7 ms·

Against Disenchantment

61 points by Vigier 7y ago

dr_dshiv 7y ago
This has relevance to the magic of AI and the disenchantment feeling when we understand it. What we need is Feynman's enchantment at integrating scientific understanding with awe, where they aren't in opposition. Where learning the biology of a rose can enhance appreciation. E.g., "Wow, such a simple algorithm can create intelligent outcomes"
- api 7y ago
  It really is a genuine mystery why mystery creates a sense of awe and why learning for many people leads to cynicism. Maybe we are driven toward learning via an emotional mechanism that draws us to the unknown and gives it a "sparkle" or "allure" similar to how sex drive works. Once we learn that mechanism turns off, again similar to how the sexual allure lessens after orgasm.
  - vinceguidry 7y ago
    It offers a heady sense of power and control, even though you intuitively know there's always a catch. If you want to be powerful like a genie, you have to learn to live in a lamp and do the bidding of whatever random a-hole figures out they have to rub it. The unknown is glamorous, and indeed an old word for magical spells was glamour. The disenchantment that results from actually learning how the spells work is the revelation that nothing truly offers infinite power, not even magic. Wisdom is the discovery that a world without magic, as much disillusionment as that might save people, is also a world without wonder. Children would stop getting impressed by dinosaurs once we start cloning them and putting them everywhere. Any wonder that's ubiquitous is by definition no longer wondrous
  - rjf72 7y ago
    Evolutionary imperative would be a very simple explanation. The Sentinelese [1] are probably the best example here. They are a group of people that "we" have tried to make contact with numerous times, including with the offering of gifts. The Sentinelese have responded by, for the most part, trying to kill the visitors and occasionally succeeding. But the most interesting thing about this people is how incredibly primitive they are in other ways. They literally have not yet learned how to make fire. Instead when a lightning bolt catches something on fire, they have been observed guarding and trying to keep the fire going for as long as possible. And they have no knowledge of agriculture either. The point of this is that if at some point people were sufficiently awed or contented by discovered technology your society would start to reach a point where it would simply freeze in time. Instead this instinct we have to assimilate, absorb, bore, and repeat - to no end, is something that seems likely a factor in our (as of yet) never ending drive to develop, expand, and grow. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
- im_down_w_otp 7y ago
  In the tech industry it doesn't feel to me like we're erring toward disenchantment. If anything, it feels like we're imbuing enormous numbers of mundane things with magical properties and cult-like followings to go along with them. There's a massive ecosystem of merkle trees which are purportedly going to completely transform humanity through how we transact payments. There are multiple glamorous conferences, dedicated to banal things like process schedulers, that an outsider could easily mistake for Sunday Mass at a megachurch. Furnished with altars reserved for an evangelizing priesthood sermonizing the congregation. We sometimes even live stream them too! Contrasted against being disenchanted, we're constantly generating enormous amounts of enthusiasm about what we do, why we do it, and even every nook & cranny of how we do it. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it does stand in sharp contrast to the idea that we're wallowing in disenchantment.
  - bartcobain 7y ago
    What a way to look at things. I agree with you. Also, that makes me think that there's even the term "evangelist" used in the tech talks...
    - vinceguidry 7y ago
