This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Arts Without Mystery, given by Dennis Donahoo, was originally broadcast in 1982.

The accusations that some modern critics have been making against society amount to this.

That it is a liar.

It goes out of its way to prevent us from knowing the truth.

But I would bring a different charge, that society is guilty of presumption,

it presumes to know what reality is, and that it can be fully represented in plain sense and ordinary language,

without admitting mystery. It assumes that metaphor is only a self- bewildering

perversion of a literal truth, and that symbolism is an illicit attempt to endow ordinary things

with a radiance, which then testifies to their meaning and their value. When I talk about society, I mean such a society as our own,

which claims to be free, liberal and pluralist.

The claim is, on the whole, justified,

especially if comparisons are made with societies

which don't even bother to present themselves as free.

But the ideology which makes our society what it is and keeps it in that state

has prescribed certain forms of life by representing them as norms.

It claims to know the point at which culture may be distinguished from barbarism,

and it enforces ways of speaking which make the point of distinction clear.

Deviation is permitted only if it's trivial, inept or otherwise innocuous.

The one risk our society isn't prepared to take is the risk of confessing that it doesn't know what

reality is, or what distinguishes fact from illusion. It isn't willing to

admit that, as the poet Wallace Stephen said, the squirming facts exceed the squamous mind.

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