Disenchantment Talk
This article is the third in a series of responses to Episode 2.2 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast.
The concept of “modernity talk” that Michael Puett addresses in the episode “What is Modernity?” raises a fundamental ambiguity in the term “modernity.” On the one hand, as Puett discusses, “modernity” names a transhistorical phenomenon characterized by a sense of before-and-after. To live in “modernity” is to understand yourself as living in a time of radical newness, with the past construed as wholly different and usually obsolete (or at least under the mastering gaze of a modern age which can pick and choose what it likes from the past). On the other hand, within the humanities, social sciences, and their adjacent popular discourses, “modernity” designates a cluster of historical developments understood to originate in Western Europe in the post-1500 period: these include liberal democracy, so-called free markets, capitalism, science, colonialism, secularization, industrialism, and human rights. Depending on who is discussing these phenomena under the umbrella term “modernity,” they can of course be presented as either positive or negative developments.
Guercino, Et in Arcadia ego (1618-1622)
In recent years, the idea of “disenchantment”—one of the influential historical narratives associated with this latter idea of modernity as a cluster of specific developments—has come under fire. Disenchantment, like “modernity,” names a rupture with the past, a dramatic sense of historical before-and-after. This concept was first articulated by Max Weber, and was later taken up by Marcel Gauchet, Charles Taylor, Akeel Bilgrami, and others. In Bilgrami’s approach, the concept of disenchantment names the replacement of a view of the natural world as imbued by a spiritual dimension prompting certain responses (including reverence) and responsibilities on humankind’s part, with a view of nature as devoid of any such intrinsic quality, and therefore as available for unconstrained exploitation by humankind. Disenchantment here also carries with it the idea that reality is fully knowable by the techniques of natural science, i.e., by measurement and quantification.
Given its close linkages with modernity talk, it would seem that the concept of disenchantment is ripe for rejection. Indeed, in his book The Myth of Disenchantment, Jason Josephson-Storm points out that what Weber called the “disenchantment of the world” is far too sweeping a concept. After all, the last several hundred years have witnessed the resurgence of enchantment in a host of areas: consider the flourishing of forms of spiritualism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The unidirectionality implied by the disenchantment narrative is thus belied by actual cycles of disenchantment and re-enchantment over the last few hundred years. Further, key features of the modern world, like capitalism, have been viewed as “enchanted.” In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx contended that money and various financial operations entail a magical power to exchange radically different features of the world, including people, lands, goods, and human activities and experiences (most notably labour), by converting them all to an abstract value. In The Rise of Mass Advertising Anat Rosenberg considers the aura surrounding consumer goods in our own world.
While the various critiques of narratives of disenchantment sketched here are valid and important, it may nevertheless be the case that what we might call “disenchantment talk” retains important affordances—particularly of an ethical, affective, and imaginative kind—and therefore should not be blithely dispensed with. I want to suggest that disenchantment talk may have continuing importance to perhaps the most pressing problem in our world, the environmental crisis.
Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup I (1968)
The narrative of disenchantment is intensely poignant: it is a mythic story of loss, of a move from a world of belonging to one of cold, heartless mechanism. Disenchantment carries with it the idea of a world devoid of intrinsic value and therefore reducible to the status of bare resource, and the notion of humankind standing autonomous, over and against, the natural world in a posture of domination to it. Specific developments in the last few hundred years—industrialism, capitalism, colonialism—which have been instrumental in precipitating our current crisis are all powerfully described and illuminated using the discourse of disenchantment.
By contrast, pre-modern western and various non-western cultures marginalized by the west’s hegemony (including indigenous cultures) provide countervailing visions in which humankind is caught up in relations of mutuality, moral responsibility, and participation with the natural world. Such participation is ecological in nature, but it is also spiritual: that is, it centers on recognition of a higher transcendent reality which frames and gathers together all creation into meaningful unity. Rather than view reality as a set of individual entities striving for self-interest and endless competition with one another (a vision resonating with discourses from Hobbesian philosophy to Darwinian evolution to capitalism), these various “enchanted” worldviews foreground forms of the common good and connection through shared meanings and values.
Disenchantment talk thus has the benefit of raising an alternative way of viewing reality to what has become deeply ingrained and habitual in us all. It helps us see that calculability and quantification do not exhaust reality, and that we need to think more in terms of the intrinsic connections among the myriad elements that make up the world, rather than in terms of a series of isolated entities striving for their interests conceived narrowly, individually, and in mutually exclusionary ways.
If disenchantment talk illuminates parallels and convergences between premodern western culture on the one hand and indigenous and other non-western cultures on the other, this may help challenge an antagonistic “western” vs. “non-western”/indigenous dichotomy. In casting light on links between the pre-modern “western” construal of nature and non-western and indigenous ones, it may provide a way of galvanizing and coordinating fragmented groups of people in a common cause.
Like “modernity,” the closely associated concept of disenchantment has been called into question to the point that it may seem necessary to reject it completely. However, as we have seen, the term can provide resources for responding to at least one pressing problem in our world. Perhaps the case of disenchantment talk may even urge us to consider whether some other forms of modernity talk can also prove useful to us in our particular historical moment.
Travis DeCook is associate professor English at Carleton University, Ottawa. He is the author of The Origins of the Bible and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2021).