To my mind, this was a really great OP on this forum — ssu

Thank you ssu, much appreciated.

In the 19th Century they had a far more apt name for economics. They called it "Political Economy". And that's what it is, no matter in how much in mathematics you disguise it, it is political and part of politics. It's basically a straight lie to try to make economics to be something like a (natural) science and somehow apolitical. It simply isn't that. The dominant questions have been the same since Antiquity. The story of the Grachi brothers tells that the question about redistribution of wealth isn't something we started thinking about thanks to Marx and the 19th Century socialists. — ssu

Absolutely.

For me, the simple reason why there can be "enchantment of magic" is that these questions are moral, not something objective, which using the scientific method can give us the right answer. If it's subjective, why not have some magic in it? — ssu

I half agree with this, but I tend not to divide things along those lines. I think we can describe things objectively without describing them on the pattern of natural science.

I have too much to say, but I’ll say it all anyway. It’s not really in the spirit of discussion to make such a massive post that’s not responding directly to other contributors, but maybe someone will find it interesting.

In a spirit of Enlightenment, I’m breaking things down as follows:

Disenchantment: the loss of a unified total system of meaning and value, especially that which happened in Western society with the unseating of Christianity from its central and foundational position.

Re-enchantment: the return of meaning, which however might only be occasional and partial, rather than forming a total system.

Ideology: legitimation of the social order (the state, the economy, class hierarchy, etc) by means of enchantment

Magic and magical thinking: the beating heart of enchantment and ideology.


Magic

I’m now thinking that magic or magical thinking is something that we should not revile. It’s the element of enchantment that we should want to retain or revive. This is the route to the secular sacredness that I was briefly talking about with @Wayfarer. My thought is roughly that we can break the spells that bewitch us without abandoning magical thinking as such.

To try and make that work, I’m thinking of magic in the way it's described by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. In that book, magic is a practice in which the object, such as a mountain, a raven, or a tree, is imbued with inherent meaning, animated by its own spirit, and is not reducible to an instantiation of a general type, a mere specimen of a species. A respect for the thisness of the object is what differentiates magic from myth, religion, and especially Enlightenment, in which classification and conceptualization serve to abstract away from individuals in an attempt to form a unified system of science and philosophy.

Thisness—which is also known by medieval philosophers as haecceity—has its own special version in the work of Adorno, namely the non-identical. It’s the part of the thing that remains unique to it when you bring it under a category or think of it in terms of concepts, but which is lost sight of in this process. The singular thing is non-identical with the specimen, the latter being an instantiation, an example defined by categories, universals, or concepts. But the thing is not exhausted by any category you put it in, any abstract universal you bring it under, or any set of concepts you apply to describe it.

Therefore conceptual thinking, though indispensable, has to proceed carefully so as to avoid losing sight of the very thing it attempts to understand.

There's a difficulty with trying to theorize about this. Adorno doesn’t use the word “haecceity” or explicitly define the non-identical, because to do so would once again bring the singular individual under a universal concept (e.g., the universal kind called "singular individuality"). Thus Adorno’s project begins to look, not only difficult, but also somewhat paradoxical. The solution to this problem, I think, is to see the non-identical as akin to the thing-in-itself in Kant's philosophy, i.e., as a limit-concept about which we don’t want to say too much. It’s a correction by means of a negation (the "non" in non-identical), rather than positive ampliative knowledge.

Now we can see that magical thinking, which is an appreciation of the singular life of things, is an important counterweight to conceptual thinking. This is what Adorno described positively about Hegel’s philosophy:

[Hegel’s] impulse to elevate spirit, however deluded, draws its strength from a resistance to dead knowledge. — Adorno, Experiential Content

By “dead knowledge,” he means … well, the way I think about it is like the difference between the living giant squid, with its shimmering colours and graceful movements, and the ugly dead specimen in the laboratory.

