The Myth of Disenchantment

Imagine if you will an episode from sometime in the last hundred thousand years or so in the lives of one of our ancestors. Picture yourself for example hunting in the landscape of Ice-Age Europe. You stand on a rocky outcrop looking down at an auroch in the valley below. You hold a spear you yourself have fashioned over several days; selecting the right kind of stone, knapping flakes from it in the way taught to you as a youth, then hafting it to a sapling you’ve also shaped and tempered yourself. Every one of your senses is poised, focused on the prey and alert to dangers from predators like cave bears and lions. Perhaps you’ve been tracking the animal for hours beforehand, using smell, vision and hearing to read signs in the environment, whilst drawing on knowledge about the animals behavior from experience or passed down from your elders. In fact you have intimate knowledge about hundreds, perhaps thousands of different plants, animals and insects and their interrelationships. And you are not alone. Others from your tribe, dotted around the valley, approach the animal in a stealthy, co-ordinated way, and when the kill is taken back to camp it is shared between everyone whilst stories are told around the campfire.

Such a hunt exemplifies many things about how our ancestors lived. They required detailed knowledge about their environment and a high degree of skill in everything from making clothes and stone tools, to tracking the seasonal patterns and properties of plants and animals. All our mental and physical powers worked in unison to aid survival. All our senses, skills and knowledge were tailored to the singular purpose of staying alive and ensuring the survival of the next generation. And we faced such challenges together, living in close-knit, familial tribes bonded through custom and ceremony in which everyone participated in one way or another. Concepts of individualism, land ownership or personal wealth would have been utterly foreign, and one imagines there was little time for boredom or agonizing over the meaning of life. The world would have been suffused with meaning, with birdsong, animal tracks, the movement of the stars, the mountains, and seasons all signifying something of importance. As an aboriginal elder from the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory, Australia, once told the ethnographer Deborah Rose about birds alone, “birds got ceremony of their own—brolga, turkey, crow, hawk, white and black cockatoo—all got ceremony, women’s side, men’s side, … everything.” Rose says that for traditional aboriginal people :

Plants as well as animals are sentient, and, according to many Aboriginal people, the earth itself has culture and power within it. In this line of thought, we are all culture-creatures. We are intelligent, we act with purpose, we communicate and take notice, we participate in a world of multiple purposes. It is a multi-cultural world from inside the earth right on through”(100).

We and our ancestor hominids lived this meaning-full, hunter-gatherer lifestyle for 99% of the last million years.

Then about 10,000 years ago, modern humans discovered agriculture and how to domesticate animals. These developments enabled bigger populations which led in turn to the first cities, centralized governments and religions circa 3000 BCE, viz. to civilization. Henceforth society would be fractured into permanent classes and professions: kings and subjects, craftsmen and farmers, soldiers and merchants, priests and parishioners. The impact of these changes on the human psyche must have been enormous. For while civilization had many benefits it also has many downsides. Our brains, hands, and bodies are adapted to the freedom of the hunter-gatherer life rather than to the drudgery of pushing a plough, sitting in front of a computer or driving an Uber all day. For most people, civilization implied, and still implies, a more sedentary lifestyle, greater routine and a mind out of touch with the flows and cycles of nature.

The reason I am contrasting the hunter-gatherer life to that under civilization is that discussions on spirituality often ignore the evolutionary bedrock upon which our psychological architecture has been erected, attributing maladies of the ‘human condition’ like anxiety, ennui, nihilism, meaninglessness, alienation and depression to things like atheism, the scientific worldview or the process of secularization. This mistake is nowhere on display more than in discussions about “disenchantment”. Disenchantment is the idea that secularization robs the world of the magic with which religion once imbued it. The eminent cultural historian Charles Taylor describes disenchantment as an “impoverishment” rather than a mere “shedding of irrational feelings”. It has been a central theme in the thoughts of writers and YouTubers like John Vervaeke and Brendan Graham Dempsey who call for a re-enchantment of some kind or another centered on a renewed sense of the transcendent. One of the first to talk about disenchantment was the German sociologist Max Weber. In his book, The Sociology of Religion, Weber explained that rationalism in general:

suppresses belief in magic, [such that] the world’s processes become disenchanted, lose their magical significance, and henceforth simply “are” and “happen” but no longer signify anything. (125)

The problem with this thesis, however, is not that the world is disenchanted to us moderns but that disenchantment is a recent phenomenon caused by the decline of religion. As I see it, we have been disenchanted since the emergence of civilization itself. When humans swapped the open expanses of the bush for the confines of a farm, they began a long historical process by which they became increasingly alienated from nature and each other. The wealth of meanings within the natural environment, evident to the hunter-gatherer, began vanishing from view, replaced over time by a bland umwelt of technological artefacts and symbols, whether buildings, cuneiform tablets, money or mines. Civilization radically changed the very nature of how we experience the world. No longer the diversity of sounds in the forest or the open savannah but the monotonous silence of the wheatfield; no longer the agency of the hunt but the mind-numbing work of grinding grain or digging copper in the darkness of an underground mine.

