Responding To Critics
About Disenchantment
I write with a fair amount of swagger only because I know I’m buoyed by the most intelligent and discerning readers on the web. My goal was never to be a stentorian megaphone giving edicts de haut en bas but to write essays as starting points for thoughtful conversations that extend through space and time. This is the inspiration for our motto here: Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled.
I received interesting comments — some complimentary, some sceptical — here and elsewhere about my piece on the myth of disenchantment, so I thought I’d clarify the main points of the argument. Mr Josephson-Storm says his argument expresses three doubts:
The Historical Doubt: the terms modern and modernity belong in the bin with the word Enlightenment — they’re all too vague to be useful. The word modernity mainly signifies that the writer thinks there was some important historical rupture: “for a long time, there was/was not x, then x disappeared/arrived and everything changed.” But there is no agreement about what x is and when it arrived/disappeared. The argument here is not that nothing changes, but that one ought to be sceptical of such neat, linear narratives. When it comes to enchantment and disenchantment, there is no neat pattern: they are always intermixed, and the dominance of one can inspire a resurgence in the other. This is why I emphasised Aleister Crowley, who aimed to refine magic with repeatable experiments — science does not necessarily correspond to disenchantment.
The Critical-Historical Doubt: why, despite spiritualist, magical, and esoteric movements, did European societies come to think of themselves as disenchanted? It functions as a regulative ideal, a rhetorical weapon. It’s convenient to say that your project or your culture or your country is “scientific” and “modern” while others are “primitive” and “superstitious”.
The Politico-Theoretical Doubt: are the workings of Euro-American society primarily disenchanting? Again, no. The major figures associated with disenchantment were (in one way or another) involved with what we’d call the occult or esoteric. Early research in electricity and magnetism inspired popular mesmerists and spiritualists. You can read Tarot cards on your smartphone. The favoured words among children today are vibes and aura. And, despite the bluster from science popularisers and airport atheists, there is no single, unambiguous criterion that separates science from pseudoscience.
Important for these discussions is Hayden White’s book Metahistory. To summarise, he argues that all historical writing is shaped into narrative structures. His word “emplotment” refers to how historians put events into familiar genres (romance, tragedy, comedy, satire) and the historian’s choices affect what these events mean to readers. Crucially, the historian’s “emplotment” is not just a flourish; history must be a narrative for it to be intelligible. The writers who see the Enlightenment (or whatever else) as a clean, triumphant break with the past are relying on narrative coherence rather than fidelity to the facts.
So, when questioning myths about the Enlightenment or any other period, historians are not doubting that changes occurred; they’re trying to come up with stories that better reflect the historical record. We will never stop believing and telling stories. We will never stop mythmaking.
