Since the so-called Enlightenment, the West has been plagued by an obsession with abstractions, privileging them over realities, an epistemological sickness that has been broadly diagnosed as Rationalism. Thus, we privilege the so-called ‘hard sciences’ and mathematics, and we conflate the quantifiable with the true, but we stand perplexed by all that unveils meaning, like art, and culture, and the disciplines of understanding (rather than ‘facts’). Moreover, our preoccupation with abstractions has arisen symbiotically with the ‘turn to the subject’—that is, the turn to the self—in a diabolical concoction of syrupy solipsism, whose ingestion has wholly inebriated the Occident.
As I reflected in Part II, the self is perhaps the greatest illusion. Roger Scruton once remarked to me that, “if one is tempted to turn back to oneself, to encounter oneself, one immediately discovers that there’s actually nothing there.” When he said this, it filled me with horror. In fact, he meant that in the attempt to encounter oneself, one must epistemically isolate oneself, but the isolated self is an illusion, given that I am only I inasmuch as I am I-in-relation-to-You.
Ideas sundered from the reality from which they’re abstracted, especially those that orbit the chief fiction of the ‘authentic self,’ are at the very zenith of self-deception. Our declining civilisation is one that is in the grip of this illusory condition, which is accordingly expressed by every duped modern, from the teenager routinely taking ‘selfies’ to the trans-activist who declares his ‘true identity’ and consequently forces others to say things that both he and they know to be untrue. All such people run roughshod over reality in pursuit of the ‘authentic self’—and it’s obvious to any sane onlooker that, of course, there’s actually nothing there.
The perennial teaching of all wisdom traditions—one that was raised to the status of holiness by Christianity—is that self-actuation comes by self-forgetting and not by self-discovery. And the perfect overturning of this humanising truth by modernity is the ultimate proof both of our epoch’s falsity and malevolence. All this stupidity and chaos is derived from starting one’s intellectual quest from the wrong point of departure: with the illusion of the self rather than—like a child pointing and asking “what’s that?”—with the (much more interesting) world out there. The person, of course, who gave this error philosophical respectability was Descartes, by whom we continue to be cursed.
The reason why, so often in my writing, I advocate hiking, riding, hunting, and foraging, and why I encourage the learning of real things, from the history of nations to the names of trees, is because I think we’re all very unwell and such things are part of my cure. Now, I want to add archery to this list of treatments.
In Toxophilus, by the Tudor-age scholar Roger Ascham, the ‘Lover of the Bow,’ after whom the book is named, addresses his interlocutor with the following words:
He that would know perfectly the wind and weather, must put differences betwixt times. For diversity of time causeth diversity of weather, as in the whole year; spring time, summer, fall of leaf, and winter: likewise in one day, morning, noontide, afternoon, and eventide, both alter the weather, and change a man’s bow with the strength of man also. And to know that this is so, is enough for a shooter and artillery, and not to search the cause why it should be so: which belongeth to a learned man and philosophy. In considering the time of year, a wise archer will follow a good shipman.
Ascham is, in sum, saying that the archer is concerned with the real and the concrete, for it is reality that will affect his shooting, not his ideas about it. The archer, if he is to shoot well, must not mechanically repeat exactly the same motions over and over—as is so often supposed—but must adapt himself to the conditions in which he finds himself, all of which will change him as an archer. Knowing the causes of the effects that affect the archer is the domain of philosophy, as Toxophilus says, but all (good) philosophy begins with experience of reality, and such experience is the fundamental prerequisite for good archery.
To put this analysis of archery into the language of the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, traditional archery requires intense right-brain activity. Modern archery—with its use of weights and stabilisers, string-walking measurements and sights, etc.—depends on two things: accurate calculations and repetition of the same technique. This entails that perfection in archery is contingent on the degree to which the archer himself can approximate something mechanical. Modern archery, then, is rather a left-brain affair. Traditional archery, on the other hand, depends on sensitivity to conditions, instinct and intuition, and feeling the shot. In traditional archery, the calculating brain that reduces reality to computations and abstract categories must become the mere servant—the ‘emissary’—of our ability to touch the interconnectedness of things.