Incidentally, I don't think of this as a complete rejection of science or the Enlightenment, more like a correction or a warning.

science establishes ... concepts and makes its judgments without regard for the fact that the life of the subject matter for which the concept is intended does not exhaust itself in conceptual specification. What furnishes the canon for Hegelian idealism is ... the need to grasp...what the matter at hand actually is and what essential and by no means mutually harmonious moments it contains. — Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies

This might all seem ridiculously abstract, but consider the real-world example of wolves and dogs. The model of the wolf pack as led by an alpha male is now outdated, and was based on studies of wolves in captivity, where their behaviour is very different from wild behaviour. And if this popular concept is wrong for wolves, it’s even wronger for dogs. This is why dog behaviourists have been trying to demolish the myth of alpha-dominance in dog training for years. From personal experience, it’s only getting through to people slowly.

You might just say it was bad science and that the concepts were wrong, not that science or conceptual thinking in general were at fault, but I see it more dialectically: science corrected its worst instincts, by paying more attention to the uniqueness of things, getting closer to what they are.

Am I saying that we should think of wolves and dogs as unique spirits with their own life-forces? It sounds a bit woo, but I think I am. Many and perhaps most people who live with dogs do this anyway: a dog is effectively a kind of person, and so personhood seems almost like the source of the magical thinking that I’m advocating: we do think of each other as unique and as animated by our own spirits.

This brings me to scientism, arguably an aspect of disenchantment and instrumental rationality. It's what leads to the denigration of personhood and irreducible singularity more generally:

There is no science of morality, or subjectivity, or aesthetics or value, therefore these things do not exist — unenlightened

So although people, even eliminative materialists, treat others in their everyday lives as persons and ends in themselves, this has been somewhat reduced by scientism to mere sentiment or even illusion.

Another way of looking at magic:

Theology, metaphysics, socialism, parliaments, democracy, universal suffrage, republics, progress, and what have you, are quite as irrational as anything primitives believe in, in that they are the product of faith and sentiment, and not of experiment and reasoning. — E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Lévy-Bruhl’s Theory of Primitive Mentality

I take issue with Evans-Pritchard’s assumed rationality-sentiment dichotomy, which is related to an underlying emotivist fact-value distinction that I’m not on board with; and in any case, his separation of rationality and emotion might be untenable (see Damasio). But leaving that aside, the quotation does highlight the continuing relevance of magical thinking in societies in which magic seems to have been replaced or marginalized. I think this ties in with several of the posts by @unenligtened and @Moliere.

Thinking that the primary way to keep alive what is good in magical thinking is art, I looked into the connection and came across a letter from Van Gogh to his brother, which contains this:

It seems that in the book, My Religion, Tolstoy implies that whatever happens in a violent revolution, there will also be an inner and hidden revolution in the people, out of which a new religion will be born, or rather, something completely new which will be nameless, but which will have the same effect of consoling, of making life possible, as the Christian religion used to. — Vincent Van Gogh

There’s much more to say about magic in art, and I’m guessing that was a big motivation for Adorno’s aesthetic theory, but I’ll leave that for the moment.


Power

The OP grew from my interpretation of Nietzsche as describing a disenchantment of power. It turns out that Weber has a theory of authority that lines up quite nicely with this. There are three kinds of authority: charismatic, traditional, and legal-rational. The latter is characteristic of a modern rationalized society and therefore of disenchantment, so it’s not a stretch to talk as I did of the disenchantment of power, or of the desacralization of power as an aspect of disenchantment, even though Weber did not use the term in quite that way, as far as I know.

There are two different kinds of charisma. One is about an individual’s personal qualities and abilities, and the other is institutional charisma...

... which can be inherited, or passed along with accession to an office, or invested in an institution. This is the charisma that gives an aura of sacred power to whomever has the right to wear the bishop's robe, or sit in the king's throne, regardless of their actual personal characteristics. — Charles Lindholm, Charisma

It’s clear that charisma of both types was what Nietzsche was identifying as lacking in the “captains of industry” and “generic bores”.

This aspect of the legal-rationalization of power was not a good thing in Nietzsche’s view, but it can be viewed positively, as opening up a space for critique.


Critique

In a disenchanted society, there remains ideological enchantment, where ideology is understood as the legitimizing ideas of the social order. In the view of critical theorists, critique of ideology is one of the central tasks of philosophy.

To that end, disenchantment can be understood and used in two ways:

• Negatively, as a lack—the lack of inherent meaning to be found in nature, society, history, and so on
• Positively, as a deliberate critique of ideology—we can disenchant the way the world is (capitalism, state power, nationalism, or whatever else we see as the primary problem), revealing the truth that it works to the detriment of people and obfuscates itself with ideology.

