The case to be made
Being essentially correct is not enough; simplicity is also required. The theory and claim that the world is becoming disenchanted is essentially correct, but the framing and the theorizing is too baroque, unnecessarily flamboyant, it does not deliver with enough ease the point; in short, it could be clearer. My end with the writ at hand is to restate the same old claim according to which that modernity implies the disenchantment of the world; this view is the one which I want to restate, with a brighter and more polished frame. This is needed and proof is a recent and very historically minded tweet, one in accordance with the likings of yours truly, one tweet by @AuronMacintyre:
We are haunted far more by the spirit of Max Weber than Karl Marx or Adolf Hitler
The preambulatory is out of the way, now the case: What is disenchantment? Wikipedia defines disenchantment as the cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion apparent in society. This definition will do for us, it explains itself, empirically that is, because this phenomenon is public, it is seen everywhere and could only be denied by the historic equivalent of flat earthers. Disenchantment is, according to this widely Weberian view, that religion has gone into retreat, a retreat caused by what is best called a privatizing process of itself, a process by which religion is relegated to the private life of the individual and segregated from an integrated lifestyle, from a common morality, from action, it is cut from the ethos (the characteristic worldview that man gets from the world he inhabits which, in turn, comes from his parents and, by extension, his community all the way up to civilization itself). It might also be interpreted as a transitionary stage on a path towards a new becoming religion, to claim this would be to make a very Comtian claim. It might also be understood as the transition from a religious to a technocratic society, and on this much has been said, and more will probably be said. Whatever and whichever history might end up becoming, the case rests: The world has been and is being disenchanted and we are not sure we now what the future will bring, we are only certain that this process is unfolding the path to a uncertain historical epoch.
Disenchantment has been brought under the light, it is pertinent, then, to ask if Yours Truly wants to simply bash Max Weber with this writ. The answer is no, Yours Truly does not want to simply go against Max Weber, he thinks that the Weberian thesis is essentially correct (that is, that he is right as most classical sociologist tend to be, when properly understood; being their usual correctness a topic for another day). My intent is to avoid the unnecessary mysticism that often veils the comprehension of this phenomenon and is caused, to a certain extent, by Weber himself. Because whatever his greatness might be, Yours Truly thinks that on this point, Weber makes things harder than they needed be. No, the process we are seeing is not, at heart, a disenchanting process, at least, not when understood properly. This unfolding process does not bear any consequences that pertain to religion, not primarily that is. This process we call disenchantment is a wider process, broader, wider, it goes beyond the compounds of religion, it is so wide it becomes difficult to trace and name it. It cannot be reduced to one or more regional or special sociologies, because it is transcendental, that is, it is in all categories irreducibly, it is of the essence of the social system, it pertains to society as such, and not to society insofar it is religious, cultural or economic (it is not special but general sociology would might sociologists say). It pertains to a phenomenon so common we might as well say it is “societal” so as to avoid darkening it. What we see, what is happening, is very simple: We are becoming idiots. We are merely becoming idiots, therefore, Yours Truly thinks that a properly scientific name for this process is not the one commonly given of disenchantment, it is more aptly called idiocy. It is, in short, The idiotizing process. Yours truly has one claim, it is that the disenchantment of the world is best understood as an idiotizing process.
The term (idiotizing process) pays homage to Norbert Elias and his work about another process: the civilizing one. His thesis accounts and explains a becoming civilizing process, it is brilliant, simply unsurpassed. You see, Norbert Elias will be a recurring character on this site. But, homages being done and proper, this is no space meant to extend the concept of civilization or a civilizing process. Here is not talk, au contraire, about a decivilizing process; this was done, in contrast, by Hans Hermann Hoppe, with ingenuity, in his famous overture to the XXI century. As was said, this rambler is just giving a better articulation of the Disenchantment thesis of Weber, trying to demystify it, that is, to make the burden of romanticism, which originated this Weberian interpretation, less of a burden. To call the disenchanting process the idiotizing process is to give it a more accurate name, it is to chew the bites so as to better swallow world affairs. All has one meaning, Norbert Elias has a great mantle, an eerie presence, considered, often, too recent to be historical, too often. And if you think Hans Hermann Hoppe is great in his overture to the XXI century, or any more obscure works of his iceberg, Sych has the duty of telling you that you are already fond of Norbert Elias, fonder than you might realize. But, as was said, this is a homage to Norbert Elias, not a reconstruction to his thesis, here we are reconstruing Weber and the ever going disenchantment of his world.
