I just want to say that this is one of the best and most intelligent responses to something I’ve seen in a comment. I hope you write for a living or as a major hobby.

“Science is indeed the faith, system, theory, methodology – choose your own term – that sustains liberal democratic secularism.”

I can see having different opinions about whether “science” sustains “liberal democratic secularism,” instead of the other way round. And I can see having different opinions about whether the good society is adequately described by the phrase “liberal democratic secularism.” But no one can honestly say theory (explanation,) methodology (way of finding explanations,) and system (set of explanatory principles and outline of their application,) are equivalent to faith. Taking things on faith is the opposite of accepting an explanation. Belief may follow examination of evidence, but it is not the explanation, the way the explanation is found or the way the explanation fits into a picture of the world. The words belief and faith overlap in meaning but that does not make beliefs founded on scientific evidence a faith.

“So the secularist may reply to the fundamentalist: ‘I do indeed have a faith but, unlike yours, it works and gets better all the time.'”

Religious believers usually tell us that their faith works fine, but the Godless world the secularists are making, doesn’t. The subtle suggestion that the enlightened readers agree that science works and religion doesn’t is all very flattering, but evades the issue of how one decides what we mean when we say that science works. The editorial’s assumption is that science does not work in the sense of discovering knowledge. The unpleasant corollary, that religion does, or at least might, is tacitly dismissed as an unfitting thought for the enlightened reader. Flattering as that may be to the reader, it is not an argument. Editorials especially should at least try to make an argument, instead of cozily admitting the reader to the inner circle of higher (but still common sensical) minds. How generalization from experience is to be equated with religious belief may be commonplace bigotry, but it still needs justification.

“At this point the secularist/scientist would be well advised to shut up, because almost anything he says to strengthen his position will topple him over into a fundamentalism of his own. For there is a scientific fundamentalism, too, and it is, in its way, just as dangerous as the religious version.”

How could anyone who reads this think said secularists and scientists have taken a position? They declare they think science works, the religious declare religion works. At this point, the two camps merely have different taste in results. How does it follow the secularists and scientists are not to be so rude as to criticize someone else’s taste? As for the assertion that there is a scientific fundamentalism, this directly contradicts the preceding articles in the series, that make a reasonable initial case that fundamentalism is a reaction to modernity (meaning such things as a secular society.) The notion that scientific fundamentalism is an emotional reaction to the threat of science, the faith of the liberal democratic secularists, has a certain droll humor. An editorial that so forthrightly ignores the magazine’s own evidence insults our intelligence.

“The fatal extrapolation to make from this position is that it must, therefore, potentially be omnicompetent and omniscient. Scientific fundamentalism is the belief that the world is accessible to and ultimately controllable by human reason.”

Rephrasing in positive terms, this guy is saying: The fact that science has previously worked can only be reasonably extrapolated as the conclusion that science is necessarily limited in scope and power. It is not at all clear how omnicompetence comes in, except that the author wants it to. All this is not only illogical but ignores the history of scientific progress. The next sentence on superficial reading seems to clarify the meaning of the first sentence. However, this sentence puffs up the notion that science has no limits in principle to the assurance that science says there are no limits. Not only is the separate question of the powers of science (technology) again somehow dragged in, but it too gets inflated into a claim that nature is “ultimately” controllable. This doesn’t really make any sense, not even grammatically, but it does make scientists seem megalomaniacal.

To put it another way, the author erects a straw man. In fact, as is well known, scientists have historically tended to limit themselves to the measurable, even to the point of positivism. The positivist tendency has had repeated embarrassments when it turned out that all sorts of things turned out after all to be measurable. Author Appleyard may want to associate himself with Auguste Comte in declaring something forever inaccessible to science, despite seeing sun and stars. Why, unless he has lived his entire life under a rock?

