no such thing as disenchantment

Imago Archive #14

No Such Thing as Disenchantment

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

— Max Weber

It's been popular for awhile to talk about the modern world being disenchanted. We've lost all magic, possibility, anything being more than the reductionist sum of its parts. This, they say, is the result of disenchantment, of past enchantments being scrubbed away.

I don't think this is right. In fact, I think the whole "disenchantment" frame is a very powerful form of enchantment, a spell cast by the dominant enchanters of our age.

The whole frame of disenchantment carries a very specific worldview: we used to have magic and enchantment that livened up the world and made it feel meaningful — but now we've been stripped down simply to the bare, disappointing reality, utterly without flair or frill.

That's... exactly the frame that this dominant rational-material-reductionist worldview wants us to have anyway. By criticizing the dominant worldview in this way, we’re retelling their own story, just in a minor key.

Their whole thing is this idea that the only real things are what we can weigh and measure and log on a spreadsheet. That anything else is less real, mere fluff and mystification — mystification that modernity has scrubbed away for us, leaving only cold, hard reality.

This whole lens, this whole worldview, lives in constant fear that we'll notice a single key thing about it: namely, the fact that this story is no more real than anything else. The Enlightenment and its torchbearers have simply enchanted us to see this barren view as the most real. That's how they get us, just like they got Jean-Paul Sartre: "like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for the truth."

There's an urge that's been implanted in us, a spell that's been cast on us, to make the most cynical view feel like the realest one. Somehow, the more barren and hopeless and corrupt and meaningless something looks, the more we moderns go "yeah, that's probably right."

And even when we rebel against this view, we have to use their frame, their language — disenchantment. We have to continue telling their story, a story where modern progress wiped away magic; the only difference is that we say magic with longing, and they say it with disdain.

But the truth is, it's not that we live in a time with no enchantment: it's that we live in a time where the dominant enchantments are barren, hopeless, corrupt, meaningless — but they are still enchantments.

The modern problem isn't a problem of disenchantment, but of misenchantment.

We live in the ruins of vast mythopoetic malpractice, and the way out does not include reinforcing the reigning enchantments, even by accident. The project of re-enchanting the world isn't purely an additive process — the mechanistic, reductionist enchantments that are already there need to be dismantled and stripped for parts. They need to be held up and revealed not as The Facts Of Reality, but as what they really are: a handful of sub-par articles of faith. A crappy faith that worships the measurable and does its best to pretend the immeasurable is either fake or simply not yet measured. The spreadsheet cult is made of bad magic, but it is still made of magic.