If you want to change driving from the right to the left you do it at once and completely.

If the decision has "in principle" been made to rescue Greece from bankruptcy, it had better be announced openly and frankly with the full complement of financial details so that the markets know exactly who is going to put their hand in their pockets and how. Unfortunately the statement in Brussels this afternoon seems to have fallen short of that. It was a mere declaration of political and moral support, but these days this will not buy you a cup of tea. Disappointing was also the claim that Greece itself had not asked for the disbursement of any funds and that her partners were confident that the government's austerity measures were going to work. This is just pusillanimous evasion and reinforces the image of the EU as a three-headed monster (Rompuy, Barroso, Zapatero) that cannot put one foot in front of the other.

The facts are stark and they had better be faced unequivocally: the country is insolvent and to wait till April for her next attempt to borrow on the open market will simply multiply the costs of the eventual rescue which is unavoidable anyway. Merkel is, understandably, huffing and puffing, but in this manner she is shooting herself in the foot. This is illogical for the additional reason that, as the wires report, behind the scenes the concrete details of the operation have indeed been roughly worked out. She is protesting too much in defense of a notional virginity which has been forfeited long ago. She'd better come out of the closet, and brush aside the rivalry with her liberal partners in government. That Germany will pay a significant price for the action that she will be forced to take is unavoidable. The Greek insanity will contaminate the sound economic core of the union without doubt. Germany's own spreads, ironically, will rise after the rescue: in other words the difference in interest rates between the German Bunds as they trade today and as they will trade after the deal is sealed and revealed. But if you do it now the contamination will be checked at a low level.

So one might hope that even by the end of today the European meeting will come out with something more tangible than the vague solidarity of a few hours ago. Nobody believes, and especially those living within the country, that the current political establishment here will muster the will and the competence to do anything significant in terms of economic restructuring and budgetary restraint. The gesturing and the outbursts against the speculators, that we heard from the prime minister again this afternoon, is a transparent smokescreen.

There is certainly a huge question of moral hazard -the Germans are right on that. The profligate Greek ruling classes, having wasted and stolen the European billions heaped upon them since 1981, have resorted to a desperate blackmail: either you bail us out, or we all go down. This is infuriating and unacceptable from the point of view of the German working class who has had to shoulder the immense burden of unification. But that could be and was swallowed on obvious historical grounds. What sticks to the gullet is subsidizing the obscene lifestyle of some Mediterranean "beach bums", as a writer in the London Times expresses it today. Not all Greeks are bums of this sort, obviously. But the top segment of this dysfunctional society, together with their ruthless and worthless hangers on, are exactly that, and it is indeed a shame that as T. Michas wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday they will get away with their serial criminality with a mild slap on the wrist. And yet the alternative would be a much greater catastrophe, namely the derailing of the European project. If the moral deficit of the present situation is not incurred, the prospective moral disaster of returning to a Europe of narrow national egoisms will be immeasurably greater.

But there is still something that can be done to mitigate the bending of the rules involved in the Greek rescue, namely stringent and inescapable conditions of audit and control on the actions of the Greek ruling elites that will make sure that there is no relapse to past prodigality. It would be a moral calamity immensely greater than succumbing to the present blackmail if, after a period of relief following the bailout, eyes were turned away and the authors of this shambles were allowed stealthily to return to their execrable habits and practices.

For this to be avoided, of course, the country will have to cede sovereignty in the economic field -and indeed this is the direction that things seem to be taking. This will be a boon for the average working Greek who has been bled dry under the pretext of a "social state" managed by ruthless vultures. To tie the hands of the local kleptocrats would eventually result in a much more humane, equal and just social setup -despite the shame of being forced from the outside to do the right thing that you cannot bring yourself to doing.

The necessity of eradicating the depravity of the local ruling elites for the sake of the idea of a strong united Europe will also force upon the rather flaccid and prevaricating bureaucrats in Brussels the choice of moving in the direction of political as well as economic integration -yes, let's not be coy about it, in the direction of a federal European state.