      The central definition of magic at use here is that an act is magical to the extent that control is removed from causation. Something went my way, but I didn't directly do anything in order to make it happen, and there's no rational way to ascertain how. It's as if I waved my hands and my will just manifested. The key is that behind every act of magic is a hidden jungle of complexity that the magical practitioner must master. A wizard masters arcane correspondences, which largely involve study of magical law, which is a rational domain divorced from human intention. If you mumble the words right and have just the right slice of frog lips, then your fireball goes boom. Or your code has to pass the syntax checker before it can get on with semantic evaluation. A priest masters the domain of human emotion and feeling, learning how to harness these things to earn mastery over divine power. If enough people believe a thing to be true, the truth manifests, called by a higher power into physical expression in the world. Or your startup manages to find funding because YC gave you their stamp of orthodox approval. You can't dispel magic because that means that there's no longer any complicated domain that we fail to understand but will pay dearly for a guide through it. Any time you have that, the emergent property of people willing to front-load time and effort for later riches and the dramatic flair for making it all look easy will manifest.
skybrian 7y ago
In some areas, superstitions persist because scientific research isn't doing all that much to dispell them. The science is controversial and available evidence isn't straightforward. Consider how many people think about nutrition and diets. Often people choose what to eat based on invisible attributes associated with food (labelling) that we as consumers can't observe directly. Opaque processes can do it too. With the rise of targeted advertising, coincidences can easily be interpreted as the result of someone watching you whether they are or not.
- peteey 7y ago
  Science is not always available to repel superstition. Nutrition is the convenient thing to fixate on, but the body is far more complex and is essential to understand. Consider that the dangers of putting petrol in a diesel engine is not explained by understanding the fuel alone. It doesn't help that our bodies vary greatly compared to the number of engine models. We should be free to dismiss magic as imaginative whimsy without hard science. "Not uh" is a valid counter argument.
- hyperpallium 7y ago
  Countless millenia of empirical observation has the stronger scientific claim. I'd like an elementary theory of nutrition, but evidence first.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    You don't have direct access to past observations. Most were never recorded. At best you have highly filtered and biased summaries.
eli_gottlieb 7y ago
Bloody hell, that was one of the most uselessly long-winded essays I've ever read! Do you actually expect to find any fairies, gods, ghosts, successful sorcerers, etc, or not? Worse, the basic question is never even posed: why should we tie our conception of society and our meaning-making capacities, as applied to our own lives, to belief or disbelief in the supernatural? After all, if the "supernatural" existed, it would just be more natural, more stuff with causal powers, which would therefore be intrinsically tied into the rest of the causal order of things.
- carapace 7y ago
  You're right I think (about the "supernatural", not the "uselessly long-winded" bit, although I feel ya.) Here's the thing that bother's me: both the superstitious people and the enlightened (in the sense of disenchanted) people are missing the point. There is always a boundary between the known and the unknown. (Just to pick a wacky one at random: there is no scientific evidence one way or another that "ghosts" are or are not made of "dark matter".) I am not a scientist, but I am an amateur: I love science. Carl Sagan is a hero of mine. So one day I attended a Reiki session. What's Reiki? (Spoiler alert: NO ONE KNOWS! But I'm getting ahead of myself...) Reiki is the name given to a kind of healing energy (apologies to any physicists reading this) that can be channeled by people to engender healing effects. So, I'm sitting in this chair, and this person is waving her arm at me from about a meter away, and damned if I don't feel something "filling me up" as it were. Now I've felt e.g. high voltage fields, I'm no stranger to the Van de Graff generator and it's potential (no pun intended) to enable various party tricks. This wasn't an electric field. For one thing I could feel it within the volume of my body and (somehow) extending into the space around me. For another it heals. I don't want to get into the personal details, but it accelerates or engenders healing on mental, emotional and physical planes simultaneously. Now my first reaction, after the awe waned a little, was, "OMG let's do science to this!" But neither the Reiki practitioners nor the scientists that I have met are interested. If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki "energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is very sparsely populated.