“This is a profoundly unscientific idea. It is neither provable nor refutable. Obviously it is a leap of faith to insist that human reason is capable of fully understanding the world. We seem to have some access to its workings, but it would be wildly premature to believe that the human brain is capable of comprehending all reality. The idea that it is up to such a task is an arguable hypothesis based on a very optimistic view of human rationality, but that is all.”

I suppose we could generously claim Mr. Appleyard is an unskilled writer who hasn’t mastered pronoun reference. Do “This” and “it” refer to the potentiallly unlimited achievements of science and technology or to the necessarily unlimited achievements of future science and technology? Eristically, it is convenient to muddle the pronouns, because the first is a reasonable position held by many while the second is an extreme claim held by…who again? The notion that modern science is “some access” to the world’s workings is a sly way of belittling science’s accomplishments. Scientists and people interested in science are already quite absorbed in problems due to science already being far beyond “the” human brain. There is already too much information for one person to absorb, too many problems inaccessible to commonsense intuition determinate but still unpredictable, situations still amenable only to statistical methods of analysis, on and on.

Further, the qualification that we merely “seem” to have some understanding is quite remarkable. Raising the bar for science’s success to include “all” reality suggests that Mr. Appleyard will not accept that science is really knowledge unless it can take the place of the Calvinist God, who predetermines everything.

Most importantly, the man is completely wrong when he claims that science bases its claims to knowledge on the validity of human reason. Even if one agreed that human reason is invalid, science is based on the notion that the universe is intelligible, potentially accessible to reason and manipulable, because it is a coherent whole. It is up to Mr. Appleyard and his fellow occultists to explain how a lawless universe keeps on being so regular. Whether he wants to admit it or not (or even realizes it or not,) Appleyard is as one with those cranks who mutter about quantum mechanics when they want to “explain” ESP or God or whatever. People may want to object to the claims there is a real universe and that it is lawful as metaphysical (ontological I think is the precise term,) and therefore not science. A philosopher expressed the notion first, ergo it is wrong. It should be obvious that argument is the genetic fallacy. The implication that imagination, speculation, has no role in scientific investigation is philistine

“We know – or should know – that all contemporary science will be modified or overthrown by the science of the future. This is not to take the postmodern view that science is just one interpretation of the world among many others. Rather, it is simply to say that the scientific truth of one era may later come to be seen as no more than a rough approximation.”

This is just militant ignorance. What fool really expects the Copernican theory to be overthrown? I suppose there are some vague, uncomprehended notions about Newton and Einstein’s theories of gravitation wandering the fog in this guy’s brain. At least, that’s the one the cranks usually fixate upon. Newton explicitly declared that he framed no hypotheses about how gravitation worked. The assumption of absolute time was noted in his own time as dubious. Thus, when Einstein does frame hypoetheses which expelled the notion of absolute time, he was not modifying or overthrowing Newton in the sense Appleyard implies. The happy confirmation that general relativity can be approximated by Newton’s theory was so happy precisely because Newton’s results could not be dismissed as an inadequate conception. Inasmuch as Newton/Einstein are the classic example of this supposed truth, isn’t it long past time taking this nonsense seriously?

“So there is a clear logical and equally clear practical and historical objection to what I have called scientific fundamentalism.”

If you’ve paid attention, this is simply not true. This asks the question, what is this editorial really about?

“That scientific fundamentalism is dangerous should be evident to any serious thinker looking back on the 20th century. Fascism was an anti-Enlightenment creed, but its most lethal expression in Nazism was founded on science. Hitler’s Mein Kampf leaned on the biology of Ernst Haeckel, which, at the time, was perfectly respectable. Communism, an ideology that sprang directly from the scientific Enlightenment, was based on Marx’s conviction that a science of history had been discovered. The slaughter of the Jews, Stalin’s massacres and Mao’s deliberate starving of millions were all executed by people persuaded they were justified by scientific insights.”

