Why I Hate the Term "Re-Enchantment"

This term, "re-enchantment" is starting to enter the lexicon of right wing discussion. We should resist this. I am not sure I have a better one, but this label works for the machine, not against it.

67. Why I Hate the Term "Re-Enchantment"

Everyone these days seems to be talking about “re-enchantment.” I will admit that it has a nice feel to it. If you were raised on the Harry Potter series, or read it to your kids when they were growing up like I did, you understand the appeal. I am an avid fantasy fiction reader. I love getting myself lost in stories of knights, dragons, adventures and, or course, rescuing princesses. Tolkien’s stories are not just a refuge, they are an anchoring vision for those who would find themselves lost in the modern and post-modern world. C.S. Lewis and Narnia? What is not to like? So, when people talk about “re-enchantment” it has an immediate appeal. It resonates. This resonance is what makes the term so dangerous.

Yes. I am a curmudgeon. I am also a Calvinist. Guilty as charged. Sometimes you just revert to base programing. In this case, though, I actually advocate things which make a lot of my brethren in the Reformed tradition uncomfortable. I was blessed with curmudgeonly professors for whom words mattered. Setting the terms of a debate. Defining the terms we will use. Good definitions and good distinctions are worth their weight in gold. Using the right words does matter. “Re-enchantment” is, in my mind, the wrong word. Using it risks undermining the whole project to address our society’s authority crisis. In part, I believe, this is because it isn’t radical enough. Its too safe. It’s an idea that gives people the warm fuzzies. It lets you think you can keep what you have, but make it better and richer, like switching from black and white to colour TV.

Let’s open old faithful, worked on by Tolkien himself, the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED, and see what insights it might provide:

enchant, n. 1634— Magic, enchantment.

enchant, v. 1377— transitive. To exert magical influence upon; to bewitch, lay under a spell. Also, to endow with magical powers or properties. Also figurative. c1374–1678 figurative. To influence irresistibly or powerfully, as if by a charm; to hold spellbound; in bad sense, to delude, befool. Obsolete.

enchant, v. 1393–1609 To attract, win over, compel or induce, as if by magic (to do something). Obsolete (cf. incentive, adj. & n.).

enchant, v. 1593— To charm, delight, enrapture.

enchantment, n. 1297— The action or process of enchanting, or of employing magic or sorcery.

enchantment, n. 1678— figurative. Alluring or overpowering charm; enraptured condition; (delusive) appearance of beauty.

There are a number of evocative and compelling words and meanings associated with “enchantment.” Magic. Power. Spellbound. Charm. Delight. Enrapture. Alluring. Sorcery. Part of the problem we have in grappling with this idea is that many of us really don’t believe that magic is real. We have embraced the frame which the modern, post-Kantian world has imposed upon us. The process began with the argument that metaphysical realities like God, the supernatural, angels, demons, magic, the forms, are not realities that can be demonstrated or proven rationally. They must simply be assumed “a priori” to be true. You cannot “prove” that there is a God. You must simply believe and work from there. The same for the metaphysical forms, the supernatural, the spiritual in general. They are not rational, they are certainly not scientific. From this beginning, things moved quickly to the point where people began to assert that all of this stuff is just the figment of our imagination. Material reality is all that there is.

Our rational, scientific, technological world was build upon embracing this new way of thinking. We set aside the question of God, of meaning, of the metaphysical and the spiritual in general to focus on practical realities, how things worked. Can we understand the things which we can see and observe in nature, in society and in ourselves? This has been tremendously powerful. We placed our confidence in the power of reason, science and technology to understand all the problems we face as human beings and then to offer solutions for those same problems. It was even believed that if we could satisfy all of our observable material, personal and interpersonal needs that we could actually obtain human happiness as a goal.

The cost for this, though, is that we have turned ourselves into functional materialists. For the most part we live and act and think and feel as if there is nothing other than material reality, even when our words say otherwise. We look to material satisfactions, to material solutions ahead of all others. Reason, science and technique are our default go-to means for understanding and addressing all problems. And it shows. Increasingly, when we look around at the world, we sense something is missing, but we no longer know what it is. Someone will tell us that we are missing “God,” but who and what is God? Does anyone you know actually experience him? Ok, you go to church. You read the Bible. But how do you know that you are really experiencing God? How do you know it isn’t just come trick of the interplay of chemicals in your brain? Our communities have been broken down. We live as “mass man,” thoroughly propagandized, isolated and alone. We sense the black and white TV quality of our life.