This latter is what I’m calling critical disenchantment.

Is this anything more than another name for the critique of ideology? Possibly. It is an enrichment of the concept, or one aspect of it. Or maybe it’s a radicalization, taking disenchantment out of the hands of the social scientists for whom it is merely a historical fact, and turning it into praxis, part of an attempt to change the world.

Another way to view disenchantment positively is as opening up the space for progress:

Society was no longer viewed as immutably anchored in tradition or God’s will. The idea of social design, the desire to create a better or perfect world, is a crucial characteristic of the modern way of thinking. — Maastricht University

And that leads us back to socialism. Nietzsche’s observation, as I interpreted it, that socialism resulted from the desacralization of power, leads us to Marx’s comments about critique:

The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. — A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Marx here refers to the move from the disenchantment of the Enlightenment, when the "holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked," to the critique of the law and politics as ideologies of capitalism. The word “disillusion” parallels the double aspect of disenchantment: to be disillusioned in one sense is bad, an unhappy state in which you realize something is worse than you thought; but in another sense it’s a good thing because you no longer perceive or believe falsely.

What we have now in postmodernity (or “liquid modernity”) is the negative disenchantment, without much of the positive, critical disenchantment, which was at its height with the socialist challenge to capitalism and the supporting Marxist theoretical challenge to ideology.

Given everything I’ve said here, I guess it looks like I’m advocating magical neo-Marxism. I’m not sure if that’s a thing.

It’s the coolest Dad music I know.

Wow. I didn't realize that. Cool. — frank

Crucially though, I can carry on wearing my kilt without feeling like I'm perpetuating a fake culture.

I think of it like food. What is authentic Indian food? Does it include chilis? But chilis were taken to India by the Portuguese, so .. :chin:

(that risks trivializing it but you get the point I trust)

There are many dimensions to it. One is about the Stuarts and Jacobitism (there’s a book about this called “The Invention of Scotland”); the massive influence of the epic poems of Ossian, which were fabricated in the 18th century; the mythologizing of Scottish history by Walter Scott (who has been called “the man who invented Scottish identity”); and generally the disproportionate weight given to Highland culture at the expense of the Lowlands.

Much if it was a response to the Union with England. An identity crisis.

Another thing: kilts. It’s not about our ancestors’ beliefs but it’s in the same ballpark. Many Scots believe that each tartan has been associated with a particular clan for centuries. This is untrue. Also, they didn’t wear kilts.

In the case of the aboriginals, it would be as if someone misinterpreted some Scottish document and went on to create a fanciful story about your ancestors' beliefs. This narrative becomes popular, and since the oral traditions have broken down, you accept the mistake as your heritage. It's kind of sad. — frank

Funny you should mention that, because that’s pretty much what did happen with Scottish culture.

The Voice — Banno

I’m showing my ignorance here, but do you mean the Indigenous Voice to Parliament?

I’m saying that every culture is determined partly by what it is thought to be, both by insiders and outsiders.

I’m interested to see what you say actually.

They adopted the bullshit as their own. — frank

Maybe at that point it’s not bullshit any more. Maybe culture works like that all the time.

Cool. Maybe I’ll read it.

Dark Emu — Banno

Just had a look around the internet. Pretty controversial eh!

My first thought was that Bruce might implicitly be conceding too much to the linear progress narrative that divides people into distinct stages of development. Turns out that’s one of the criticisms the book faced from historians.

You have to laugh, surely, at such hubristic naivety? And written just after WW1, that fine exemplar of rational methodical control —not. — unenlightened

He had initially supported the war, maybe because it seemed to represent a cure for, as he saw it, the mediocrity of rationalization and disenchantment. He was not especially approving of the "rational, methodical control of life," as far as I can tell. Nationalism of course is another kind of magic.

Apparently he sort of turned against the war later, but I've forgotten why.

I think I'm mostly on track in stating "magical thinking", yes? — Moliere

I think it's fruitful, but I don't know where the track is.