paganel 7y ago
Up until recently I had only known of most of max Max Weber's thoughts through the books written by other thinkers (I had only read his "Protestant Ethic" about 10 years ago) but as I'm about to finish his "Economy and Society" [1] I more and more realize that we live in a Max Weber world, we have been doing so since the advent of capitalism (I'd say since the early 1400s by which time the Italian city states had "invented" most of capitalism's basic tools). I remember an interview from back in 2002 or 2003 with today's most wealthy man, that is Jeff Bezos, and I was stuck by his insistence even back then of measuring and counting almost everything that involved Amazon's business, there was no room for happenstance or of "we think of taking that business decision because [insert some intuition-based thing]", everything was rationalized, there was no room for "enchanted" solutions (the ones involving intuition, for example), disenchantment had already taken place. Couple of years later (I think around 2005-2006) I also remember the partial furore caused by a Google designer who had decided to leave the company because he was unhappy with Marissa Mayer's decisions of using certain colors on the Google front-page based on A/B testing alone, there was no room for "artistic thinking" anymore (not his exact words, but the general idea of his post back then), a specific blue nuance had to be chosen only after A/B testing, there was nothing left to the designers' imagination. Again, a big step towards rationalization and a big step away from the "enchanted" artistic work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_and_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_and_Society
- hguant 7y ago
  If you're interested in Weber, you might find Erich Fromm interesting as well. He studied under Weber's brother in Germany, fled to America during the rise of Nazism, and wrote a monograph for the officials and State Department types who would later coalesce CIA about the conditions which lead a democratic people to turn to Fascism. The monograph was later expanded into a book called _Escape From Freedom_, which is widely regarded as the first work of political psychology.
  - paganel 7y ago
    > If you're interested in Weber, you might find Erich Fromm interesting as well I did read his "Sane Society" just recently and he was almost like a revelation to me, I didn't know about "Escape From Freedom" and the story behind it, I'll sure be checking it out, thanks for the recommendation!
beefman 7y ago
I'm glad to know there's a name for this. The world has definitely become less enchannted in the last 30 years, and even the last 10. I imagine this process has been roughly continuous since ancient times, and that would be consistent with my understanding of history. It's not as straightforward as the fraction of people who believe in magic, though that is certainly related and decreasing. It's also the importance of art, the importance of holidays, how easily we have sex, how much violence we tolerate...
idoubtit 7y ago
Metaphysical subjects like this are mostly a matter of taste, but I can't resist pointing out there are bias and errors in this. > the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths or magic. Religion is excluded from all this "enchantment" talk. I don't know if it is because of the personal belief of the author, or because it would hurt most of the American readers. E.g. Christians generally believe in miracles and saints, or at least they believe that some kind of omnipotent spirit watches over them. Isn't that the most common form of magic? > Chasing the domination of nature, humans began to dominate each other. [...] led toward the objectification of humanity; the concentration camps and Gulag followed. This is absurd. When Tamerlan destroyed cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people, there was no desire of dominating Nature, nor "enchantment". Three thousand years ago, Assurbanipal organized large scale transfers of populations, and he claimed he tortured civilians routinely. Many "enlightened" religious wars led to huge atrocities, where the opposite side was treated worse than cattle. And of course, slavery and "sub-human races" are an old invention totally unrelated to the domination of Nature. Modern tools led to powerful acts, but "objectification of humanity" is nothing new. [edit: typos]