This cannot be avoided. The present half-way house of a common currency and twenty different economic and national policies cannot be continued, what with the disastrous charade of the Giscard constitutional project, the infuriating antics of the Polish twins and the latest stranglehold exerted by the Czech president on the Lisbon charter. This is a Marx brothers night at the opera situation. The Greek political personnel, incidentally, cannot complain if such a course robs them of wiggle room for their evil shenanigans for, rhetorically, they have been -believe it or not- the most vocal proponents of a united states of Europe!!! Now, under conditions that their very stupidity has brought about, they will be forced to put their money where their mouth was.

So, this is a great opportunity for Greece and for Europe to clear the Augean stables and emerge purified from the present debacle. Greece, as has been said, has only been the canary in the mine (a predicament certainly that it brought on itself). The fortunate thing is that the Greek people themselves have finally realized the gravity of their situation, acquiring consciousness of the necessity to abandon the suicidal mentalities and practices that their leaders coaxed them in in order to enrich themselves at the people's expense.

Huge majorities support the austerity measures and condemn the Neanderthal "militancy" of the blockading farmers and the civil service unions. The latter in particular have no moral standing in the eyes of the underprivileged masses, who know them for the fat-ass drones that they are. The strikes yesterday were a dud - as I can personally attest. They made for striking pictures in the international press, but they were a minority affair. That the communist party can bring ten thousand people out beating drums and paralyzing traffic downtown is no big deal. Besides, it is actually very fortunate that the unavoidable dissatisfaction with the drastic belt-tightening necessary is channeled through the communist party, rather than the looting and burning crowd of hooligans calling themselves "anarchists". The CP, despite its ideological blindness, is a conservative party, thoroughly integrated into the system, subsidized by the government budget and profiting from an extensive network of private businesses. Its adherents, moreover, are decent working people. Their protests, though misguided, are a normal sign of democratic life.

So, if one takes a long term view there is actually reason for subdued optimism. We may not live to see a much better day, but our children probably will -if everybody somehow avoids screwing up in the present juncture.

This architectural and ecological brutality spread like pestilence all over the land, and within a few years of the demolition of historical Athens the countryside as well as transformed into an heap of grotesque cement cubicles with rusting iron rods sticking out of them. Extraordinarily beautiful and culturally seminal islands like Crete and Rhodes were pulverized into amorphous heaps of concrete that could only have issued from the rotting brains of anthropoid creeps. The Cyclades were provisionally spared the worse of this barbarian rampage, although islands like Myconos, once famed for its untouched naturalness, have by now become the domain of the vulgar kleptocrats of the Athenian ruling class whose obscene villas and swimming pools paved over the hinterland. It will not be long before the remaining enclaves of natural and architectural beauty are drastically degraded.

And this has transpired, as I have noted before, in a country that trumpets the fact that it is the only one to include a clause protecting the environment in its constitution. This ties in, of course, with that other predicament previously mentioned, namely the total perversion of language in this place, where concepts have been gutted of their proper meaning and you can be certain that when used they signify the opposite of what they pretend to denote.The sanctimoniousness of official utterances is the surest sign of the actual suppression of the ethical norms that they nominally uphold. Unabashed hypocrisy is the order of the day, with those taking the lead in the subversion of all constitutional, ethical and even plain humane propriety being the most vocal in the fake defense of the values that they have done the most to destroy.

One hears ad nauseam, from official lips as well as from journalistic talking heads, the slogan that "this is the most beautiful country in the world". This would be a silly and ludicrous statement even if Greece were still unspoiled, for the beauty of all places is unique and no hierarchy of degrees can be placed on it. But under present conditions of widespread architectural blight and environmental degeneracy it amounts to more than a lie: it is an offensive violation of common decency.