Me too! Almost like the glasses in They Live! — Moliere

Can we distinguish between counter-spells that reveal the truth, like the glasses, and those that merely compete on the same ground, like the minimalism example I gave--bewitching us with something different and possibly better, but still bewitching us? How would we make that distinction? Have I lost the plot?

Just describing this phenomenon feels so surreal to me in the magical sense. For lots of reasons but foremost being that I feel like "magic" is the right description for how consumerism has an adaptability unto itself, or at least feels like it's behaving on its own, like it's alive. But it's not like consumerism is a thing with properties, either, so it sits in a quasi-place. — Moliere

Yes, and this is why it helps to use the concept of magic; I disagree with those who are dismissing it with an easy let's get real, there's no such thing as magic. You can't point to quasi-places on an everyday map.

I don't have the answer. But I have a garden. — Banno

An enchanted one, I hope.

For the various popular religions in Asia, in contrast to ascetic Protestantism, the world remained a great enchanted garden, in which the practical way to orient oneself, or to find security in this world or the next, was to revere or coerce the spirits and seek salvation through ritualistic, idolatrous, or sacramental procedures. No path led from the magical religiosity of the non-intellectual classes of Asia to a rational, methodical control of life. — Max Weber, Sociology of Religion

Magic is something maybe only seen from the outside. In which case, it's hard to identify if it's magic, because you sort of have to know how it works "from the inside" too. In which case it's no longer magical, so how do you spot the spell if it's lost its potency? — Moliere

Immanent critique springs to mind. You dig into it from the inside, or to mix metaphors, you pull at the loose threads of contradiction, till you see how the spell really works—and then you tell people about it. You don’t presume to begin outside, like you’re something special; you're able to see the spell thanks to your critical reason, which you apply from within while knowing you’re under a spell like everybody else. You continue to fetishize commodities after you’ve read Capital.

This is a bit like the question of the historical relativism of philosophy: it’s a problem only if you’re not aware of it. You don’t have to be transcendent in your thinking, only critical.

So while I find it all very interesting, I also get lost very quickly. — Moliere

I’m a bit lost too. There’s magic, enchantment, ideology, and, though I didn’t mention it, there’s myth too. And these terms are all used differently by different thinkers. For example, Adorno and Horkheimer contrast magic as a mostly ancient practice that addresses things in their specificity, with myth and enlightenment, which tend to bring things under general concepts as a means to explain and dominate nature. I feel like I should have stuck to the Weberian angle of disenchantment and enchantment. But then the OP would have been more boring.

Are there spells which counter-spells? — Moliere

I like the idea of counter-spells. The recent lifestyle movement they called “minimalism” was set against the spell of consumerism, but was really just a magic spell itself, sitting alongside all the other self-help trends as yet another choice in a consumerist world.

Minimalism is a tool that can assist you in finding freedom. Freedom from fear. Freedom from worry. Freedom from overwhelm. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from depression. Freedom from the trappings of the consumer culture we’ve built our lives around. Real freedom. — The Minimalists

Unfortunately I lack the brain wiring required to accept any kind of collectivism — NOS4A2

I think the collectivism-individualism polarity obscures more than it enlightens. I’ve recently been reading some Frankfurt School Marxists, and collectivism is one of the things they seem to hate the most. Socialism is about getting the balance right, and any socialism that does not exist to enable the full flourishing of individuals is not one I could get behind.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. — The Communist Manifesto

In other words, individual freedom is the necessary condition for collective freedom.

But that’s a side-issue.

I wonder if since N's time the idea of the "industrialist" and "commercial magnate" has gone under the sort of makeover required to form him into a being more interesting, that a worker might follow him as obediently as a soldier would his general. There are definitely obsequious and servile workers, but then again I'm not sure the stereotype of the industrialist has been altered too much since those days. — NOS4A2

There’s a sense in which Elon Musk has an aura, not of nobility, but of something modern and yet equivalent to it. At the very least, he does appear out of the ordinary, at least in his public image. But Henry Ford had something similar, so…this might be an American thing. Nietzsche in his day may have been unaware of any charismatic, larger-than-life captains of industry.

On the other hand, maybe even these people would have appeared lacking in greatness to Nietzsche. In any case, the main point of the last part of the OP was that even if business tycoons and executives appear ordinary to the masses, the magic of the economy (or the system) itself is so strong that they do not turn to socialism as they once did, but once again to larger-than-life characters.

