By Carl Trueman, TGC.
Few today would deny that we live in a world marked by disenchantment. A term popularized by Max Weber, “disenchantment” captures the sense that nothing—including ourselves—has any great significance, that we’re at best cogs in some giant machine, whether political, bureaucratic, or economic.
There’s irony here: Human beings are exceptional—capable of feats, positive and negative, to which no other creature can aspire. We can produce beautiful art and develop cures for diseases; we can engage in acts of deliberate cruelty and have even produced weapons that could annihilate our species. Yet the net result of all this brilliance has been to render us small in our own eyes. Our intellectual and technical brilliance has all but eroded our sense of mystery not simply with the world in general but with ourselves in particular. We’ve become nothing more than raw matter, talented for sure but ultimately of no account.
In this context, it’s not surprising to hear calls for the reenchantment of the world. If the problem is that materialism has reduced us, then the answer is to find the depth in our existence that has been lost, to recapture a sense of the mystery of existence. Even in this disenchanted world, there are still hints of something deeper: Stories of great deeds still have the power to inspire, many of us still experience love for another, and even our dissatisfaction with disenchantment indicates we crave something more.
While the disenchantment/reenchantment model contains much truth, it’s ultimately inadequate both as an explanation of our world’s problems and as a solution to them.
Destroying the Sacred
Take, for example, the shift in language surrounding abortion. Thirty years ago, abortion advocates argued it should be “safe, legal and rare.” That’s the kind of approach we might expect in a disenchanted world. It has an air of resignation and of the acceptance that, in a world like ours, sometimes we have to do things that we find distasteful. It was a medical procedure, unpleasant but necessary in certain circumstances.