So what is the cause of all this? The facts as have been laid out are true beyond the slightest doubt, but the explanation of them is a highly complex affair, with many subsidiary processes feeding into the general dynamic that brought about the horrid state of affairs we described. But, I believe that the chief reason for this retrogression into cultural aphasia is the gradual dismantlement of education, the demolition of the social edifice of Paideia both in its institutional as well as its axiological dimension. The "old education", to use that well-placed Aristophanic rubric, i.e. the state sponsored indoctrination with national values that derived from the nineteenth century and endured until the 1960's, was autocratic and filled with stereotypes. It was marred by huge gaps and deliberate omissions. But it was, nevertheless, rule-based and resulted in a functional knowledge both of the language and of the basics of history, however slanted and tainted. Underneath the official cant there was still sufficient factual awareness that enabled some functional social behavior -as well as critical thinking that challenged the ruling assumptions and official doctrines. Above all it was based upon a sound recognition of the intrinsic value of knowledge and a deep-going respect for those who had dedicated themselves to its cultivation. The students looked up to teachers that could boast of intellectual and ethical substance.

This official education was of course nationalist in a narrow and even hysterical sense, but it was not anti-European. In fact its chief claim was that European culture rested upon a Hellenic foundation and that a Hellenic-minded and Hellenic-educated person could feel at home in the mental habits and spiritual structures of Europe.

Now, these attitudes were essentially shared by those who adopted a critical stance vis-a-vis the official mode as it became progressively petrified through the years. The rebellious youth shared a commitment to intellectual cultivation and a commitment to Europe, despite the fact that they drew upon diverse strands of the European heritage in order to buttress a new and progressive version of the modern Greek identity. This was eminently true of the famed literary generation of the thirties; but it also applied to the Marxists who had derived their ideological property from Germany and France and who quite properly understood the "revolution" within a pan-European context. There was no blanket anti-westernism current in the forward-looking segments of the intellectual class. This type of mentality characterized, rather, the extremist fringes of the "national" camp -and even they were under the influence of western versions of anti-westernism, such as that of Barres for instance.

There was certainly general awareness of that "eastern drop in the Greek blood" (something after all present since immemorial antiquity), and this was now materially symbolized by the presence of the refugees. But the progressive political and economic elites of the refugees themselves were decisively oriented towards the west, something that was not canceled by the orientalism of the social habits of the refugee masses. Venizelos, the political god of the refugees, was the most determined westernizer and Seferis who introduced Anglo-Saxon modernism into literature was also of refugee stock and even of pronounced populist sensibilities (viz. his attitude towards Makrygiannis and Theophilos for instance). The drama of Greek political and spiritual life was thus enacted on a European stage, or on what understood itself as an extension thereof.

It was this fundamental orientation, this openness to a universal cultural becoming, which came to an abrupt end in the seventies and eighties of the previous century. Traditional education was dismantled, but its sound ingredients (generally acknowledged by left and right, as we said) were also thrown out. Knowledge and culture were now turned into a mere instrument to promote political ends that became all the more venal as time passed. This "closing of the mind" resulted into an utter confusion of notions and beliefs whose chief purveyors now were various nonentities and charlatans that flooded into and took control of the educational system under the pretext of "democratization" and whose only credentials were their politics, their determination to serve the party system and to benefit from this service.

The architectural and ecological wasteland now on view is the direct outcome of this decomposition of the collective consciousness of the country.

In an interview for a local architecture and design journal the ambassador of France in Athens (the darling of local feather-headed socialites and self-adoring literati with roots in the turgid depths of modern French word-mongering trying to cajole some kind of French state distinction or benefit from him) declared his admiration for the city of Athens as a vibrant hub of culture and entertainment. We will let that pass. He went on to acknowledge the ugliness of the place, which he immediately excused, however, by saying that when the refugees poured in from Asia Minor in the twenties of the previous century architectural aesthetics and urban planning were the last thing on their mind. What they needed, he said, was a just a roof over their heads procured in whatever manner possible and stitched together from whatever materials were at hand.

This is precisely wrong. This is an example of the well-meaning flattery by many foreigners of the thoughtless pretensions of the local elites, which under a hypocritical veil of "social" consciousness, do nothing but sustain long standing nationalist myths about this society.

