The City Built to Music

Though more than half of mankind does not believe in the ultimates and basics, surely less than five percent of the Science Fiction People have any belief at all in what is real. Science Fiction is, for ninety-five percent of the people who indulge in it, a surrogate “True Belief,” in things from which the truth has been carefully removed. It is a “True Belief” in a false religion, one without dimension. — “True Belivers” (Prose Statement)

The city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built forever. — Tennyson, “Gareth and Lynette”

A thinking aloud post. Lafferty’s metaphysical position on the nature of truth can look tricky. On one hand, he is highly invested in exploring the nature-constructed social worlds and the notion of consensus reality. On the other hand, he is a philosophical realist who will say things like one’s ambient is largely subjective, which can seem to push towards near-total constructivism or even solipsism. Pile on Lafferty’s genius for creating paranoid, closed, gnostic universes and demiurgic manipulators of consensus and ambient, and things can get muddy.

One way through this is to distinguish between verum est ens and verum quia factum.

Verum est ens ("the true is being") is a classical realist position. From all that I can see, Lafferty agreed with this, the position one finds in Aristotle, and that was perfected by Aquinas. Truth is a transcendental property of being itself. It is convertible with ens, bonum, and unum. The intellect doesn't construct truth but discovers it by conforming to what is. This leads to a definition of knowledge as being adaequatio intellectus et rei. It is the adequation of mind to thing. The thing has intelligibility prior to and independent of the knower, because all beings participate in the divine intellect that created them. Two sources that Lafferty appreciated are great introductions to this: Chesterton’s St. Thomas Aquinas and Walter Farrell’s My Way of Life.

Verum quia factum ("the true because made") is Giambattista Vico's counter-principle, one that has had a major effect on modernity, from the Counter Enlightenment to Foucault and beyond. Vico was motivated by his disgust with Cartesian rationalism, and while Vico was a Catholic, his ideas had the considerable effect of being a battering ram against the whole classical tradition. This is not unprecedented. Nominalism, the epistemology behind much of the science of the seventeenth century that set the foundation for much that followed, and that was a battering ram used against Scholastic thought, was itself a product of Catholic scholastic thought. Vico’s idea can be put simply. He thought that we can only truly know what we ourselves have made — verum et factum convertuntur. God differs because God knows nature perfectly. He made it; humans can possess certain knowledge of their own constructions: history, civil institutions, and language. Natural philosophy gives rise to probable knowledge at best, because we didn't make the natural world. In modern terms, you will never know what it is like to be a bat. This relocates the ground of certitude from being to making, from contemplation to production.

The apparent problem is this: Lafferty spends enormous energy saying that what we call “reality” is a collective human construction, consensus reality, and he treats it as a character in his fiction. Now, I think he is incredibly equivocal on this point, which is why I distinguish between Prime and forms of consensus reality. It looks impossible to me to square this with the fact that Lafferty’s metaphysics of truth make him a Thomist who believes truth is a property of being itself, not something humans fabricate. Without something like this, a character like Ouden and the metaphysical plot in Past Master make little sense to me. On the other hand, Lafferty does not discuss being in Thomistic terms in his most Thomistic work, the novel Aurelia. He said, “it’s true that I’ve spent countless hours on [Aquinas]. But the beginning of it all for me was St. Augustine. I went to prep school to the Augustinian priests at Cascia Hall here in Tulsa . . . and they certainly formed my mind.” The Augustinian way of saying verum est ens is nam verum mihi videtur esse id quod est (“for the true seems to me to be that which is”). Augustine did not have a fully technical transcendental convertibility doctrine. On top of this, it can look as if Lafferty is simultaneously claiming that truth is made in Vico’s sense and given in Augustine’s or Aquinas’s sense.