On the other hand, and despite the atrocities of the 20th century, State prestige has only grown in accordance with its power. Petitioning the state, taking part in its elections, and casting ballots is now the only means by which we can secure any right, which the state gets to confer at its whim and fancy. State power, then, becomes the means of salvation. That's why I would argue that the replacements for the old enchantments of religion and the divine right of kings is the State — NOS4A2

As I’ve implied, I think this is compatible with my position. The difference is that, unlike me, you don’t see it as inextricably bound up with the economy (which is not to say that you can’t have an oppressive State without capitalism).

Perhaps this is why, historically, socialists have followed tyrants and demagogues — NOS4A2

Forgot to address this. It’s not about who the socialist wants to follow, it’s about who the masses want to follow, and this is what I came back to towards the end of my original post. (Not that I’m endorsing Nietzsche’s view on this entirely, though he does identify something real)

As you know, Nietzsche is no fan of socialism. I only consider what Nietzsche previously wrote of socialists and assume it in this aphorism. He mentions “socialists and state-idolaters” in the same book, but it goes further back, for instance, in Human All Too Human. Their desire for state power is unavoidable.

Maybe I’m wrong but my reading is that Nietzsche was psychoanalyzing the socialist, criticizing how he dehumanizes the employer. The employer is unknown and uninteresting. At the same time he is a cunning, blood-sucking dog of a man, while everything else about him—his name, shape, manner, reputation—no socialist cares about. In my mind this is dehumanization.

But, in an extra little slight upon the socialist, following a tyrant into tyranny isn’t as painful, and if “the nobility of birth showed in [the employer’s] eyes and gestures, there might not be any socialism of the masses.” Perhaps this is why, historically, socialists have followed tyrants and demagogues. — NOS4A2

Although I’ve been reading the book recently, I didn’t notice the bit about state-idolaters. On top of that, I misinterpreted you, forgetting that you were writing about “Nietzsche’s socialist”. I was too quick to jump to the defence of my socialist, the revolutionary workers I had in mind, against what I thought was your own characterization. Apologies.

But I don’t think Nietzsche is writing about the dehumanization of the employer. He is writing about how ordinary the employers appear to workers when compared with great tyrants and generals. He has as much contempt for the bourgeoisie as he does for socialists.

The employer is “unknown and uninteresting”, lacking in greatness, from Nietzsche’s own point of view. From the same section, entitled “Of the Absence of Noble Demeanour”:

It is probable that in all those forms and insignia of a superior race which alone make a person interesting, industrialists and commercial magnates have thus far been woefully deficient; had they the distinction of noble birth in their look and bearing, there might not be any interest in socialism among the masses.

He dislikes both. His sympathies are clearly with, as you’d expect, nobility and greatness.

As for capitalism, there is no system that does not consider the management and segregation of capital. In that sense, all economic systems are invariably capitalist, socialist or otherwise, the only difference in being who controls it, private or the State. Had socialists named it something else, like the Monopolist system, we might well have been passed it by now. — NOS4A2

This is difficult to address because it hinges on the definition of capitalism, which we don’t want to get into. If I just say that any stable State is not in opposition to the economy, and if economic actors are powerful such that they significantly influence the State, then to be under the spell of the State is to be under that of the economy.

I'm not sure how this fits into your thread, but if I have strayed too far, I apologize — NOS4A2

I’m not sure but don’t worry, it’s interesting. I derailed things with my misinterpretation.

Great thread. Good read — NOS4A2

Thank you.

So it is with Nietzsche’s socialist. He is unable to legitimize the business owner’s authority as he once did the leaders of a superior kind, those militant types who hitherto governed them with force and subjection. The act of submitting voluntarily to someone who is neither superior in class or race was too foreign to him, I suppose, so the socialist runs, serf-like, to the politicians and the State.

