THERE is a little street in York called the Shambles. It is a charming, narrow medieval thoroughfare just south of the Minster, named after what was once an open-air slaughterhouse. It has long been popular with the tourists, but, when I visited last year, it was packed.
As I pressed through the mass, I noticed something odd. Many of the tourists were carrying not guidebooks, but copies of Harry Potter. And the street, long lined with tourist emporia, now had (at least) three Harry Potter-themed shops (“The Shop That Must Not Be Named”, “The Potions Cauldron”, “World of Wizardry”). Ah, I thought, Diagon Alley, J. K. Rowling’s famous magic street in London. It must be based on the Shambles, and these must be Potter superfans doing the tour.
I was half-right. They were, indeed, fans, but Rowling has denied basing her magic alley on the former slaughterhouse. It looks like it was all just a good marketing opportunity. We moderns are seemingly obsessed with the magical, the mystical, the enchanting. We’ll find it anywhere. And, that being so, there’s a profit to be had.
Intellectuals don’t like to talk about magic. That’s for the pagans and proles who wander about like starstruck tourists with Harry Potter books in their hands. Intellectuals talk about enchantment, its polysyllabic Latin apparently disguising the fact that the word, coming from incantare, meaning to sing or cast a spell, basically means magical.
Once upon a time, such magic was everywhere. The Church tried to ban it, alongside witchcraft, divination, and necromancy, but it was only after centuries of reformation and industrialisation that popular fascination with such enchantment actually waned, and the world finally became “disenchanted”.
That label is owed to the German sociologist Max Weber, who famously said, at a conference at Munich University in 1917, that “the fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’.”
And so it was, for a while at least — because, recently, the enchanting is back. Indeed, it has been hard to hear ourselves think but for talk of “re-enchantment”. There have been books on the re-enchantment of art, of nature, of morality, of political science, of 19th-century fiction, and of everyday life. Last May, the Austrian gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac put on a show in Paris, entitled simply “Re-enchantment”, which brought together ten artists “whose work responds to a reality that is often felt as demystified and damaged by the objectification and exploitation of nature and traumas of the past century to explore ways of re-enchanting the world”.
ABOVE all else, there are books upon books talking simply about the re-enchantment “of the world”. It is not an entirely new phenomenon. More than 40 years ago, the historian and social critic Morris Berman wrote a perceptive volume called (yes) The Reenchantment of the World, which looked at the rise of our “scientific consciousness” and the mechanistic idea that we get to know the natural world only by distancing ourselves from it.
He placed this in contrast with more “holistic” and “animistic” traditions from which it emerged, which conceived of humans as participants in, rather than observers of, the cosmos, but which were subsequently eroded by modernity. And he argued that we needed to revive such views, in ecological rather than animistic traditions, before our self-alienation from the wider environment killed first it and then us. All this in 1981.
Since then, the themes have grown ever louder. One 2009 volume of essays explored various “strategies” for re-enchantment which enabled people to fill “the vacuum left by departed convictions”, but, crucially, without abandoning a commitment to “secular rationality”. Another, a few years later, gathered a dozen academics to do a similar thing, but with a sharper focus on the effects of globalisation and a tighter approach from within a Christian framework.
These are just the tip of the iceberg, however. Indeed, one of the most noteworthy aspects of the whole phenomenon (you can’t really call it a movement) is the sheer range of different things that are vacuumed up under the label of re-enchantment. For example, the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler wrote a book, The Re-Enchantment of the World, criticising consumer capitalism and putting forward an “alternative path” that “appeals to the force of the human spirit”.
A Princeton Professor of Philosophy and the Arts, Gordon Graham, wrote a book (same title) that compared religion with painting, literature, music, and architecture, as sources of meaning in an increasingly materialistic world, and concluded, controversially, that only religion “properly so-called can ‘enchant the world’.”
Professor George Levine, of Rutger University, wrote Darwin Loves You (subtitle Natural selection and the re-enchantment of the world), which contended that, in spite of the way Darwinism has been understood, Darwin’s own ideas and language “offer an alternative form of enchantment, a world rich with meaning and value, and more wonderful and beautiful than ever before” (shades of Richard Dawkins’s Unweaving the Rainbow here).
AlamyA male polar bear (Ursus maritimus) resting on a melting ice cap in Svalbard, Norway
The Italian-American scholar and activist Silvia Federici collected her work in a volume (same title) that offered a history and critique of the politics of the commons from a feminist perspective. The theologian Alister E. McGrath wrote about the ecological crisis in his Reenchantment of Nature. The philosopher David Ray Griffin called his defence of process theology Reenchantment without Supernaturalism.
And so on and so forth. It seems that there are few topics — science, literature, art, globalisation, ecology, feminism, process theology — that cannot be gathered together under the badge of “re-enchantment”. “Re-enchantment” can be found everywhere, and is apparently about everything.
THE American political philosopher Patrick Deneen said, in his popular book on the subject, that liberalism failed because it succeeded. The more fully it captured political, economic, and social thought, the more obvious became its faults and problems, and the more palpable its harms. The same could be said for disenchantment. If “disenchantment” is now failing, that is only because it succeeded so thoroughly.