The refugees had absolutely nothing to do with the present awfulness of a city which back in the thirties, for instance, was a charming example of European elegance and charm, what with wide boulevards, neoclassical edifices and pleasant tree-filled squares appointed with academic but expressive classically referenced statuary. The refugees did indeed build hastily the ramshackle banlieues that girded the historical center of the city, but there was nothing ugly or inhuman about their construction. Actually, their habitations exuded the spontaneous folk spirit of the peasant communities they hailed from, and it would have been a great cultural and historical boon if they had been preserved. They were filled with the spirit of human solidarity and pulsated with the elemental desire of human beings to fulfill the deep and sacred needs that define their humanity. These communities were suffused with the age-old wisdom of people who live in tune with the eternal rhythms of nature, and their peasant humbleness constituted an appropriate complement to the official neoclassical city, thus affirming in splendid visual terms the vaunted cultural continuity of the Hellenic ages which official education had reduced to dry-as-dust and hence repulsive rhetorical formulas.

Ever since, both the stately face of Athenian classicism as well as the organic, earth-rooted harmony of the refugee districts have been wantonly demolished. And at a time when all the war-ravaged cities of Europe east and west were exerting themselves to reconstitute their historical image and recover the brutally assailed past of their civilization, one of the most important historical cities of the continent was in fact systematically destroying all visible testimonies of its cultural legacy. This amounts to a despicable act of cultural vandalism, one of the most egregious ones to grace the annals of human folly.

So what brought about the present abomination, the utter ruin of all character and the reduction of this monstrous urban area to a concrete and iron cage for beings who have shed all inner feeling, tenderness, grace and historical awareness?

Joseph Stiglitz was right the other day to complain during his stay in Athens that there are some people in Brussels who are "deficit fetishists" and that they get pleasure from talking tough to Euro-zone economic miscreants. He was also right that during times of crisis it is by deficit spending that you stimulate the economy -along the lines of Obama's stimulus plan of last year.

But on both of these points he was right on the purely theoretical level -they, unfortunately, are not considerations that can be applied to the current Greek situation. Stiglitz's views on Greece seem to be refracted through the opinions of his close friend, the current prime minister. The latter seems to be of the opinion that the current dust up is due to speculators trying through rumors to take down "strong governments" (this is how he expressed it at Davos). Anybody who would count Greece among strong states unfairly facing the malign designs of evil forces is of course either lying or dreaming. But this is a notion that goes down well with the klepto-socialist diehards of the prime minister's own party, who are chiefly responsible for the present shambles not only of the economy but of the entire institutional and ethical framework of this society. It also stokes the nationalist resentment of the average man in the street who -again under decades of ideological manipulation by "leftist" pilferers and robbers of the public coffers- is more than eager blame to the present collapse on anyone but the misdeeds of the local political class. There is always good old imperialism to conjure up when anything goes awry, for this removes the responsibility to look ourselves in the mirror and to recognize the deformity of our own outlook.

With respect to Stiglitz, the Greek deficit was not run up during times of crisis. It was the result of sustained bad management for the last three decades at least, whose purpose was to provide a scandalously privileged existence to a thin layer of well connected bribers, blackmailers and outright thieves by a governing class who also in turn grew disgustingly fat in the process. Public moneys were never primarily expended for infrastructure projects but siphoned off to the private accounts of party bosses and also the parasitic consumption of their political clientele. As a result of this type of deficit spending, the streets of the country became filled with Porsches and all the latest in luxury cars and SUV's at the same time as the health service and education simply rotted away, and the portion of the people, i.e. the great majority, who had no access to outrageous public sector privileges secured by ruthless unions in cahoots with the ruling parties were strangled by taxation.