I would say the magical forces do not manifest as economics and economy, but as politics and the State. The relationship between employee and employer rises from the Law of Necessity (in Nietzschean terms) whereas the relationship between man and state is one of unbridled superstition. — NOS4A2

I think you have a view of what socialism means that is very different from mine. The socialists I had in mind, and the ones Nietzsche was referring to, were not “running to the State and politicians”, but fighting for rights, grouping together with no help from the State (on the contrary) to challenge the power not only of the employers but of the State that backed them, demanding changes to the law, calling for a revolution and for emancipation. The idea you have that socialism is some kind of worship of the State or necessarily a privileging of government, or that socialist workers have not acted independently of authority, is badly mistaken, and it maligns a long tradition of efforts that, while they did not lead to revolution in Western Europe as intended, did win for the workers many important rights and improvements to their conditions. And you brush it off with contempt!

And this is a clue to what I see is the problem with your second paragraph quoted here. Capitalism subsumes politics and the State. To be under the spell of the State and politicians is to be under that of capitalism, in most countries, where no political party is willing to challenge capitalism.

Of course there have been state socialisms, including some very horrible ones, and of course professional social democrats look to the state to do everything—that’s just not really what we’re talking about when we talk about workers being massacred by police for going on strike.

By the way, although I won’t tell you not to respond to me with a brilliant and comprehensive denunciation of socialism in all its forms, I don’t know if I want to debate that, as it’s not really where I was going with this discussion.

On the other hand, it’s actually interesting to see that the OP is meaningful to someone with a very different world-view, and once again I appreciate that you addressed the central issue.

The spells we are under determine which spells we think people are under, but we’re not always right.

Yes, but "magic" is a loosey goosey term, once it's taken out o the theater and pressed into service at the Academy — BC

The term is used in anthropology, ethnology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. No doubt it’s used loosely sometimes in those disciplines. I guess you’ve been unlucky and have somehow, in all of your reading, managed to miss the more rigorous use of the term.

:cool:

Alas my instruction to breathe came too late. The whole point is the mutuality of relationships of understanding. — unenlightened

Isn't it also important not to be too quick to conclude that the other has failed to understand?

Otherwise, sage words indeed, as befit your role.

And some of us have reached an understanding with a significant other. This is the enchantment of romantic love - a mutual accommodation. — unenlightened

I tend to experience romantic love more like being hit on the head with a mallet, causing brain damage, madness, and aberrant behaviour. I think I experience understanding like that too sometimes. Or, to use a different metaphor, it's like immersion, and the accommodation may never come.

Are you saying that we cannot be unenchanted, but that we can be enchanted well, genuine understanding and romantic love being the models we should look to?

EDIT: I hadn't seen your last paragraph when I wrote this.

A post to sort things out in my head (and maybe yours too)...

The OP mixes up two topics, related and both interesting but perhaps better treated separately. It begins and ends with the disenchantment and possible re-enchantment of power, but in the middle there's a very speculative digression into the "polytheism" of small enchantments.

But what's done is done, and I don't mind discussing either.

A uniform is an enchantment. One puts on the accoutrements of a nurse, or the police, or a soldier, or a bank robber, and one becomes that identity; one behaves and is treated in a different way, as if one had special powers. One has united ones' being with the Orisha of Nursing, and one really has healing and comforting hands, and one speaks with the comforting authority of the healer. — unenlightened

Thank you for enriching my stew of ideas.

I am actually in battle with the huge army that serves under the banner of "The Enlightenment", as anyone who pays attention to my posts will be aware. — unenlightened

I'm still on the fence on that one. Or rather, I'm for and against.

Surely the most dangerous and potent enchantment is the one that induces the belief in the person that they are not enchanted and are immune from enchantment and the enchantment does not exist? — unenlightened

You talking about me‽

"I'm not affected by ads" — unenlightened

I once said this to a friend of mine, who is a marketing manager but is actually very intelligent and interesting. He roared with laughter and spoke for an hour to prove I was talking bollocks. Quite convincing.

Such blind and absolute faith in oneself makes one open to every horror — unenlightened

The enchantment I mentioned as being the most important one today was the economy, which was just my secret code for capitalism (I dishonestly avoided making the post look too Marxist). This one works in the way you describe I think. I still have to sort out the differences between magic, enchantment, and ideology. Magic is a knowing use of objects and rituals, whereas enchantment is to be under a magic spell, often unknowingly, and it's the latter that fits with the concept of ideology. Anyway yeah, I agree.