The soul of idiocy
An idiot, a moron and an imbecile walk into a bar… What is the difference between them? Honestly, not much. Being analogous terms at best, one can chose any, and any of them wholeheartedly. Here, “idiot” will be chosen. “Idiot” will be used because it is not a word used, at least not as commonly, in day to day speech, not in the way imbecile or moron is. Compared to imbecile or moron, “idiot” is posh, so to speak, it serves a better purpose when used solely for scientific purposes. We are talking, then, of idiots.
Where does one start? Five minutes or five millennia ago? It is paramount to understand that any social process can always be further traced, and, as there is an idiotizing process, there is also a process for the development of intelligence, there has to be one, and it is to be hoped that such a process will ever point be recorded, somehow, somewhere. Be any process traceable to processual infinity then, but here we have a practical affair at hand, here we want to understand the idiots at bay, the idiots we live with. We want to understand why we perceive everything grey, at heart, what one want is to understand oneself. Being the world traceable to infinity, we are free to start our enquiry at any point of the process, we are free to choose what we deem most alive in its stages. However, as a call to order, one might as well look at the etymology of idiocy; this inquiry might, this way, shade some light upon this quiddity.
All are idiots now, and sociology is meant to understand man, its existence is meant for the purpose of human survival, not that of man as such, because animals (that we are, after all, also supposed to be) already know the “how-to” of survival. We are idiots, so we might as well use Wikipedia. According to the English Wikipedia, once upon a time, the word “idiot” had a technical meaning, that is, it named somebody that had a grave intellectual disability, a disability that is no longer such, by the power of democratic tastes and their incessant sophistication. This usage of the word was for sure taken from common sprache*, it meant somebody that is stupid and, more precisely, an imbecile. The word made reference to someone being imbecile, moronically. Now it has this meaning, however, the meaning was different in the beginning, because in the beginning there were only Greeks, historically. For the Greeks, the idiot was, bluntly, the individual. Idiot comes from idios, that is, to be without oneself; this is to say that when somebody does not partake in society, he is basically an idiot. It follows that those who were just private in partaking where purely breed idiots, they lacked social skills, and nobody could be blamed for thinking that our spiritual ancestors, the Greeks, might have considered the contemporary autist an idiot, poor guys. Carrying one, it is true that the Greek take was very based, but it was not as practical as the roman take on the idiot, that is: To be an idiot is to be ignorant, unlearned, unskilled. Being posh, the romans might have been mistaken for conflating the rustic with the idiot, things which must not be conflated. Be it as such, the French took the roman meaning, and like many other things, from France the idiot flew, thus becoming universal. W have the word, more common in romance language than in English, it will hold either way for an inquiry.
The word idiot, like “mom” has universal extension among Indo-Europeans (in all its variant dialects and tongues), imperial even, because it does not matter where you travel, where you go, the idiots will bring their presence with them, the idiots will be found there, walking with the Indo-Aryans. Lastly, there is a mandatory reference, on the topic of idiots: the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. As is public knowledge, Dostoyevsky has a famous book on the topic of idiots, they are essential to the novel, so much so that the topic of idiocy is in its title: The idiot. Sadly though, one most confess to not having read this novel. The book deserves a bigger share in this post, in any post, because it is of Dostoyevsky. Nonetheless, at some point, sociology will have to consider the importance of the dostoyevskian idiot, but this writ is not the right place. The story of the becoming of the idiot, as one can see, goes far back. With such a trajectory, there is need synthesis: what does the etymology of the wording of the idiot teach? Etymology teaches that idiocy has been one straight line, one pure trajectory. Could it be said with more clarity and simplicity, that is, with words more in accordance with Sych than this words?: In tongues moronic has he walked this path, from atom to illiterate does the imbecile go, that is the idiot-sprache1.