The public sector that, thus, became a bloated whale not only did not contribute anything to economic growth, but has been the most decisive factor in preventing healthy economic investment and competition through all kinds of absurd regulations whose effect was to cut the country off from the broad European environment in which it operated. The ever expanding coils of bureaucracy (that put to shame the achievements in this field of Czarist Russia for instance) was their lethal weapon in sucking the blood out of the real economy and preventing structural reform. To these people, still in effective control of the state apparatus, Stiglitz's statements are music to the ears. Not because they know or care anything about Stiglitz and his theories (he is, after all, also a cunning imperialist and a Jew to boot), but because he provides them with cover for carrying on their anti-social rampage under the guise of the "welfare state" -a state, that is, whose only purpose is, as far as they are concerned, to fill their insatiable bellies at the expense of everyone else.

In his severe article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung a few days ago condemning in categorical terms any attempt of bailing out Greece as an effective dismantling of the Euro, Othmar Issing remarks that no country has benefited more from the common European currency while at the same time systematically violating all obligations and collective goals flowing from its membership.

On this he is absolutely right. The structural funds flowing in since 1981 were used for parasitic consumption, while at the same time a warped ideology of national exceptionalism took hold which gradually distanced the country from the core of values and cultural attitudes defining the European project. An egregious "closing of the Greek mind" took effect, whereby the more the material standard of living rose towards the EU average (at the expense primarily of the German taxpayer) the more rabid the anti-European and anti-Western orientation of the collective mind became. Half of the population, practically, declared themselves journalists, professors, actors, intellectuals of various itinerant sorts, all of them demanding to be supported by government funds (drawn, again, from Europe's purse and from taxing the rest of the population to death) and seeing as their lives' purpose to denigrate and to vilify the very project of integration that made their bloated and conceited existence possible.

Since the beginning of the 80's Greek governments constantly declared that they were going to Brussels to "do battle" in favor of "the people". This meant that they were going to fight to secure the continuing flow of European monies that fed the increasingly venal political class and their business cronies and arse-licking hangers on. The notorious cotton farmers of Thessaly, in particular, were gorged on subsidies from the CAP. Emboldened by the tacit and open support of the ministry of agriculture they filled their crates with stones under a thin layer of the white stuff in order to suck ever growing amounts of Brussels lucre. The result was the execrable quality of their cotton at artificially high prices, the ruining of the livelihood of third world cotton producers, and finally the destruction of the Thessaly plain itself under unconscionable use of water, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, an environmental calamity of the magnitude of lake Baikal.

A byproduct of this was the effective demolition of traditional architecture in the country under a spate of phony development. Greece (which boasts of being the only country with an article in its constitution protecting the environment!) was in a couple of decades transformed into an immense eye-sore of ugly concrete, a heap of formless and soulless structures stifling the mind and even robbing you of breath. What remained of the countryside was put to the torch.

All this, mind you, occurred under the label of socialism and "anti-imperialist" militancy. And by the nineties of the previous century everybody in the country, all political formations were socialists or communists of some sort -even the extreme right declaring that in social terms they were red collectivists.

This lurch to utter depravity was given its final push by the Yugoslav conflagration. Suddenly, the journalistic and political establishment, that bunch of vulgar and corrupt ignoramuses believing in nothing else but their bellies (κακ'ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἷον: never were the words of Homer better applied) discovered Orthodoxy!!!! Our "brothers in faith" were under attack by the perfidious and scheming West. A wave of hysterical racism drowned the country. Suddenly we were back in the days of the Balkan wars, the "Macedonian struggle" commenced all over again. Even the communist party itself, shrugging away the implosion of the "fraternal regimes" in eastern Europe, took up the nationalist banner openly and unashamedly. Within the past year they have combined this with a full-blown return to Stalin.

Thus, the economic dimensions that Issing underlined are only one side of this tragic and suicidal story. The more dependent for its economic well-being the country became upon European largesse, the more rabid its hatred for Europe and the west in general, the greater the distance between its collective consciousness (molded by comic and rotten opinion makers) and the fundaments of the European mind. In fact, as education itself decomposed under a spate of "reforms" introducing ideological and party-political manipulation as the guiding principle at all levels, elementary knowledge of history, including Greek history, disappeared. Historical awareness degenerated into a cacophony of primitivist screams pouring from the air-waves, public property hijacked now with the blessing of the governments by various charlatans, bigots and dunces who had appointed themselves leaders of the nation -becoming filthy rich in the process.