So when someone suggests that we must “re-enchant” our lives, I get the appeal. Living enframed in the bleak materialism of the rational, scientific and technical world, we are starving and thirsty for something to give us life. Anything. The vast majority of the entertainments, experiences and pleasures we seek are meant to fill up this lack within us. When someone tells us we must re-enchant our lives, our default setting is to approach it as if it were another material solution to our problems, an other technique or approach for a richer, fuller life. But here is where the problem lies. Magic, rather than something which is opposed to rationalism and technology, is something aligned with it. It is actually the first technology.

Magic is the attempt to harness the fundamental powers of the universe for our benefit. You gather the right ingredients, mix them properly and say the incantations in the right way at the proper time of day or on the right date, within the proscribed symbols and sigils, and making the right sacrifices, you will then be guaranteed results. In this sense, we all want the world of Harry Potter and Hogwarts to be real. You wave your wand and say some corrupted Latin and the forces of the universe are there at your beck and call to harnessed and wielded. You mix the ingredients the right way during potion making and you can variously cure diseases or make someone fall in love with you. Words are important and they evoke things within us. The word “re-enchantment” promises to us that the colour can be returned to the world without us having to make any fundamental changes to our lives or how we do things. Our life will be as if always has been, but “magical.” It does this, because magic is of a piece with the technical world. Just teach us the spells, and we can bring fairies back to our gardens again.

We want to approach the irrational and the intuitive in a rational way. We make great study of things like archetypes, alchemy, symbols, myths, stories. We collect them, sort them, analyze them, categorize them and study them. Rationally. Scientifically. We look for patterns. They all claim to show us another reality. But how many of us really believe in Odin, Zeus, Isis or Shiva? Really? For most, these are esoterica, knowledge that is off the beaten path that make us seem interesting at parties. Unfair or not, there is a lot of truth to this. Or, worse, beginning with a materialist frame, not taking this supernatural stuff seriously, people think it a lark, another experience, adding richness to their lives, and in so doing open themselves to malign or evil spirits who then use this gateway willingly opened to them to put them in bondage and oppress them.

There is a lot that can be learned from writers and thinkers like Carl Jung or Mircea Eliade or even Othmar Keel, whose book on the symbolism used in the book of Psalms is excellent. We can learn a lot studying archetypes and symbols, metaphors and stories. There is no denying this. But this is not the same as actually interacting with God metaphysically, or better, supernaturally. The academic study of the spiritual is not the same thing as interacting with the spiritual realms. Iain McGilchrist argued at length that within the human person, the human brain, human consciousness, there are two identifiable halves. One half of ourselves is set up for intuitive perception, to receive the world and grasp it as a whole without necessarily having to do anything with that knowledge. The other half of ourselves is geared towards taking those wholes, organizing them, systematizing them, converting them from intuitions and feelings into language. Once in this format it can be used to build, make and do things. The cost of this transition is that rationalized intuitions lose much of their depth and richness. On one side, you have an experience that is deep and rich, fully technocolour, but not necessarily the most practical or useful. On the other side, you live in the realm of “knowledge is power.” Rational, scientific, technological. But bleak and lifeless, lacking meaning.

Ideally, those two sides of ourselves should be held in balance. What McGilchrist argues is that the history of the West broadly speaking, is one in which we have come to embrace one half ourselves, while almost entirely neglecting the other. We have forged the modern world, harnessing the power of rationality within us to build an unparalleled society. But in so doing we have lost touch with our other half, allowing it to wilt and wither. He argued that it is making us mentally ill, personally and socially sick as a society. I agree. The evidence is all around us. Recognizing this, along comes the discourse about “re-enchantment” with its linguistic associations with magic, and it connects with we who are rational, scientific and technical to the core, giving us the hope that if we just learn the incantations, mix the potions, study the myths, symbols and archetypes that we can reinject the colour back into our society. But it isn’t this easy, and the answer why to the question of why it won’t be easy is deeply tied into our society’s crisis with authority. And by this, I do not mean that we are on the precipice of an authoritarian society; but rather, why we have no authorities which we can trust.