Does Sych actually have a proof for this grand arch, this narrative, this claim that idiocy reigns triumphant in our time? Not entirely, to be fair, this claim of idiocy’s fashion pretends to be a mere observation. He is not making a historical claim, or an empirically demonstrable statement that idiocy is ascendant. He is describing the concern, the matter, the problem, the object, the fact that Weber is trying to explain with his theory. I am talking of the explanandum, not the explanans. Because one cannot forget that when Weber calls this process the disenchantment of the world, he is of course also speaking, at least indirectly, of his own disenchantment with that world. Weber is doing something more productive than mere complaint: He has become a sociologist, so as to explain the loss he feels. Heavy weights Weber’s burden, he is, if not one of their kind, the master of cynics.
What event was Weber trying to explain with his theory? Translating to digital lingo, he is trying to explain why Science and Technology have not brought us the goods. He explains with this why the evolution from theology to positive knowledge did not have the implications that was expected. Weber was trying to explain why the Enlightenment had turned to be, in morbid fashion, the Disenchantment. One most not forget, after all, that Weber’s type is the living stereotype of the cynic, he would himself be the archetype of Laertius’s favourites, if he was not brighter than his brain appeared to deem him. He had no musical sense for religion, as he himself claimed at one point. Such a statement makes it sound as if he might have been the closest thing ever observed comparable to natural atheist. Look at the sentence! He could speak of faith only by analogy with music!
But he was not a natural atheist, because such types exist but in fairy stories, under the mantle of Isaac Asimov. Weber, being so out of tune with religion as he claims to be, needed, still, the perennial resort to it, that way he could explain everything. Sociologist, since Rousseau have always needed religion as the start of everything, the “becoming of becoming” in idealist sprache, they might not be religious, not by an inch of an atom, they might declare God dead with Nietzsche, but, all declared, they cannot get rid of Him, not when it comes to scientific explanation of why society is in this state rather than another. Weber, agnostic as he might have been, had the vice common to men of extreme and disordered piety: The vice of having religion mixed in every problem. One of this cases of religion/mania is disenchantment, because disenchantment has less to do with European man becoming dechristianized or apostate, and more to do with him just not being sharp as he thought he was. Weber needed religion so as to put it against rationalization and, in turn, he needed rationalization so as to still have a method for preaching-prediction-prophecy. He needn’t have mixed reason, religion and re-enchantment in one stew, so that he could explain why the world was so grey, the sciences so dull and the advancement of technology such a waste in the end.
One does not really need to prove that disenchantment is happening. One could for sure, but Sych hopes statistics might have better usage elsewhere. What he is claiming is that rationalization, that is, to prefer explaining things by scientific laws and to prefer technical solutions over other more supernatural solutions (aka: the original God of the gaps) is not really the cause of disenchantment because, to be honest, reason doesn’t makes the world grey. He does not think a rational account of nature or a purely profane instrument such as a shower are original, in spirit, to the modern world, he does not think people b.K.2, not even before Aristotle, had a different logical structure than the one man now has. We have the knowledge accumulated over millennia, centuries cannot account for it, nor our culture, only our true world can. And coming from eons of natural evolution, on the other hand, we get genetics, but this second process is such a chunk of time ago, that we can stay on topic and focus on that which transcends time. No, polylogism will not do, even with his brilliance, one must admit that Weber fell for historicism. To consider disenchantment and rationalization but two sides of one coin is to say that reasoning makes the world grey, and I do not think this is true. One most admit, it is true: Western historiography (really, the only historiography worth any salt) through history, has slowly taken over the social role of myth, I do agree, wholeheartedly, that the west is the least mythical civilization, the least mythical Lebenswelt, it is the least mythical culture, the only proper civilization, now, and it has been the least mythical culture since Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Christ. I admit, in turn, with Bertrand de Jouvenel that the romans were the least religious of all people, and I confess, I gladly confess, that Christianity is a historical, not a mythical religion. I agree, definitely, that enchantment is not western, not in the strong sense, not in the sense, at least, that some on the right give to the term and believe the West to be. And I hope such admittances might do, as an atomic theological excursus, to keep on justifying why Bluetooth and Quantum Mechanics have no blood on their hands, no responsibility when it comes to the dullness and greyness of our age, at least insofar as they don’t posses hands.