- rjf72 7y ago
  The article hit on this exact point with a rather interesting quote: "I should note that disenchantment should not be confused with secularisation. The sociological evidence suggests that de-Christianisation, while usually equated with secularisation, often correlates with an increase in belief in spirits, ghosts and magic – not the reverse.". The article is more about animism than magic. Personally I find the confident, sometimes bordering on militant, rejection of animism by some to be no less peculiar than the no less confident adoption of others in religions undoubtedly invented by men. Why? We know that our brains seem to drive most of our decisions through various complex interactions with the rest of our body. And when these actors are manipulated, our behaviors thus change. This seems like a clear enough argument for determinism that would clearly run contrary to animism, but there's one little problem. "Me." I am standing here believing that I am the one choosing my words, formatting my text, conveying my thoughts. Why would I be observing this, imagining myself to be the one engaging in such actions? If you write a program to generate a pseudo-random number I think everybody would agree it's quite absurd to imagine some being briefly flickers into existence, imagines himself picking a number, and then flickers back out of existence. Yet how does this notion become any less absurd as the program becomes more complex? You have to engage in extensive hand-waving and appeals to unknown and untestable facts to argue against animism in this case. Quite ironic then that it is this same behavior that people use as a critique of animism. Don't take this as an endorsement or condemnation of either side. If anything it's an an appeal against radicalism on either side: believe what you want, try to persuade interested others if it gives you satisfaction, don't escalate beyond that.
bfuller 7y ago
This is something the situationalists addressed with the theory of derive. There are plenty of people carrying on in that tradition, including my own project.
PavlovsCat 7y ago
> Furthermore, the widely repeated claim that modern science necessarily produces disenchantment is equally a mistake. It fails on a philosophical level because it has been impossible to successfully and fully demarcate ‘science’ from other domains. As Larry Laudan, the greatest living philosopher of science, has shown, ‘there are no epistemic features which all and only the disciplines we accept as “scientific” share in common’ and, moreover there is no unitary scientific method. There is, however, a result they share in common: > The rise of the natural sciences is credited with a demonstrable, ever-quickening increase in human knowledge and power; shortly before the modern age European mankind knew less than Archimedes in the third century B.C., while the first fifty years of our century have witnessed more important discoveries than all the centuries of recorded history together. Yet the same phenomenon is blamed with equal right for the hardly less demonstrable increase in human despair or the specifically modern nihilism which has spread to ever larger sections of the population, their most significant aspect perhaps being that they no longer spare the scientists themselves, whose well-founded optimism could still, in the nineteenth century, stand up against the equally justifiable pessimism of thinkers and poets. The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself. -- Hannah Arent You might say that's being blind and alone, and knowing it. I still don't agree that this necessarily needs to lead to pessimism or nihilism or disenchantment, I am joyful because I want to be, not because I have reasons for it I couldn't dissect and disappear with "rational thought". But what I observe is that, we seem to have regressed from that, we love to pretend objectivity is even available to us, and think science is somehow the opposite of "mere subjective experience". It's still just subjective experience, on a larger scale by more people, but that doesn't make it fundamentally different. Heisenberg knew this, we no longer, and I wonder why that is. > How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? -- Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman" (1882)

