The Disenchantment of the World

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, Technology and the Sacred: Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Preface & Chapter 1: The Disenchantment of the World

I read Berman quite some time ago, but felt I should post a summary of his argument before doing one for Szerszynski, because the two have very different ways of understanding the same epistemological shift. Specifically, Szerszynski criticizes the notion of the “disenchantment of nature” that Berman bemoans; and indeed that Weber describes in his work on bureaucracy (“The disenchantment of nature is central to Weber’s account: in a disenchanted society ‘there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at work’ – everything is capable of being explained (Weber, 1989: 13))” (5).

Szerszyski does not deny that it would seem from appearances that there is indeed a disenchantment of sorts occurring in the modern age: “Nature is mathematical – something to be counted, measured and mapped. Nature is immanent – it operates according to its own internal processes, rather than being shaped or guided by a supernatural hand. It is mechanical, behaving according to cause and effect, not seeking teleological goals. It is a resource, to be owned or held in common, to be used or preserved. It gives up its meanings to careful observation and scientific theory, not to mythology or divination. This is the nature of scientific, industrial modernity, the nature whose being is mastered by science, whose value is measured by economics, and whose potentiality is determined by technology” (5).

This sounds rather like Berman. But then Szerszynki pauses and decides to look deeper. He asks, “to paraphrase Mark Twain, what if reports of the death of nature have been greatly exaggerated? What if the narrative of the disenchantment of nature is little more than a creation myth of modern society – a half-truth told in order to secure a sense of modernity’s exceptionality, its discontinuity with earlier cultures (Crook, 1991; Latour, 1993)” (7)?

The key difference in his interpretation of the trend is that it’s not that God is dead; but rather, a shuffle has occurred, which has produced a different ordering of the sacred in our lived reality: “I do not want just to identify exceptions to a general, assumed disenchantment of nature; instead, I want to propose a shift in the whole way we think of that disenchantment, in terms of an overarching set of transformations in the sacral ordering of the world” (xi-xii). So, bizarrely, it seems that even the clear trends toward secularization – the thinning out of congregations, for example – is merely a manifestation of this restructuring: “…rather than particular orderings of the sacred being a response to a particular experience or understanding of God, I would rather see any particular understanding of God (including the idea that there is no God) as a feature of a particular ordering of the sacred, as only intelligible when that order is grasped as a Gestalt” (ix-x). Similarly, we should not hail the “revival of ‘nature religion’” in contemporary societies as a “‘return of the repressed’, as an eruption of a long-suppressed pagan cosmology and sensibility” (9): “Instead, we should understand contemporary ideas of and practices around nature as evidence of a postmodern sacred, a mode of being-in-the-world and a cosmology that is the product of a long and distinctive historical process, and shaped by distinctively contemporary conditions” (9).

So like Berman, Szerszynski concedes that epistemologies are ‘situation-bound’ (“…what Heidegger calls our ‘throwness’ in history means that our being-in-the-world is mediated through – no, stronger, is incarnated in – the cultural currents into which we are thrown…. (x)), and that they are self-reinforcing (“And it is only when we approach nature in a technological way – in a way that is concerned above all with prediction and control – that the kinds of knowledge offered by science and economics become intelligible and useful (Habermas, 1971a)” (5)); but he makes the claim that there is a thread that connects these ways of knowing: “whatever character the local eddies might have, [I hope to show that] the broad swell is always that of the sacred” (x).

In other words, his book aims to show that the sacred is not dead; it is not lost; it is incognito, disguised as secularization, atheism, disenchantment, etc.. All the while, the sacred still guides our understanding of the world on a fundamental level.