on the myth of disenchantment

I just wrapped up my course on The History of Disenchantment and one of the interesting elements of the class – well, interesting to me, anyway, but I think also to most of my students – involved the ways that Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment challenges the big narrative of Taylor’s A Secular Age.

Taylor’s argument, radically condensed, is that the early modern era in the West inaugurated the construction of the Modern Moral Order: an order in which (a) spirits do not populate the world and therefore cannot be directed and need not be propitiated; (b) magic is impossible; (c) God exists but is not directly involved with the world He made, which runs along on its own power; and (d) God expects everyone to meet His moral standards. In such an environment, which is not created all at once but over a period of centuries, human beings are no longer “porous” but rather “buffered” selves who dwell within a “disciplinary society” that produces good citizens of a disenchanted order.

From this account – which is of course, in its large outlines, not unique to Taylor, though he adds some unique elements – Josephson-Storm (hereafter JJS) dissents.

The single most familiar story in the history of science is the tale of disenchantment — of magic’s exit from the henceforth law-governed world. I am here to tell you that as broad cultural history, this narrative is wrong. Attempts to suppress magic have historically failed more often than they’ve succeeded. It is unclear to me that science necessarily deanimates nature. In fact, I will argue à la Bruno Latour that we have never been disenchanted.

JJS believes, rather, that secularization, far from extinguishing enchantment, promotes and encourages and in a sense creates it. Even when the Christian God is excluded from socially acceptable belief, spirits come to take His place. Thus, “In the face of things like [Marie] Curie’s scientific séances, spiritualist revivals, and the modern resurgence of magical orders like the Golden Dawn, how did we get the idea that modernity meant disenchantment in the first place?” The Myth of Disenchantment is a fascinating and illuminating book, but I’m not sure that it successfully makes its case; I think Taylor’s argument largely survives JJS’s critique.

The first point I want to note in this context is that JJS makes a subtle and unacknowledged but important shift in the terms of his argument. Early in the book he cites a series of studies that show the persistence of beliefs in spirits, ghosts, and a wide range of paranormal phenomena. This lays the groundwork for his claim that “we have never been disenchanted.” But then the rest of the book focuses exclusively on intellectuals: philosophers, physicists, historians, social scientists, plus the odd quasi-intellectual like Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley.

One consequence of this shift of attention is that it allows JJS to ignore enchantments or re-enchantments that had no popularity among intellectuals: thus the Order of the Golden Dawn gets discussed but not Pentecostalism, which is by any sociological measure infinitely more important and influential than the Golden Dawn. More generally, the whole vast history of Christian (and for that matter Jewish) renewal movements over the past four hundred years plays no role here. It seems to me that JJS ought at least to tip his hat to them.

That said, such movements need play no major role in his story, because that story is not about Everyone, but rather primarily about those figures — from Bacon and Descartes to Madame Curie and Theodor Adorno — who are thought to be representatives of a disenchanted cosmos, or who thought themselves to be, or both. That is, the story JJS tells is of enchantment and re-enchantment appearing where they are least expected. And he tells it well.

But even so, not wholly convincingly. I do not have time or leisure to develop this argument at the length it deserves, but it seems to me that what we see in episodes like Madame Curie’s interest in séances, or Max Müller’s endorsement of mysticism, or James Frazer’s speculations about some realm of knowledge that lies beyond science as we now know it, is not the persistence of an enchanted cosmos or the renewal of one. Rather, I think what we see is a group of people dwelling day-by-day and hour-by-hour fully within Taylor’s MMO who occasionally peer over the fence at goings-on among the naive, credulous, and superstitious.

The spirit, I think, is at its strongest the “wishing it might be so” of Hardy’s “The Oxen,”, and more often appears as a kind of brief mental vacation from a disenchanted world of buffered selves, from Weber’s “iron cage of rationality” — the sort of impulse that made Darwin so delighted by sentimental novels:

Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.