And so we find out: New Scientist is against the Enlightenment because it leads to Communism! Nazism wasn’t based on science, but on anti-Communism, traditional anti-Semitism, revanchism, Bismarckian statism, nationalism, and, oh yes, Satan via the paganism and occultism of the Thule Society. Whatever Hitler said in Mein Kampf, before I take it seriously, show me some reason to think he was being honest and show me some reason to think that people actually paid attention to the book, rather than their Lutheran pastor, who usually thought Hitler the best Catholic politician in Germany. Since Stalin’s massacres included the majority of the Communist Party leadership, all claims of continuity are false. The allegation that Mao deliberately starved millions seems to be original to Appleyard’s particular rightwing sect. He would have been much more prudent to claim Khrushchev deliberately disrupted the Chinese economy and starved millions. All this psychotic drivel is like the claims that pagan decadence led to the fall of the Roman Empire; that Katrina was God’s punishment on the sinners of New Orleans; that homosexuality causes earthquakes. (I originally wrote, that teaching evolution leads to Nazism. Then I remembered that Appleyard actually did claim this!) There is no point in speculating on the particular mental deficiencies or moral defects that cause someone to peddle this filth.

“Of course, it might be said this was bad science. But that is no more of an excuse than saying the Spanish Inquisition was bad religion.”

This is so wrong it exceeds my capacity to express amazement. Just like evolutionary psychology today, would-be scientific racism was demonstrably bad science. The scientists who blithely accepted the orginal scientific racism justified their acceptance by limiting their science to confirming cherished prejudices, rather than following scientific logic and evidence to the end. Just as Appleyard limits science so that it can’t pronounce on human affairs, they limited science to confirming their equally cherished prejudices about the inequality of races. Arbitrarily limiting science was no excuse for scientific racism, and it’s no excuse for Appleyard’s reactionary politics.

What Appleyard and his cothinkers refuse to accept is that there is no valid criticism of any religion on religious grounds: That’s why there is not one theological fact established after thousands of years. The supposed crimes of the Spanish Inquisition were justified by theology. Religion does not progress to a more complete understanding of the truth, because nothing in religion corresponds to anything in reality. You can only reject the religion, either for another religion like Protestantism or Islam, or for the generalization of experience that shows there is no room in the world for the supernatural. That is to say, science.

“Some scientists will dispute this, claiming that the values of open, objective enquiry, mutual criticism and protection of learning in the accumulated wisdom of science amount to an ethical system which, if applied to the world, would make it a better place, potentially protected from future horrors. This is not wrong, it is just fantastically utopian. Such values are not exclusive to science; they preceded it. Science sprang from philosophy, theology and even magic. The reason it became modern science at all was because of the direction these disciplines took in the course of the Renaissance. That these values worked so triumphantly in science is unarguable; that they have failed to work anywhere else is equally unarguable. The brief period of calm we currently enjoy in the west floats on the usual sea of war and genocide.”

Magic is a discipline? An interesting use of the word. If one can say that the vague notion of God the King decreeing the Laws of Nature, as an earthly king makes laws for his subjects qualifies as theology, then one has pretty much exhausted the contributions of theology to science. The theologicans who contributed to science’s conceptual foundations did so when confronting the challenges of secular philosophy. And those challenges were ultimately supported by the crudely material value of technology. Most scientists were believers to some degree or other (which is still true,) but it is precisely those smuggled in prejudices that motivated the worst abuses of science. Even worse for Appleyard and his ilk, some of the values that led to science’s success include materialism, including the reality of the world; its lawfulness; the impossibility of the supernatural; the potential intelligibility of nature. Appleyard omits these because he wishes to attack them. Why he neglects to note the role of technological progress and economic development is mystifying, though it generally fits with his obscurantist agenda. Lastly, genocide is not usual.

