at this conference for, as I put it in the Editorial Notes of the current (2003) issue of the Golden Blade, “the English-speaking world as a whole to make up its mind whether to work collaboratively with the rest of the world to foster a true economic brotherhood or to allow the American imperialist spirit – masquerading as Michaelic internationalism – to perpetuate a ‘sickness and death of culture’ where man is but the plaything of machines”.