In his ironically-titled address “Science as a Vocation,” Max Weber, the father of modern sociology, said in 1918, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.'”
Before the rise of science, nature understood to be filled, if not with spirits, with spiritual significance. As Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Science, though, has reduced the world to inert matter, comprehensible to reason and the scientific method, banishing the supernatural and “disenchanting” not just nature but life itself.
“Disenchantment” has become a hallmark of modernity. People have become disenchanted with the family, with sexual morality, with the church, with life itself.
But lately there have been calls for “re-enchantment.” After all, as science discovers the quantum realm, we are learning that nature becomes far more mysterious the more we learn about it. Religion is coming back. Simplistic rationalism and materialism are dissolving.
The National Review‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty says that he has become religious and that he is trying to relate his faith to the totality of his life. But he denies that we as a whole are going through a period of re-enchantment. He keeps being disenchanted.
In his essay Everyone’s Just Going Crazy, he says that we have become disenchanted with scientists, the medical professions, politicians, and experts of every stripe.
It’s not enough to say that institutions like public health lost their good reputation, and that leadership failures and promiscuous attempts at censorship helped fuel a populist mood that’s been stalking politics ever since the dawn of social media.
Clearly, it has unloosed the screws and discredited sturdy taboos that we built for a reason. American mass culture has rapidly been replaced by giant buzzing colonies of internet influencers. Now, people will do and say anything. . . .
Is this the re-enchantment of the world? No, it’s the continued decomposition of the old one. We lost our religion centuries ago. The enterprises of self-understanding we used as replacements for religion — psychology, pharmacology — are falling apart even faster. Now the last inherited habits of civilization are giving way to the onset of paranoia, distrust, and desperation for answers. Most things you thought were solid in our civilization have been vaporized and evacuated. The second you lean on these structures, they fall apart.
Well, Dougherty comes close to understanding what is happening, but then he seems to miss his own point. What he and much of the public are disenchanted with now are “the enterprises of self-understanding we used as replacements for religion.” We threw out religion and tried to replace it with science, psychology, and politics, to name a few. But those human enterprises cannot fill the God-shaped void. Of course we are becoming disenchanted with them. They were never enchanted to begin with.
We are now getting disenchanted not with religion but with what we tried to replace it with. That is absolutely necessary for the re-enchantment of the world. And that is happening.
Photo: Max Weber, 1918 via Picryl, Public Domain
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