61 points by Vigier 7y ago

This has relevance to the magic of AI and the disenchantment feeling when we understand it. What we need is Feynman's enchantment at integrating scientific understanding with awe, where they aren't in opposition. Where learning the biology of a rose can enhance appreciation. E.g., "Wow, such a simple algorithm can create intelligent outcomes"

api 7y ago
It really is a genuine mystery why mystery creates a sense of awe and why learning for many people leads to cynicism. Maybe we are driven toward learning via an emotional mechanism that draws us to the unknown and gives it a "sparkle" or "allure" similar to how sex drive works. Once we learn that mechanism turns off, again similar to how the sexual allure lessens after orgasm.
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  It offers a heady sense of power and control, even though you intuitively know there's always a catch. If you want to be powerful like a genie, you have to learn to live in a lamp and do the bidding of whatever random a-hole figures out they have to rub it. The unknown is glamorous, and indeed an old word for magical spells was glamour. The disenchantment that results from actually learning how the spells work is the revelation that nothing truly offers infinite power, not even magic. Wisdom is the discovery that a world without magic, as much disillusionment as that might save people, is also a world without wonder. Children would stop getting impressed by dinosaurs once we start cloning them and putting them everywhere. Any wonder that's ubiquitous is by definition no longer wondrous
- rjf72 7y ago
  Evolutionary imperative would be a very simple explanation. The Sentinelese [1] are probably the best example here. They are a group of people that "we" have tried to make contact with numerous times, including with the offering of gifts. The Sentinelese have responded by, for the most part, trying to kill the visitors and occasionally succeeding. But the most interesting thing about this people is how incredibly primitive they are in other ways. They literally have not yet learned how to make fire. Instead when a lightning bolt catches something on fire, they have been observed guarding and trying to keep the fire going for as long as possible. And they have no knowledge of agriculture either. The point of this is that if at some point people were sufficiently awed or contented by discovered technology your society would start to reach a point where it would simply freeze in time. Instead this instinct we have to assimilate, absorb, bore, and repeat - to no end, is something that seems likely a factor in our (as of yet) never ending drive to develop, expand, and grow. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
im_down_w_otp 7y ago
In the tech industry it doesn't feel to me like we're erring toward disenchantment. If anything, it feels like we're imbuing enormous numbers of mundane things with magical properties and cult-like followings to go along with them. There's a massive ecosystem of merkle trees which are purportedly going to completely transform humanity through how we transact payments. There are multiple glamorous conferences, dedicated to banal things like process schedulers, that an outsider could easily mistake for Sunday Mass at a megachurch. Furnished with altars reserved for an evangelizing priesthood sermonizing the congregation. We sometimes even live stream them too! Contrasted against being disenchanted, we're constantly generating enormous amounts of enthusiasm about what we do, why we do it, and even every nook & cranny of how we do it. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it does stand in sharp contrast to the idea that we're wallowing in disenchantment.
- bartcobain 7y ago
  What a way to look at things. I agree with you. Also, that makes me think that there's even the term "evangelist" used in the tech talks...
  - vinceguidry 7y ago
    The central definition of magic at use here is that an act is magical to the extent that control is removed from causation. Something went my way, but I didn't directly do anything in order to make it happen, and there's no rational way to ascertain how. It's as if I waved my hands and my will just manifested. The key is that behind every act of magic is a hidden jungle of complexity that the magical practitioner must master. A wizard masters arcane correspondences, which largely involve study of magical law, which is a rational domain divorced from human intention. If you mumble the words right and have just the right slice of frog lips, then your fireball goes boom. Or your code has to pass the syntax checker before it can get on with semantic evaluation. A priest masters the domain of human emotion and feeling, learning how to harness these things to earn mastery over divine power. If enough people believe a thing to be true, the truth manifests, called by a higher power into physical expression in the world. Or your startup manages to find funding because YC gave you their stamp of orthodox approval. You can't dispel magic because that means that there's no longer any complicated domain that we fail to understand but will pay dearly for a guide through it. Any time you have that, the emergent property of people willing to front-load time and effort for later riches and the dramatic flair for making it all look easy will manifest.

skybrian 7y ago

In some areas, superstitions persist because scientific research isn't doing all that much to dispell them. The science is controversial and available evidence isn't straightforward. Consider how many people think about nutrition and diets. Often people choose what to eat based on invisible attributes associated with food (labelling) that we as consumers can't observe directly. Opaque processes can do it too. With the rise of targeted advertising, coincidences can easily be interpreted as the result of someone watching you whether they are or not.

peteey 7y ago
Science is not always available to repel superstition. Nutrition is the convenient thing to fixate on, but the body is far more complex and is essential to understand. Consider that the dangers of putting petrol in a diesel engine is not explained by understanding the fuel alone. It doesn't help that our bodies vary greatly compared to the number of engine models. We should be free to dismiss magic as imaginative whimsy without hard science. "Not uh" is a valid counter argument.
hyperpallium 7y ago
Countless millenia of empirical observation has the stronger scientific claim. I'd like an elementary theory of nutrition, but evidence first.
- skybrian 7y ago
  You don't have direct access to past observations. Most were never recorded. At best you have highly filtered and biased summaries.

eli_gottlieb 7y ago

Bloody hell, that was one of the most uselessly long-winded essays I've ever read! Do you actually expect to find any fairies, gods, ghosts, successful sorcerers, etc, or not? Worse, the basic question is never even posed: why should we tie our conception of society and our meaning-making capacities, as applied to our own lives, to belief or disbelief in the supernatural? After all, if the "supernatural" existed, it would just be more natural, more stuff with causal powers, which would therefore be intrinsically tied into the rest of the causal order of things.