McGilchrist has speculated that we may be undergoing civilisational decline, since our societies are characterised by the typical left-brain dominance traceable—according to his theory—in the collapse of all civilisations. He was once asked what our societies would look like if they were characterised by right-brain dominance, to which he replied, “beautifully balanced.” And this, it seems to me is what the archer is seeking, or should be seeking, for himself: to be, interiorly, beautifully balanced. He practices archery because he wants to habituate that condition and thereby make it a second nature. Indeed, such an interior state is arguably a precondition for wisdom.
What is perhaps most striking about traditional archery is that it took full advantage of technological developments whilst remaining exactly the same: the bow has changed extensively, but the nature of traditional archery as a sport and a martial art has not. The original English longbow, for example, was simply a single piece of yew wood, cut from the tree where the heartwood (the central part) and the sapwood (the outer part) meet. The shaft was then seasoned for a few years before being slowly worked into shape. The final bow stave had a D cross-section, making it extremely springy. Whatever people mean by a longbow today, however, they don’t mean that.
From the 18th century onwards, longbows were made from other woods, often imported from America. Bowyers used powerful adhesives to laminate various woods together, adopting techniques that had been used in the Middle and Far East for over a millennium, making the longbow more consistent, perform better, and increasing its ‘lifespan’ by a few years. Georgians and Victorians added leather or felt handles to their longbows, and beautiful deer-horn knocks at the ends of the limbs.
In 1930s America, an experiment was carried out to reveal the best cross-sectional shape for a bow limb. This experiment was done, in fact, to explain why the English longbow’s D-section was superior to all other bow designs. Instead, it revealed that the best cross-section was that of a flat limb. This research finding was then applied to the English longbow. The result was a far more efficient and stable longbow with flat limbs, which could be made from more common woods, with a much longer life (about eighty years, rather than the six years of a modern English longbow), especially if made with added fiberglass. This bow, called the American longbow, has been further developed since, with additions like a shooting shelf (reducing the degree to which the arrow must flex around the bow) and ‘reflex-deflex’ limbs (called a ‘hybrid longbow’), making these bows considerably faster.
In each age, the latest technology has been fully embraced to make longbows of better quality, as well as creatively to develop other traditional bows such as field-recurves and Hungarian and Ottoman horse bows. Thus, traditional archery is not an antiquarian pursuit, but disturbingly modern. Nonetheless, the art of traditional archery has remained unchanged. It is still as simple as a man with a stick and string, shooting wooden arrows. To do this successfully, he must do nothing different to that of the medieval longbowman hunting boar with a stave of yew wood: clear his mind, feel the shot, point, and loose the arrow.
Archery of this kind returns one to reality—to the concrete, the real, the conditioned. From the spectral web of unanchored ideas one tumbles, landing on a range with the breeze on one’s face, bow in hand, staring at a target—missing which might mean a broken arrow. Habituating flights back to reality is an absolute imperative for those who are intellectually inclined. In a breath-taking passage, Roger Scruton reflects on this imperative, and his fulfilment of it through foxhunting:
Abstract thinkers must renew their awareness of the really real. They should hunger for the sight and smell and touch of things, and nothing brings the sensuous reality into focus more clearly than hunting. This ‘Being’ that Heidegger refers to, as though it were some glutinous stuff from which the little shoots of ‘Dasein’ (you and me) sprout up like curious protozoa—what has it to do with the spring of turf, the ooze of river bank and the muddy grind of gravel in which this sure believing hoof is planted? The ground is not one but many—hard and soft, sharp and yielding, dry and wet, grass-canopied or raw beneath the scattered rout of last year’s vegetation. Pad, hoof and foot follow in turn through this multifaceted terrain, grasping it as an infant grasps its mother, knowing the taste and touch of every part. And aloft among these flying animals you re-enter the state which our ancestors renounced for comfort’s sake.