Admittances aside, demytification3 and disenchantment are not the same. Christianity, historically, has eliminated myth not as such, but has an explanation of reality, specially, in the political sense. Christianity is the West, the “Renaissance” did not start the development of technology, science, or, specially, political science: It was a long process intimately related to Christendom. Political science needs to put poetry on the back wagon, it had to from the beginning. Plato threw the poets out of his republic, he was as harsh with them as modern intellectuals tend to be with millionaires. Mentioning Plato, some might say that the agent of such a boorish process of mechanization and scientific explanatory demonstration is Platonism and not Christianity, sadly for them, it does not really matter, not if you understand were I am coming from with this distinction between disenchantment and demytification. Demytification: It is something Nietzsche treats aptly, it is the Apollonian mindset, one corollary of it, it is Ur-Platonism at play. That is so, however, Weber and Nietzsche are talking of something akin yet entirely different. Demytification and Disenchantment are related, but they are not the same. There is since Homer demytification, but disenchantment is, in comparison, the affair of yesterday. What matters in this prolonged period? That we most never forget that history is not monistic, because there are always different trends and currents converging into a historical epoch, often opposed, difficult to relate; historical continuity is never a simple thread. The unity of the world is difficult for Clio to grasp. And now we are talking. All that said, Sych gives his insight, it is elemental: Technology or technique is just artistry minus intelligence.
TL,DR Since the Renaissance technological and scientific development might have become faster, but such modern development is part of a prolongated process by which the world becomes dominated by human artifice, explained by scientific knowledge and where myths get replaced by a historically (in its theological claims at least, if you are Christophobic) oriented faith. Saint Augustine was much more severe towards myth than many moderns were, and Christianity cannot give up on myth (poetically, morally, maybe even spiritually), that said, the lack of myth is an integral part of Western-Christian civilization since Nicaea, at least. And here the point pertinent to our topic: This process cannot explain as such the disenchantment of the world, it can only ground any actual explanation of it.
Corruptio optimi, pessima This phrase has to become a truism, but it is not for the present moment, when it becomes one, man will mature his understanding. Weber is great, and Wilfredo Pareto is a hard pill to swallow. Disenchantment can become such an abstract inquiry, to the point that it becomes a better literary theme than a boringly sociological investigation. Sociology has its beauty, art and science are both interested in truth, but the beauty of science takes even more time to flourish than the beauty of art. Science starts giving answers to boring questions, but over time it can get metaphysical. Science and labour have the same soul, historically, at the end of both activities one can reap metaphysical goods, one needs, however to go through the whole process. Ludwig von Mises, for example, reaches metaphysical heights when it comes to economic calculation, but one needs to traverse first the worldly concerns of scarcity, wants, needs, supply, demand, exchange and the long litany of Catallactics so that one can appreciate that metaphysics is found in all its parts, also in Economics. What Yours Truly is trying to say is that the sciences are more akin to the servile arts, what we nowadays call work, than to the liberal arts or, simply, arts. The sciences, as labour, are more ascetical than they are mystical, they are needed to purify ourselves, they are needed as fasting is needed, or lent. There is nothing beautiful in fasting, the journey is horrid, what is beautiful is getting to eat normal again, after some weeks, when Easter with spring’s blossoming comes. Similarly, science is work, it is prosaic, its poetry is in the destruction of fancy, in its demystification, there is nothing more disgusting to science than mysticism, unrelated to mystery, that is why the scientific mind tends, when it is not properly organized and governed, towards agnosticism. Asceticism, according to Pavel Florensky, is filokalia (the name explains itself: love of beauty), the claim that there is more love of beauty in science than in art could be made, because love naturally comes from the knowledge of needs, and science can be so dry… All this is meant to challenge a common belief, to say that science and even technology are metaphysical, and they must be dignified as many desire nature and the environment to be, SyntherChronicles will go further: He makes the claim that both scientific and technical knowledge are rooted in human nature, and their corrupt state must not be taken as their natural state. He answer contra Heidegger: Science thinks, and what doesn’t think is an angel, an animal… or an idiot
Corruptio optimi, pessima What happens when you give computers to a monkey? A funny video. What happens when you give a millennial tradition of theological demytification done against mythology4, of History against perennial cycles of becoming, of natural reason against brutal intuition to a man who has only learnt that nothing lasts forever, that reason is just engineering and that History is whatever happened in the past5? You get a disenchanted world. There is talk of the divide of cultures, Sych does not want to unite cultures, humanistic and scientist, he wants to truly get one world, instead of a bundle of cultures, this is: SyntherChronicles is developing a synthetic philosophy; therefore, Weber is on the radar, so that man can use his iPhone, listen to Mozart on it, and not feel ashamed.