And on top of this sensory and semiotic impoverishment, came the burden of inequality and hierarchy. For most of the population who were serfs, slaves, indentured servants, and the like, it was no longer a world in which one communed with plants, animals, skies and mountains, but one of taxes, debt and overseers. For kings and generals on the other hand the natural world became a site for the extraction of economic values so they could accumulate riches, expand empires, build armies and advertise their power through gigantic monuments and temples. States and empires extended their reach far and wide to draw in the required resources. Tin and copper for bronze weapons, cedarwood for temples and ships – and most importantly, serfs and slaves to toil in the fields and man their armies. The historian Lewis Mumford once described the system of social control and engineering used to build the pyramids and ziggurats of the ancient world as a “megamachine”. But for the majority, life in the megamachine compared to that of their forbears was spiritually and aesthetically barren. From this perspective, organized religion with its soothing stories of the meek inheriting the earth and the powerful finding punishment in hell, would have been one way the poor and disenfranchised made sense of a world that no longer made sense, that gave meaning to an often meaningless existence. In short, disenchantment is the cause of religion not an effect of its loss.

If we look at creation myths from the first civilizations like those of ancient Mesopotamia we occasionally catch glimpses of how the first religions were used to justify this new state of affairs. In the Akkadian myth of Atra-Hasis for example, the gods were originally divided into two tiers, the Anunnaki and the Igigu. The lower gods toiled in the fields and labored on the irrigation channels to feed the upper gods and keep them in luxury. The upper gods in exchange kept the cosmos turning day after day. But after 40 years the lower gods revolted, going on strike and destroying their tools. So the leader of the upper gods, Enki, took the blood of the god Geshtu-E  and mixed it with clay creating humans to replace the Igigu (Wiki). Thus the priests had people believe that humans were created to labor and suffer in the service, not of kings and overlords, but the very gods themselves.

Elaborate ritual and sacrifice overseen by a caste of full-time priests was also necessary to keep the world from sinking back into the primal chaos ruled by the fearsome serpent-god Tiamat. Similar ritual-centered cosmologies are found in the earliest religions whether those of the Aztecs, in the Vedas of India or the empires of ancient China. In most religions, humans have an essential cosmic purpose such that existence might be seen as enchanted and meaningful. But it is a false enchantment, more like an evil spell disguising true reality than something of genuine value

We should not idealize the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It was no doubt peppered with moments of fear, anxiety and grief. Hunger, disease, predators and tribal violence often made life difficult and short.  But neither should we forget that something profound and beautiful was lost in the transition to a settled way of life. Indeed when hunter-gatherer people meet ‘advanced’ cultures for the first time, they do not give up the freedom of the bush easily in spite of the many enticements afforded by civilization. In 1790 Governor Phillip of Australia’s first settlement at Sydney Cove was astonished when the Aboriginal man Bennelong, whom he had been hosting at his own house, took off for the scrub at the first opportunity. “Our native has left us” he wrote, “and that at a time when he appeared to be happy and contented … I think that man’s leaving us proves that nothing will make these people amends for the loss of their liberty”.

Once civilization takes off though there is no looking back. It is unlikely to have survived this long had it generated nothing but misery. More food, physical security and  writing were some of its undoubted benefits and today we can add everything from painkillers and vaccines to Mozart and the James Webb telescope as just some of its invaluable products. But the global megamachine in which we are now living is going off the rails, eroding, at an ever-increasing rate, the environmental basis of all life on earth. The elites who run the megamachine as a matter of course love nothing more than wasting society’s resources on wars of conquest and the construction of impressive but ultimately useless monuments, whether stone pyramids 4000 years ago or silicon-based AI data centers today. Civilization can do better. We do need a re-enchantment of sorts, but not one based on the anthropocentric religions of the past, but on science and new modes of life that value nature in all its richness and complexity, compatible with, albeit different from, how our bodies and minds evolved to experience it in the first place. As Jerome Stone has written of such a science-based re-enchantment, “Our children must have a chance to play in the woods and to be taught, with wonder, gratitude and respect, at their mother’s knees, that the trees are genetically scripted”.

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References:
Governor Phillip to Joseph Banks, 26 July 1790. https://www.ryde.nsw.gov.au/Finding-Bennelong/Abduction

Mumford, L. The Myth of the Machine. Harcourt, 1964. p.28.

Rose, D.B.”Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: attentive inter-actions in the sentient world”, Environmental Humanities, vol. 3, 2013, pp. 93-109. www.environmentalhumanities.org

Stone, J. “Spirituality for Naturalists”Zygon, vol. 47, no. 3 (September 2012) p.489.

Taylor, Charles. “Buffered and porous selves”, in The Immanent Frame, September 2 2008.   https://tif.ssrc.org/2008/09/02/buffered-and-porous-selves/

Weber, M. “Science as Vocation“, H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Translated and edited), Essays in Sociology, pp. 129-156, New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. https://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf. 

Wiki entry on Atra-Hasis; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atra-Hasis