The restoration of ourselves and our society begins with the recognition that there is no sure knowledge. The promise of enlightenment rationality was that we could put knowledge onto a sure footing. We could dispense with “superstition.” The problem is, that while scientific knowing can be immensely powerful, it cannot answer the question of what you should do with the knowledge. Should you study a thing or not? Should you harness the power of nature in the ways suggested by scientific inquiry? Science, we were told, would set aside metaphysical questions, questions of religion, faith, morality and just focus on understanding the observable world. It would pursue the truth regardless of pre-existing orthodoxies. In this sense science was supposed to operate a-morally. But when your whole world has been framed by reason, science and technology, how is it that we then decide what to do with what science has uncovered for us?

We were told that reason could produce a moral frame that would be able to guide our actions without any need for superstition. We could reason our way to good morals without God or the supernatural, without the stories, myths or personages of the past, without any reference to the metaphysical or notions such as the Forms. We would develop a morality based completely on reason. And this is what we have set out to do. The result of this, functionally, is the policy manual. Thousands of pages long. Experts having studied and examined every eventuality such that in any situation that one encounters the right policy will always present itself. Flip to page 3265, section 134, subsection 62, paragraph 58 and read the answer. But the problem is that this is the same way of knowing and understanding the world which science is supposed to use. There is an internal, unresolvable contradiction within the system of rationality. Science is supposed to be a-moral, yet it is science that is dictating and proscribing the actions of the policy manual. The policy manual is fundamentally about making moral decisions. So either science is fundamentally moral in nature, that is ideological; or morality comes from somewhere other than the rational and the scientific. If science can answer the question, “what should we do?” it is fundamentally a moral project. Science would then always be moral and political. Or, the alternative is that morality is fundamentally metaphysical, religious, spiritual in nature. This tension was pressed upon us during SARS-CoV-2 when we were told that we must “follow the science.” Science would dictate all of the responses. It became obvious that science was an inherently political and moral activity and/or it was a mask, a cover for other, unacknowledged, motivations. A decision was being made, but yet the closed system of scientific rationality could not allow us to acknowledge how this decision was being made because to do so would undermine our modern system of both knowledge and authority.

In his short work, “Political Theology,” Carl Schmitt talked about two realities, one was the “exception” and the other was the “miracle of law.” What Schmitt, a lawyer, recognized, is that you cannot create a system of law so complete that it can account for ever eventuality. Sooner or later there will arise a situation for which there is no answer in the policy manual. The whole modern system is built upon the idea, the hope, that we can come up with answers and develop policies ahead of time for every situation. The hope is that we can do away with the need for persons who would rule over us. The system of law, the grand policy manual, the vast system of managerial control which is built upon this idea, would replace the need for personal judgement. In so doing, it would replace the need for persons like kings, lords, bishops or popes.

What Schmitt argued is that law is generated miraculously in the moment, through intuition. In the pre-modern period, it was understood that this intuition was a gift from God. It came as part of the anointing process. It is what set the king apart from your average man. The king was God’s representative in society and his role was clear: to pronounce law and thus institute justice in society. He was responsible and answerable to God for this. All kingdoms have a tradition of law. The person of the king represented the balance between reason and its artifacts in law and the intuition that exists within all of us. He lived both within the order of law, but also apart from it and above it. These symbolic roles matter. We know what a bad king is because we intuitively grasp the archetype of the good king. The modern world wished to dispense with this relationship. We could rely exclusively on reason. We thought that we could use reason to dispense with corrupt kings and rulers. The system would inform us and protect us. And so began the unbalancing of our society and ourselves.

In building this system of rationality, we effectively cut ourselves off from intuitive, person-centered knowing. We lost sight of the notion that all knowledge begins as intuition. The content of our rationality is initiated by that which cannot be put into words, by that which is merely apprehended. Our materialist way of thinking, foisted upon us by modernity, says that these raw apprehensions are limited to what can be taken in by our five senses, that which can be observed and measured. But we all understand from our own experiences that many of the things we know come not from our senses and cannot be rationalized. They are felt. They are intuited. This does not make this form of knowing any less real. And for the most part, this is the material out of which we form words and develop rational constructs to understand and explain the experiences we have. There is real content here, much of which is never rationalized. Yet, it is this non-rational content of our real experiences that forms the basis for many of our judgements.