carapace 7y ago
You're right I think (about the "supernatural", not the "uselessly long-winded" bit, although I feel ya.) Here's the thing that bother's me: both the superstitious people and the enlightened (in the sense of disenchanted) people are missing the point. There is always a boundary between the known and the unknown. (Just to pick a wacky one at random: there is no scientific evidence one way or another that "ghosts" are or are not made of "dark matter".) I am not a scientist, but I am an amateur: I love science. Carl Sagan is a hero of mine. So one day I attended a Reiki session. What's Reiki? (Spoiler alert: NO ONE KNOWS! But I'm getting ahead of myself...) Reiki is the name given to a kind of healing energy (apologies to any physicists reading this) that can be channeled by people to engender healing effects. So, I'm sitting in this chair, and this person is waving her arm at me from about a meter away, and damned if I don't feel something "filling me up" as it were. Now I've felt e.g. high voltage fields, I'm no stranger to the Van de Graff generator and it's potential (no pun intended) to enable various party tricks. This wasn't an electric field. For one thing I could feel it within the volume of my body and (somehow) extending into the space around me. For another it heals. I don't want to get into the personal details, but it accelerates or engenders healing on mental, emotional and physical planes simultaneously. Now my first reaction, after the awe waned a little, was, "OMG let's do science to this!" But neither the Reiki practitioners nor the scientists that I have met are interested. If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki "energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is very sparsely populated.

paganel 7y ago

Up until recently I had only known of most of max Max Weber's thoughts through the books written by other thinkers (I had only read his "Protestant Ethic" about 10 years ago) but as I'm about to finish his "Economy and Society" [1] I more and more realize that we live in a Max Weber world, we have been doing so since the advent of capitalism (I'd say since the early 1400s by which time the Italian city states had "invented" most of capitalism's basic tools). I remember an interview from back in 2002 or 2003 with today's most wealthy man, that is Jeff Bezos, and I was stuck by his insistence even back then of measuring and counting almost everything that involved Amazon's business, there was no room for happenstance or of "we think of taking that business decision because [insert some intuition-based thing]", everything was rationalized, there was no room for "enchanted" solutions (the ones involving intuition, for example), disenchantment had already taken place. Couple of years later (I think around 2005-2006) I also remember the partial furore caused by a Google designer who had decided to leave the company because he was unhappy with Marissa Mayer's decisions of using certain colors on the Google front-page based on A/B testing alone, there was no room for "artistic thinking" anymore (not his exact words, but the general idea of his post back then), a specific blue nuance had to be chosen only after A/B testing, there was nothing left to the designers' imagination. Again, a big step towards rationalization and a big step away from the "enchanted" artistic work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_and_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_and_Society

hguant 7y ago
If you're interested in Weber, you might find Erich Fromm interesting as well. He studied under Weber's brother in Germany, fled to America during the rise of Nazism, and wrote a monograph for the officials and State Department types who would later coalesce CIA about the conditions which lead a democratic people to turn to Fascism. The monograph was later expanded into a book called _Escape From Freedom_, which is widely regarded as the first work of political psychology.
- paganel 7y ago
  > If you're interested in Weber, you might find Erich Fromm interesting as well I did read his "Sane Society" just recently and he was almost like a revelation to me, I didn't know about "Escape From Freedom" and the story behind it, I'll sure be checking it out, thanks for the recommendation!

beefman 7y ago

I'm glad to know there's a name for this. The world has definitely become less enchannted in the last 30 years, and even the last 10. I imagine this process has been roughly continuous since ancient times, and that would be consistent with my understanding of history. It's not as straightforward as the fraction of people who believe in magic, though that is certainly related and decreasing. It's also the importance of art, the importance of holidays, how easily we have sex, how much violence we tolerate...