It is necessary for a philosopher to deliberately seek out means to free himself from his preoccupation with abstractions. What is courageous, however, is the choice to return to his philosophising specifically in order to privilege realities over abstractions in his thinking (and an exemplary philosopher in this regard was indeed Scruton). I use the word ‘courageous,’ because in so doing the philosopher declares that his ideas are not reality (as so many philosophers purport of their schemas), but a mere means to grasp better the reality to which we are all privy. And if his ideas fail to illumine what we all already know (but perhaps didn’t know that we knew), then such a declaration is an invitation to discard his ideas as vicious snares. Such an approach entails that he, a philosopher, belongs to no special class of ‘perfecti’ or intelligentsia, but is a man stumbling in the dark just like everyone else—he just has slightly sharper eyes.
Such privileging of things over concepts by a philosopher implies that if you travel with him to the far side of his philosophy, there you will find nothing other than the world apprehended by the man on the street, only better lit by the lamps of thorough thought. Indeed, if you do not find yourself next to the man on the street, then you have fallen into the hands not of a philosopher at all, but of one of the many evil sorcerers who fill modern humanities departments. And given that evil is not creative, but a privation, you will not only have lost your hold on reality but found yourself trapped in the grey, boring limbo of an ‘intellectual system.’ And that, I submit, is an interior condition that is perfectly antithetical to wisdom.
Archery is an activity practiced for its own sake. Nonetheless, archery is also, I have been at pains to convey, a means—far from the only means, but one that is special to me—to recapture reality as well as the wonder that is the appropriate response to reality. After all, the world we inhabit is an icon of God, testifying both to His beauty and His goodness, as St. Thomas Aquinas remarks in the Summa Contra Gentiles:
God, through his providence, orders all things to the divine goodness, as to an end; not, of course, in such a way that something adds to his goodness by means of things that are made, but, rather, that the likeness of his goodness, as much as possible, is impressed on things. However, since every created substance must fall short of the perfection of divine goodness, in order that the likeness of divine goodness might be more perfectly communicated to things, it was necessary for there to be a diversity of things, so that what could not be perfectly represented by one thing might be, in more perfect fashion, represented by a variety of things in different ways.
The glorious world around us is itself a communication of God, and this is an elementary truth that is impossible to acknowledge for those locked up in the prison of the self. The mindless adolescent engaged in habitual selfie-taking—blind to how boring is the idiot on his iPhone at whom he pouts, who in turn pouts back at him, whose vacuity no number of filters will mask—simply cannot see the glorious world around him. (The irony of such self-referential writing making these points about the self has not escaped me, but that may just be this particular archer’s paradox.)
An obligation looms over us throughout our lives, namely to hit the target by hitting the self, and only then can we begin to see reality as it is, beginning with ourselves. I have suggested that the practice of archery may be one way to do this. Roger Ascham saw the art of the bow as an essential accompaniment to his intellectual endeavours in the service of our western civilisation. As Samuel Johnson remarks in his biography of Ascham:
[He] sufficiently vindicated archery as an innocent, salutary, useful, and liberal diversion; and if his precepts are of no great use, he has only shown, by one example among many, how little the hand can derive from the mind, how little intelligence can conduce to dexterity. In every art, practice is much… precept can, at most, but warn against error; it can never bestow excellence.
By a life spent on the range, with longbow in hand, in the pursuit of such excellence, at the end of his life Ascham was able to hit the target. He hit the target in the deeper sense, by identifying the only thing that mattered, and he thusly expressed his noble longing: “I want to die and be with Christ.” With these words, Ascham departed this world. And since the ancients whom Ascham so carefully studied believed that you could judge a man’s life by the way he died, we can assume that his many accumulated hours of loosing arrows were pregnant with his deepest longings, namely for union with the Saviour. This, I judge, is wisdom.