The ancients understood this. I will apologize to my long-time readers for bringing up this example yet again, but I don’t know of any more concise illustration of this point than Proverbs 26:4-5.

⁴ Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
    or you yourself will be just like him.
⁵ Answer a fool according to his folly,
    or he will be wise in his own eyes.

There is no policy manual which will give you the answer to this question. Yet the problem can be expressed rationally, with words. This question is not irrational. There is real content that exists between these two seemingly opposite wisdom sayings. There is nothing in “the plain meaning of the text” and the answer is not a “self-evident truth” which someone can hold onto. You will not know what the answer is until the moment of the encounter. There is content there, real content that will direct a decision. It is not some magic incantation that you can generate with a wand and some corrupted Latin. Where does this content come from? It is essentially a miracle. You are witnessing the miracle of law in formation as it happens. Again, from where does the answer come? And you can’t say “scripture” because the Bible purposefully does not give you the answer because the Bible is not fundamentally “God’s rule book for living.” The Bible is not a policy manual. It does, though, point us to the answer:

²⁰ Where then does wisdom come from?
    Where does understanding dwell?
²¹ It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing,
    concealed even from the birds in the sky.
²² Destruction and Death say,
    “Only a rumor of it has reached our ears.”
²³ God understands the way to it
    and he alone knows where it dwells,
²⁴ for he views the ends of the earth
    and sees everything under the heavens.
²⁵ When he established the force of the wind
    and measured out the waters,
²⁶ when he made a decree for the rain
    and a path for the thunderstorm,
²⁷ then he looked at wisdom and appraised it;
    he confirmed it and tested it.
²⁸ And he said to the man,
    “The fear of the Lord—that is wisdom,
    and to shun evil is understanding.”

The answer is ultimately found in God himself. It is transcendent, supernatural, metaphysical. It involves seeing, intuiting with the eyes of faith. In some sense you have nothing, nothing but a relationship with God and a trust that in the moment, when the crisis of decision is upon you and you are face-to-face with the fool, the answer will present itself, like a miracle. This answer has real content that leads to real actions, but it cannot be known until the moment of encounter itself.

This whole discussion emerges out of this moment. The modern world has tried to deny us this so as to protect us from tyrants, tyrannical kings and tyrannical priests. But in so doing, it has cut us off from the source of wisdom. And in doing this, it has cut us off from knowledge itself. Not entirely. Perhaps better is it prevents us from acknowledging to ourselves where knowledge comes from. Even when observing the material world, our insights about this world are essentially spiritual, mystical in nature. The myth of scientific rationality has cut us off from this and creates a harmful conflict within us. We are not permitted to trust our own intuition. It is demanded that we look to experts cloaked in the mantle of science to tell us how to do just about everything these days. Your intuition tells you that the response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus was dumb. You are not allowed to think this thought because you are expected to “follow the science.” This is but one example of how our whole society operates and how we are expected to think. We are expected to live enframed within the rational, scientific and technical and only answer questions from within this closed system of rationality.

It is not a matter of rejecting the rational. It is a matter of learning to connect again with the intuitive grasping of the transcendent, the supernatural which forms the ground of all knowledge. We must once again learn to trust our intuitions of God and his metaphysical order. It is a recognition that knowledge is, at its core, fundamentally mystical. We live within a sacred order that is pregnant with meaning. That meaning is an expression of the divine presence in all things, the energy of God sustaining and ordering the universe moment-by-moment. Intuiting this presence of God in all things and all moments places upon us a moral demand to conform our decisions and actions to this reality. It is in part conforming ourselves to archetypes, symbols and stories as these are artifacts of this intuited reality. I can also mean paying attention to scientific study as this too is an artifact of this intuited reality. Mostly, it means living in the fear of the Lord, opening ourselves up in faith to God’s real transcendent and supernatural presence all around us.