In this maelstrom even the very language itself became deformed and warped in order to serve the interests of these vandal hordes, mutating into what can only be described as a spiritless patois devoid of all historical depth and aesthetic integrity. As a life-long educator, it pains me to attest that the younger generations have well-nigh forfeited not just the capacity to formulate a coherent thought, but even the ability to put together words on a line, or to voice a comprehensible utterance. It is no accident that Greece ranks last in all international surveys (PISA etc.) on education -and sinking fast. It is very traumatic to say it, but this descent into a Neanderthal-like anti-Europeanism has ipso facto been a de-Hellenization of the country. I believe it is fair to say (and again it pains me immensely to pronounce this) that there is no other place where there is less knowledge of and less love for the basics of Hellenic culture. This is a society that has deliberately severed all its vital links with the historical past that flourished in its geographic area, including the recent one. It is a broken branch on the ground. Oh, but of course: invocations of "our glorious ancestors" are rampant. But all this is a meaningless and tasteless rhetorical flourish, just as fake as the 2004 "return of the Games to their homeland" and the drug-soaked triumphs of the local athletes in them.

The more I think about it, what Taylor seems to be aiming at is that in a crushingly technological age such as ours religious feeling should not be ruled out of court. In this he is of course absolutely right. But I believe that the best way to go about it is not to stress the alleged commonalities between science and religion, but quite the contrary to bring out as sharply as possible the distinct character and function in life of the two endeavors. They ought to stand side by side and be affirmed as worthy exercises of the active self (for whomever chooses to engage in them) precisely because they fulfill fundamentally different needs, precisely because they cannot be reduced one to the other or be brought under some common denominator. The best argument in favor of the indispensability of religion vis-a-vis the stupendous strides of the scientific spirit in the past few centuries is that religiosity was not extirpated in a modern environment suffused with this-worldly rationality. Modernity was not desacralized or disenchanted in quite the thorough way that M. Weber diagnosed or feared. On the contrary, in the interstices between the regions of life pervaded and guided by means-to-ends rationality the poetic spirit still managed to thrive in new intense ways. And of course the notion of God is the supreme creation of the poetic imagination. In this region of Wittgensteinian silence which is the flip-side of "all that is the case" logicism religion and art can find all the oxygen they require to thrive.

Charles Taylor is one of today's great philosophers, and one that I am personally attached to ever since the appearance in 1975 of his great work on Hegel. My doctoral dissertation was based on the insights of that seminal interpretation, which I still think to be the most plausible account of the the thought of the German metaphysical speculator. The theistic background of Taylor's philosophy is also well-known, and to me especially suggestive and challenging.

Be that as it may, the views that he expressed a few days ago at a Cambridge philosophical conference concerning the relation between science and religion (if these views were reported correctly, for I have not yet read the actual transcript of the proceedings) do call for some comment. He was trying it seems to draw essential parallels between the two fields by pointing to the decisive function of "intuition" in both. And he brought in Kuhn's account of science in terms of "paradigm shifts" in order to argue that ultimately science itself is a matter of "faith".

With all due respect, this is just far fetched. "Intuition" in science, i.e. the sudden conception of a possible hypothesis organizing a given set of data, belongs to the context of discovery and not to the context of explanation. The hypotheses "conjured" in this way presuppose to begin with a thorough familiarity with current theory which has been antecedently tested by experiment and assented to by the scientists working in the field, and secondly it is itself meant to be subjected to these experimental tests so that it might appeal to the scientific community. The mere conjuring by itself does not provide it with any theoretic warrant whatsoever. From this point of view, science is by definition intersubjective (if one is loath to use the currently maligned term objective), which means a public enterprise that aims to establish an encompassing "paradigm" in which all current research takes place. Normal science is unitary in this way, and the anomalies that turn up and which may eventually lead to the overthrow of the theoretical consensus are the results of ordinary experimental methods. Besides there is a huge question whether the "overthrowing" we are talking about involves the complete disabling of the antecedent theoretical framework and its replacement by a new one "incommensurable" with it, or whether the superseded science is somehow incorporated into the new and more far-reaching explanatory perspective. If one considers as paradigmatic the transition from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican cosmological vision, then she/he would be inclined towards the first interpretation. If on the contrary, the supersession of Newtonianism by Einsteinian relativity is privileged, the latter view on paradigm shift might be preferred.