Tracing a complex phenomenon like this to a single idea always risks oversimplification, but, if “disenchantment”, a word first used in the early 17th century, has a taproot, it lies in the Reformation’s antipathy towards magic. To be clear, the medieval Church had long been antagonistic to such enchantment. As early as 785, the Council of Paderborn, in what is now Germany, outlawed belief in the efficacy of magic.
The Second Lateran Council, 350 years later, condemned magic outright, and threatened those involved in it with severe punishment. This, however, was a stance not so much against magic per se, but against the wrong kind of magic: in particular, magic with malicious intent, and, above all, magic practised by those outside of ecclesiastical structures of authority.
The stance of (some) Reformers in opposition to the miraculous nature of the mass and the sacramental power of (most) rituals, together with their hostility towards any magical powers of the priesthood, launched a fuller and more sustained assault on the idea of an enchanted world. The transformation was slow and patchy. Moreover, as Keith Thomas emphasised in his seminal Religion and the Decline of Magic, there now opened up a divide between the elites, who rejected the principles and practices of magic, and the masses, who believed in both.
Nevertheless, the elite rejection of an enchanted world only strengthened over the years. This was an ontological stance (the world was not made up of mysterious, intangible forces) and an epistemological stance (we come to know the world through studying the scriptures or nature, not by crediting sacred mysteries). But, as is the nature of these things, that also meant it was a social and political stance.
The early reformer John Bale, commenting on an important verse from Revelation which mentions enchantment, linked it to “the crafts [&] lies and hypocrisy [&] errors in superstition”, by means of which “subtle charmers” deceived “all nations of the world”, blinded the “great governors”, and seduced “the common people”. Enchantment became part of the polemic against popish superstition and authoritarianism, a polemic that formed the religious backbone of the narrative of modernity. To be modern was to reject an enchanted cosmos and those whose power rested on that enchantment. It was to embrace a world that was reasonable, knowable, and manipulable.
First, the Scientific Revolution, then the preaching of rational religion, then the preaching of rational irreligion, and, finally and supremely, the effects of industrialisation all brought the disenchanted world to the wider public. Reality could now be known, tamed, controlled. The word became safer, and eventually more comfortable.
At the same time, though, it also felt a bit duller and more predictable, lacking the sense of newness, surprise, wonder, and delight which came with its being enchanted. It is no accident that disenchanted means both (literally) without magic, and also (idiomatically) disappointed, wearied, unable to muster energy or faith. This was the state of modernity that Weber lamented. Disenchantment worked, but at a cost.
OVER recent decades, the deal has come to seem less compelling. If disenchantment (in the idiomatic sense) was the price we had to pay for our newly ordered, safe, reliable, and largely contented world, then it was probably worth paying. The problem today, and the reason that we are seeing a such an interest in re-enchantment, is that our world does not feel as if it is as ordered, safe, reliable, and contented as it should be.
By this, I am not referring to the political insecurity and bellicosity that is the current geopolitical mood music, although such things often provoke a kind of soul-searching among people, but, rather, to a sense of vulnerability that is the direct, if paradoxical, consequence of our apparent control of the world.
In what is, historically speaking, a remarkably brief period, we have become painfully aware of how this control has resulted in habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, and ever more extreme weather events. It is telling that, having used various terms for it over the years — “global warming”, “climate change”, “climate emergency”, etc. — “climate chaos” has become popular of late. It captures the uncertainty, volatility, and fear that we are facing, none of which was part of the original “disenchantment deal”.
One could make a similar observation about rising levels of mental ill-health. Jonathan Haidt’s recent book The Anxious Generation may try too hard to lay all the ills of contemporary childhood at the door of smartphones and social media, but its central point — that the technology that was supposed to liberate us is doing the opposite — is beyond dispute.
The same point can be made of the information age in general. Overwhelmed by information that provides “stimuli” rather than “orientation and meaning”, we risk becoming blind to “other forms of life” and “other perceptions and realities”, thereby “losing ourselves”. That, at least, is the view of the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose many books explore the maladies of late modernity.
Han’s answer to this is for us to abandon both the type of transparency that attempts to render the whole world visible, and (what he calls) “storyselling”, the kind of narratives that try to eradicate uncertainty from the world. He advocates, instead, a form of re-enchantment, because it is precisely our capacity for uncertainty which enchants the world with possibility and meaning.
Although not well known in the Anglophone world, Han is a considerable philosopher. His analysis of these problems underlines how our recent embrace of re-enchantment is not simply one massive cultural tantrum, a foot-stamping decision to vote X at the next election because Y has let us down so badly this time.
On the contrary, one of the characteristics of our re-enchanting age is quite how many highly sophisticated thinkers have developed different but compatible analyses of the issue at hand. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, dedicated his 2007 A Secular Age to demonstrating how the disenchanted vision underlying secularity was not the natural state to which intelligent humans automatically progressed, but, rather, an achievement in its own right, and an unusual one at that.