“The human world is very different from the one seen through the telescope or in the test tube. To say it would be nice if it wasn’t is to say nothing. To say it should be and we can make it so is downright sinister – fundamentalist, in fact. But that is precisely what many scientistic thinkers, dazzled by the success of science, have been saying. The human world is perverse, complex, violent and utterly indecipherable. There is no science of history and no technology that will save us from the future. Scientific fundamentalism deludes us with dreams of competence; it expects too much of this world, just as religious fundamentalism expects too much of the next.”

Cui bono? The idea that the social order just happens, and “we” can’t do anything about it, benefits some people greatly. On one level, this editorial is just another marketing ploy, saying New Scientist is free of any ideas that might offend religious people. On another, it contributes to the attack on enlightenment the other articles profess to oppose.

This takes us back to the official Romanticism we class as such — Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819), Shelley’s Alastor (1816), Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18), Scott’s Ivanhoe (1818), Coleridge & Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798). The last of these is a start-point if we treat Romanticism as a genre of English poetry, but I think the term is as useful, if not more so, as a label for a broader aesthetic, a discourse even. The aesthetic of Romanticism continues past that period and arguably begins before it.

So if we open our perspective, we start to see also Gothic & Proto-Romantic literature — Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) (in the preface to the second edition of which Walpole casts his work as a blend of old and new romance), Macpherson The Works of Ossian (1765), Joseph Warton “The Enthusiast”(1744). This takes us back to the Gothic Revival beginning in the 1740s. What all these works share is an aesthetic of passion versus reason, one which is born in and binds together the sublime, the grotesque and the idyllic. It’s an aesthetic of the sensational that’s wired into the romance form itself. It can even be abstracted to the architectural.

One can set this against a rival aesthetic, where realism, rationalism and classicism are bound together in what might be broadly termed an aesthetic of the intellectual: the Neoclassicism of David’s Oath of the Horatii (1785); Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy (est. 1768) (Burke said of Reynolds: “To be such a painter, he was a profound and penetrating Philosopher.” Reynolds said of the French aristocracy, fallen to the revolution: “They neglected Trade & substantial Manufacture.”) We can read Samuel Johnson’s characterisation of the grandiose folly of Charles XII of Sweden in “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749) — “Think Nothing gain’d, he cries, till nought remain, / On Moscow’s Walls till Gothic Standards fly, / And all be Mine beneath the Polar Sky.” — as a critique of that Romanticist aesthetic made before it was named as such.

I guess what I’m saying is that in strict terms, where Romanticism is taken as the movement(s), the genre(s), it’s fair to cast it as a response to the Enlightenment — Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) — but I’d argue that the conflict of discourses here is a Culture Wars going back to Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605-1615), a direct satirical response to Amadis de Gaul (1508) and other such chivalric romance. It wouldn’t really be correct to say that Cervantes is attacking Romanticism, because Romanticism doesn’t exist yet, but he’s attacking the aesthetic which very much *does* exist.

So the reference to the “grand lineage” is deliberately… ambiguous. One can trace that aesthetic back into and beyond the Renaissance via Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590-96), Mallory Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (1220s), Chrétien de Troyes’s various Arthurian tales (1170-90), all the way back to Geoffrey of Monmouth. But that action of tracing entails a characteristically Romantic fabrication of heritage. But then from Geoffrey on, those writers are themselves fabricating their heritage, turning the Early Medieval into a Western European “age of heroes” to replace the classical Matter of Rome. Which is where Tolkien explicitly renders himself Romantic, by the way, as I see it, in his stated purpose of creating a mythology for England — curiously dismissing the Matter of Britain which is exactly that.

I’m not sure if that answers the question, but maybe it sketches in the wider discourse I’m suggesting.

I’d also argue that the influence on “fantasy” that you ascribe to Tolkien would be more accurately ascribed to the perception of Tolkien (the paper copy of the blue flower, I suppose). Which is a pedantic distinction to make on one level, but I think does actually go to the core of what you’re talking about here. I don’t think Tolkien could be described as a Romantic (although, again, I suppose it depends on how you define Romanticism); but I think it’s a common misreading of his work to do so.

Quibbling aside, good essay!