The additional point to be stressed in connection with Kuhn is that he always strenuously insisted that his philosophy of science was not relativistic, because science itself was not relativistic. He may have not been able to argue this with complete success (for whatever it's worth, I personally believe that relativism does creep into his account). But the important consideration is that he did not want to be, or to be considered to be, a relativist. This aversion to relativism is to my mind an essential characteristic of the scientific temper (despite recent well-known attempts to break out of this commitment) -and precisely the point on which the most stringent and uncompromising separation between science and religion must be based.

For religion is, and we must insist that it is relativistic, in its very concept and definition. There is and can never be any unitary framework of religious faith obligatory upon all practitioners in this particular field. There cannot be, and ought not to be either, any systematic procedure of falsifying, disestablishing or overthrowing a given religious paradigm -unless one is bent upon a war of cultures. This relativistic nature of religion we must defend resolutely against religious absolutists of all stripes, who consider of course their version of faith as the only true one. Fortunately (we must hope that)reasonable and decent religious people themselves (again, of all stripes) are opposed to the absolutism of the extremist fringe of their particular religion.

For, after all, religion cannot be understood to be dealing in truth, since with respect to the matters of special interest to it no rational or empirical mode of investigation of any sort is in principle allowed. Its "truths" are just mystical intuitions, of the kind that can never be subjected to any rational test whatsoever -and hence absolutely distinct from "intuition" as it functions in the heuristics of scientific research. These mystical visions may indeed have extreme emotional significance to some individuals or groups, who because of this psychologically comforting function of their faith are moved to attach the name of truths to them. This is an idea that dominated W. James' account of religious experience. But if we are not willing to accede to an epistemology which (as in James) assigns truth value (or "cash value" as he felicitously phrased it) to a proposition merely because it is emotionally soothing and satisfying to someone, then we should reject the subjective, psychological effect on the believer as a proper "empirical test" of the theoretic adequacy of any religious hypothesis. People can and do believe in anything and everything for the purpose of finding their way in the world. But this in no way speaks to the truth content of these fancies. In his Cambridge remarks as I understand them Taylor seemed to be making some such claim: since religious belief is somehow supported by the inner experience of its holders then it qualifies as a form of truth, and in this manner it is epistemologically indistinguishable from scientific theory. I sincerely hope I have misunderstood. But any such utterance, even in an oblique and heavily hedged form, would be a philosophical monstrosity.

The kind of experience that a scientific hypothesis is based upon is qualitatively distinct from psychological dispositions and feelings, of its proponent or any other individual. It is established by public experimental procedures that allow access to it to all concerned and is then accepted (or rejected) on the basis of external, intersubjectively available criteria and outcomes. Religious "truth", on the contrary,is absolutely inner and non-accessible to intrusive strangers, articulated in terms of private meanings and even a private language, the ineffable expressivism of mystic transport. This is tantamount to saying that it is fundamentally inexpressible, and anybody trying to render it in terms of scientific rationalism or empiricism is doing violence to its very nature.

The immense value of religious faith resides precisely in the fact that it safeguards the inviolability of an inner sanctum, a province of the interior self which is the the most precious possession of a human being precisely in the present day and age. But of course Taylor has written the definitive account of that inalienable and irreducible interiority.

For the rest, if we take the issue from the other end, the reduction of science to a variety of religious faith is the cherished enterprise of post-modernist obscurantism, this wrong-headed enterprise of destroying meaning and meaningfulness in existence altogether, this bathetic insistence on the wild power of the irrational to which it is proposed we must succumb. Taylor certainly is not a philosopher of this stripe.