One might also cite the great affection of so many hard-core materialists for fantasy and superhero stories. In contrast to JJS, I would contend that this kind of thing does not mean that “we have never been disenchanted,” but that we have, and sometimes we hate it.

(There is so much more to be said about this fascinating book, to which I have scarcely done justice here — maybe I can return to it later.)

Darwin's mail

I’ve just read Janet Browne’s two-volume biography of Charles Darwin, and it’s a magnificent achievement — one of the finest biographies I’ve ever read. I especially admire Browne’s judgment in knowing when to stick with the events of the life and when to pull back her camera to reveal the larger social contexts in which Darwin worked.

One of the interesting subthemes of the book concerns the way Darwin gravitated towards technologies that would allow him to pursue whatever aroused his curiosity — and whenever his curiosity was aroused he tended to become obsessive until he satisfied it. For instance, though he hated having his photograph taken, he made extensive use of photographs in writing his peculiar book on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Also: if you think of the various scientific institutions and journals of the Victorian era as a kind of network, he and his chief supporters (Thomas Henry Huxley above all) skillfully exploited those technologies to spread the news of natural selection far more quickly than it could have been expected to spread otherwise.

But as someone who has a long-standing interest in the postal service, these passages from the early pages of the second volume are especially provocative:

Systematically, he turned his house into the hub of an ever-expanding web of scientific correspondence. Tucked away in his study, day after day, month after month, Darwin wrote letters to a remarkable number and variety of individuals. He relied on these letters for every aspect of his evolutionary endeavour, using them not only to pursue his investigations across the globe but also to give his arguments the international spread and universal application that he and his colleagues regarded as essential footings for any new scientific concept. They were his primary research tool. Furthermore, after the Origin of Species was published, he deliberately used his correspondence to propel his ideas into the public domain—the primary means by which he ensured his book was being read and reviewed. His study inside Down House became an intellectual factory, a centre of administration and calculation, in which he churned out requests for information and processed answers, kept himself at the leading edge of contemporary science, and ultimately orchestrated a transformation in Victorian thought.

Maybe it wasn't the telegraph that was the Victorian internet but rather the penny post — even if it was slower.

And Darwin was utterly unashamed to use letters to get other people (friends, family, and often strangers) to do research for him:

He also hunted down anyone who could help him on specific issues, from civil servants, army officers, diplomats, fur-trappers, horse-breeders, society ladies, Welsh hill-farmers, zookeepers, pigeon-fanciers, gardeners, asylum owners, and kennel hands, through to his own elderly aunts or energetic nieces and nephews. Many of his letters went to residents of far-flung regions — India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, China, Borneo, the Hawaiian Islands — reflecting the increasing European domination of the globe and rapidly improving channels of communication.

It’s a good thing that Darwin was a wealthy man: “In 1851 he spent £20 on ‘stationery, stamps & newspapers’ (nearly £1,000 in modern terms) ... By 1877 Darwin’s expenditure on postage and stationery had doubled to £53 14s. 7d, a sum roughly equal to his butler’s annual salary.”

And here’s Browne’s incisive summary of this method:

If there was any single factor that characterised the heart of Darwin’s scientific undertaking it was this systematic use of correspondence. Darwin made the most of his position as a gentleman and scientific author to obtain what he needed. He was a skilful strategist. The flow of information that he initiated was almost always one-way. Like countless other well-established figures of the period, Darwin regarded his correspondence primarily as a supply system, designed to answer his own wants. “If it would not cause you too much trouble,” he would write. “Pray add to your kindness,” “I feel that you will think you have fallen on a most troublesome petitioner,” “I trust to your kindness to excuse my troubling you.” ...

Alone at his desk, captain of his ship, safely anchored in his country estate on the edge of a tiny village in Kent, he was in turn manager, chief executive, broker, and strategist for a world-wide enterprise. Once, in a passing compulsion, he attached a mirror to the inside of his study window, angled so that he could catch the first glimpse of the postman turning up the drive. It stayed there for the rest of his life.