Conclusion: Shifting the Weberian paradigm
Technology is the topic most beloved by our times, but it is the least when it comes to philosophical understanding and deep sociology. The sign of the contemporary quasi-intellectual is the ability to give a general critic of technology. The distinction between the true and the false mindfulness is, when it comes to technology, to start with Weber.
The true question is not if electronic devices have perverted our souls, the true question is if this question even makes sense. It does not make sense because there is a more fundamental question: Is it man’s rotten soul that uses machines to evil end, or the structure of the machine that corrupt man who relies on it? Without answering this, whether iPhones are good or bad, regressive or progressive, civilizing or uncivilized, are pointless questions.
Much more could be said, but for now we most leave the idiot be. There are other things to talk about, Clown World will stay as it is, at least until Yours Truly has more to say about its soul.
Idiot-sprache can be read as a language game, or, sociologically, as a part of the decivilizing process’s effect upon our language habitus (second nature)
Before Kant
Demytification: It is not the elimination of myth, it is a socially ascertainable process by which the role of myth as the main explanation of reality, understood as nature and the human world, is eroded and gives way to other explanations, theological, metaphysical, scientific. It leads, in turn, from a mythical understanding of human existence, to a historical understanding. An example is the conversion of roman myth into literature, or the way Plato criticizes the poets in The Republic. It is not the elimination of myth. To understand where Yours Truly comes from, you can read J.R. Tolkien’s essay about fairy stories, and also a thorough reading of Plato.
Mythology: It is not the same as myth, mythology is when man uses myth in similar fashion to modern ideologies, when it is used as a means to power, knowledge or therapeutically, against the fear of death. A good example is the use of the Bible, from the XIVth century onwards, as a book of natural knowledge, instead of using proper scientific research to understand the universe. Neoplatonism, as in Julian the Apostate, with highly allegorical readings of myths, is an even better example of mythology. Mythology can also be read as the study of myth, or their taxonomy, here this definition is not being used.
History is not what happened in the past, it is all human events that, occurring in time, transcend it. This was the subject of another piece of Yours Truly: Manifest Century
fascinating article and thanks for working on this theme as i think its really important. but i still think marxism and the marxist approach to culture and culture critique has the best resources for making sense of the development or devolution of culture, not weber but perhaps your focus is on myth. anyway, someone like christopher lasch i think proves this point. the critique of technology makes the most since together with a critique of the capitalist system and its ascendant values.
First and foremost I appreaciate the endorsement. I am focusing on Weber and Auguste Comte because I think their influence is as pervasive as other thinkers and, yet, we do not consider how much power their thought as upon us.
I think that Weber influences people like Heidegger (or my own Austrian School) the same way Popper can be found all over the place influencing the thought of a wide variety of thinkers.
I think that, before we delve into the profound profoundity of someone like Heidegger, before we moralize (which is important) about technology, we need to adress the “elephant in the room” that is Max Weber.
One last point is an admittance on my part: I am biases against marxism. I am biased not because it is evil or revolutionary, it is just that, like many, I have been bombarded with marxism (of a more soft and dull type for sure) all my life and it becomes tiresome to find about every possible subject some academic or journo with the same good ol’combo: Marx, Althusser and, maybe, some other french intellectual (except for any of the french liberals like Raymond Aaron or De Jouvenel). But you are right, marxism is important, and, being quite a revisionist (for good and bad), adressing such a monstrosity of a históricas force is essential.
Either way, the feedback is much appreciated, in Kantian lingo, it is the a priori of improvement.