idoubtit 7y ago

Metaphysical subjects like this are mostly a matter of taste, but I can't resist pointing out there are bias and errors in this. > the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths or magic. Religion is excluded from all this "enchantment" talk. I don't know if it is because of the personal belief of the author, or because it would hurt most of the American readers. E.g. Christians generally believe in miracles and saints, or at least they believe that some kind of omnipotent spirit watches over them. Isn't that the most common form of magic? > Chasing the domination of nature, humans began to dominate each other. [...] led toward the objectification of humanity; the concentration camps and Gulag followed. This is absurd. When Tamerlan destroyed cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people, there was no desire of dominating Nature, nor "enchantment". Three thousand years ago, Assurbanipal organized large scale transfers of populations, and he claimed he tortured civilians routinely. Many "enlightened" religious wars led to huge atrocities, where the opposite side was treated worse than cattle. And of course, slavery and "sub-human races" are an old invention totally unrelated to the domination of Nature. Modern tools led to powerful acts, but "objectification of humanity" is nothing new. [edit: typos]

rjf72 7y ago
The article hit on this exact point with a rather interesting quote: "I should note that disenchantment should not be confused with secularisation. The sociological evidence suggests that de-Christianisation, while usually equated with secularisation, often correlates with an increase in belief in spirits, ghosts and magic – not the reverse.". The article is more about animism than magic. Personally I find the confident, sometimes bordering on militant, rejection of animism by some to be no less peculiar than the no less confident adoption of others in religions undoubtedly invented by men. Why? We know that our brains seem to drive most of our decisions through various complex interactions with the rest of our body. And when these actors are manipulated, our behaviors thus change. This seems like a clear enough argument for determinism that would clearly run contrary to animism, but there's one little problem. "Me." I am standing here believing that I am the one choosing my words, formatting my text, conveying my thoughts. Why would I be observing this, imagining myself to be the one engaging in such actions? If you write a program to generate a pseudo-random number I think everybody would agree it's quite absurd to imagine some being briefly flickers into existence, imagines himself picking a number, and then flickers back out of existence. Yet how does this notion become any less absurd as the program becomes more complex? You have to engage in extensive hand-waving and appeals to unknown and untestable facts to argue against animism in this case. Quite ironic then that it is this same behavior that people use as a critique of animism. Don't take this as an endorsement or condemnation of either side. If anything it's an an appeal against radicalism on either side: believe what you want, try to persuade interested others if it gives you satisfaction, don't escalate beyond that.

bfuller 7y ago

This is something the situationalists addressed with the theory of derive. There are plenty of people carrying on in that tradition, including my own project.

PavlovsCat 7y ago

> Furthermore, the widely repeated claim that modern science necessarily produces disenchantment is equally a mistake. It fails on a philosophical level because it has been impossible to successfully and fully demarcate ‘science’ from other domains. As Larry Laudan, the greatest living philosopher of science, has shown, ‘there are no epistemic features which all and only the disciplines we accept as “scientific” share in common’ and, moreover there is no unitary scientific method. There is, however, a result they share in common: > The rise of the natural sciences is credited with a demonstrable, ever-quickening increase in human knowledge and power; shortly before the modern age European mankind knew less than Archimedes in the third century B.C., while the first fifty years of our century have witnessed more important discoveries than all the centuries of recorded history together. Yet the same phenomenon is blamed with equal right for the hardly less demonstrable increase in human despair or the specifically modern nihilism which has spread to ever larger sections of the population, their most significant aspect perhaps being that they no longer spare the scientists themselves, whose well-founded optimism could still, in the nineteenth century, stand up against the equally justifiable pessimism of thinkers and poets. The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself. -- Hannah Arent You might say that's being blind and alone, and knowing it. I still don't agree that this necessarily needs to lead to pessimism or nihilism or disenchantment, I am joyful because I want to be, not because I have reasons for it I couldn't dissect and disappear with "rational thought". But what I observe is that, we seem to have regressed from that, we love to pretend objectivity is even available to us, and think science is somehow the opposite of "mere subjective experience". It's still just subjective experience, on a larger scale by more people, but that doesn't make it fundamentally different. Heisenberg knew this, we no longer, and I wonder why that is. > How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? -- Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman" (1882)