Our attitude “toward earlier societies who saw themselves as living in an enchanted universe . . . is generally one of dismissive condescension”, he subsequently wrote in Cosmic Connections. But that condescension was misplaced. Although we could not “accept these earlier world views as literal truths . . . we can now recognise them as earlier attempts to grapple with issues that we are not that good at dealing with.”
The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has written powerfully about how our modern determination to know, master, and exploit the world reduces it a series of objects, draining it (and us) of life, and generating frustration and despair today. It is only by acknowledging and opening ourselves up to “the uncontrollability of the world” (the title of one of his books) that we allow newness to enter in and ourselves to experience “resonance” with the world.
Perhaps most importantly, the polymath Iain McGilchrist has shown, in his remarkable books on the divided brain, how different hemispheres pay different kinds of attention to, and thereby conjure up different representations of, the world. A dominant, analytical left hemisphere has created a world in which “nature has become mere resource; the divine mere superstition; and the unruly complexity of life [something to] be simply rationalised, ironed out, and subjected to our conscious control” — in other words, the disenchanted world.
Properly speaking, that competent but limited left hemisphere should be the servant (or “emissary”) of the more holistic right, which is open and receptive, and sees things as a whole and/or as part of a whole.
In effect, the disenchanted world that we have created, and from which we are now rebelling, is not our natural habitat.
IF THIS all sounds encouraging (and it is), there is a problem, which brings me back to the Shambles, and that verse from Revelation.
A colleague recently sent me an article about “Nouveau Nihilism”, a growing trend of despair in the future and the desire to live for today and screw the consequences. The article was not in a psychology journal, but in Marketing Week, which explored what part brands could play in all this. “Nice to see capitalism has found a new way to ram its feeding funnel into general pessimism,” he commented to me.
As with “Nouveau Nihilism”, so with re-enchantment, and anything to do with it. As many a commentator on this phenomenon has observed, it is very easy to consumerise “alternative spiritualities”. Mindfulness comes to mind. And so, as if on cue, we hear from the global director of VML Intelligence, how “people are craving more emotion, and there is a growing yearning for re-enchantment.”
The comments were made at a Micebook EXPO last year, in a session entitled “The Age of Re-Enchantment”. She went on to say that people are “sitting there with open arms saying I want to feel something. I want to feel alive.” The solution is obvious. “There is a huge opportunity for brands to create experiences that connect people in a more meaningful way and create moments of joy and surprise — 65% of people say brands should make for effort to wow me, and 70% can’t remember the last time a brand did anything that excited me.” Lindsey Naegle, the marketing executive in The Simpsons, could not have put it better.
I have nothing against Harry Potter. On the contrary, I think J. K. Rowling is an exceptionally creative (and brave) individual. But I don’t think the Shambles is improved by being colonised by Harry Potter shops. It is quite magical enough, thank you.
As with the Shambles, so with life. Douglas Adams was right: you don’t have to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden to see that it is beautiful. But an enchanted world need not be one full of sprites and pixies. Rather, it is one that, to quote Seamus Heaney’s poem “Postscript”, can “catch the heart off guard and blow it open”. It is a world that is open, opaque, humbling, surprising, uncontrolled, inexhaustible: a world that, to revert to etymological origins, sings to us.
And yet, if the market can turn our despair into “Nouveau Nihilism”, it can certainly capture our thirst for re-enchantment and transmute it into a product or experience that we can buy, in the process disenchanting it once more. In the Revelation verse on which John Bale commented, and that did so much work for the Reformers, the business of buying and selling is angrily fingered. In amid his bewailing of the sins of Babylon, St John decries “your merchants” who were “the great men of the earth” and “with your enchantment deceived all nations”. Precisely because our yearning for enchantment is evergreen, it can be hijacked for commercial gain.
Or, indeed, political gain; for one of the criticisms that has increasingly been levelled at the re-enchantment phenomenon is the way in which it has been politicised and weaponised for the culture wars. “Enchantment is being used as an argument for the West to return to Christendom . . . as means to restore Christian ‘civilization’,” wrote the theologian Richard Beck. Frankly, “a lot of those who write or talk about enchantment seem more in love with Christianity than with Christ.”
This may still be more of a US phenomenon than a British or European one, but it highlights again the malleability of re-enchantment. Because it is about everything — what we think the world is, how we know the world, how we navigate and shape it — it is an enormously potent and potentially profitable phenomenon. To be clear, the world is not about to double-back through 500 years of history and re-embrace the medieval world of magic. Disenchantment won, and, deep down, few people — certainly not those who have ever been treated in a modern hospital — regret that.
But, to return to Patrick Deneen, disenchantment is losing ground precisely because it won, and we are going to hear more about re-enchantment, in its various guises, in the future. The fate of our times, to borrow from Weber, is characterised by anxiety and uncertainty, and, above all, by the “re-enchantment of the world.”
Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos and the co-author of Playing God: Science, religion and the future of humanity, published today by SPCK at £16.99 (Church Times Bookshop £15.29); 978-0-281-09004-4.