This is why I think it’s important, when reading a Lafferty story, to ask whether the storyworld (understood as a thought experiment) is gnostic or not. Gnostic worlds in Lafferty bottom out in consensus reality and demiurges: verum quia factum. Non-gnostic storyworlds do not; they bottom out in verum est ens. On this reading, Lafferty is not claiming that truth itself is a human construction. Rather, he is claiming that our increasingly deformed experience of reality is a human construction, and a degraded one. This subjective “editing” of communal existence is something Lafferty treats as a fundamental human tendency:

I have a theory though that a person constantly edits and updates his memories, and that the updated memories are at least as valid as the original memories. As to the original facts, they have no being except in the cloud of memories that shows approximately where they once were.

Lafferty can be tangled when he says things like this. One could read this constructivistically, as the claim that reality itself is nothing but memory. I think that reading mistakes an epistemological claim about facts as available to humans for an ontological claim about being itself. Events can have being even when no one remembers them; what does change is their availability within the memory-cloud. "Valid" here means operative within that cloud, where adequacy can still be judged against what is. Here "no being" means "no continued presence for us except as remembered," not "no existence." In short, I think one has to read Lafferty's asides like this against his programmatic statements, ones like the True Believers one. It would be good to have a real discussion around this issue amongst people who read Lafferty.

He made an interesting point once relevant to consensus reality. It was about gun control. He said that regulating guns but not the media is like regulating small guns while leaving the really big guns unregulated. Consensus reality is a filter and something shared. Once the filter breaks, worlds must be remade. The ens world is always there, but the factum world is a problem of modernity because of the disintegration of consensus. He described the modern state of this collective construction as a form of intellectual pollution that threatens the very foundations of civilization, writing that

The next calamity, when it comes, will be, more than the previous ones, a combination of the natural, of the unnatural, and of the supernatural. I really believe that our Western Civilization . . . was a "City Built to Music," and that it is now very near the point where the music breaks. The pollution of the arts and the attitudes has been serious since the beginning of this century. The intellectual and expressionist pollution is more serious than the physical pollution in our world, though they are interlocked.

Lafferty's willingness to make arguments like this means that he uses verum quia factum diagnostically, not ontologically. It describes what humanity has done to itself in building worlds that are more or less adequate (this shows up in creating open storyworlds such as "The Man Who Lost His Magic") or in (being stuck inside) inadequate ones ("Snuffles"). The moral dimension of his work comes through most clearly through negations and satire. It is most apparent when he critiques the language of modern social movements, which he viewed as a dangerous departure from objective truth:

It [the modern movement] operates almost entirely by catchwords. But the Father of Catchwords is the Devil who is also the Father of Lies. Usually the two things are the same. Are you a dupe or a duper or a super-duper, Bill? May God have mercy on you and bring you back to the Truth!

Where some thinking about Lafferty gets over its skis is by thinking Lafferty is making a metaphysical claim when he talks about consensus reality when he's making a moral and epistemological one. It seems categorically confused to read Lafferty as saying we need to change the factum without acknowledging how factum, on Lafferty's view, is normatively ordered to ens. This is understandable because a huge amount of Lafferty's art is about dramatizing the epistemological claim as if it were a metaphysical one. Why does Lafferty do this? There are surely more reasons than two, but two stand out to me. 1. Verum quia factum is what most moderns believe deep down, or so he thinks; most moderns do not believe in truth as a transcendental. And 2. verum quia factum has become more of an experiential fact because of the air-conditioned nightmare and the pervasiveness of media. He wrote the old tools for contemplating being—such as deep literacy—were being discarded in favor of these more manipulative, transient forms of media:

It's too bad . . . [to] be so good a reader just when the Age of Literacy has come to an end. OH, it's all over with. It really was an interesting little quirk in human history, but it will sink without even an eddy. Everything from now on will be audio or video, but legible (reading-and-writing) stuff will be gone forever. The last person able to read English has already been born.

He may be hyperbolic, but there is truth in the claim when we consider how human cognition has been rewired as culture shifted from deep reading to ultra-processed reading. The last figures I saw showed leisure reading declining by roughly 40% over the past decade. Johnny Can’t Read has been said for decades, but something different is happening now. This is a problem of factum.