There's a current academic who has criticized the 'disenchantment' thesis - Jason Josephen-Storm - a review here - review also mentions the Frankfurt School — Wayfarer

Yep, I've been looking into his work and I've read a few articles, but not the book (yet). As for the Institute for Social Research, as you may know I've been working through their work, and my OP is clearly informed by that--they made great use of the concept of disenchantment, and I'm attempting to use something along the lines of their approach to the critique of ideology. That might come out more explicitly in the discussion, but as they're focused on reason more generally, I'm not sure exactly how it fits. The "culture industry" is relevant though, for sure.

G K Chesterton quote, 'When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.' — Wayfarer

Also quoted by @unenlightened above.

There's a deep sense that nobody knows what is real anymore. Not even scientists, with their mad dreams of multiple universes or dimensions. Makes it easy to believe in anything. Life is like a movie, but unfortunately with real blood. — Wayfarer

I think you're right.

You know, 'disenchantment' has it's own Wikipedia entry — Wayfarer

Of course, but it’s not great. The SEP article on Weber is better, particularly on re-enchantment, which is of relevance to the OP.

Highly relevant and interesting, thanks. No I don’t think I was aware of these dialogues.

So far I haven’t read Habermas, I admit partly because superficially his work seems a bit boring compared to that of the original Frankfurt lineup.

There's a bogus, but profound, Einstein quote, 'either everything is a miracle, or nothing is'. I think there has to be an element of that feeling in life, otherwise, as Neitszche also glumly predicted, nihilism engulfs everything. — Wayfarer

Yes, in fact I’ve vaguely hinted at the need for re-enchantment, so I’m not saying it’s all bad. Just that, well, the bad stuff is bad. Otherwise, I’m groping towards (though not so far in this particular discussion) the idea of the sacred as a positive thing. Since I personally think I have a feeling for the sacred while being non-religious and mostly non-mystical, I think we can get to some secular version of the sacred.

From a secular POV (which everyone, of course, doesn't share) we never were enchanted by magic spells so we can't be disenchanted now. There never was any such thing as 'magic' if by 'magic' we mean 'effective control over the material world'. — BC

Magic is "a way of thinking that looks to invisible forces to influence events, effect change in material conditions, or present the illusion of change" (Source)

I'd add something like a mode of behaviour to "a way of thinking". It's real, as real as religion, although like religion, it might not always work, or work in the way people think.

I admit I’ve used the concept loosely. Maybe I’ll write a post delving into it.

Yes. Magic, like Marketing, is in the business or creating desirable images in the mind of observers. The power of mis-direction does not force, but merely leads the sheep willingly to the fold. That's only a bad thing when mutton is on the menu — Gnomon

Nicely put.

This sometimes vulgar display of material wealth not only enslaves the employee but also the employer — invicta

Yes, I see what you mean. It’s not only the actual relationship between the two which is enslaving, but the display—the bewitching images of desired-for wealth. As you say, the American Dream, which probably could have made my list.

Your list is infused with incommensurable value-fragmentation and plurality of alternative metanarratives — BC

People are always telling me that.

Conspiracy theory–a shared narrative which unites an 'out group' around a supposed falsehood–is entirely separate from science. I'm not sure what anyone means by 'scientism'. Demagoguery*** is in disfavor, and isn't equivalent to nationalism and populism, which are currently in ill repute in some circles. New Age spirituality is one of my pet peeves, so no quarrel there. "Progress / Decline / Catastrophe" Consumerism ..... All four terms have meaning, of course, but what did you mean? — BC

Weber talks about the fragmentation of values following society’s secularization, resulting in a “polytheism”, an array of smaller enchantments. The idea is that we now have numerous gods and demons, but they look different, and some of them are secular. The conspiracy theorist doesn’t arrive at the idea that the moon landings didn’t happen via a process of rational enquiry, but because they are looking for meaning; and once they have found it, it is incontestable—they will not be dissuaded (at least for a while).

It’s odd that you say demagoguery and populism are disfavoured, when they have so recently made a resurgence. It’s not only Trump (and…do think he and his style of politics have just gone away now?)

This is from 2019 and I think it identifies a real phenomenon:

The rise of new political movements is transforming the political systems of many advanced democracies. Three changes in particular are taking place.

1. The dimensions of political conflict have changed. The traditional economic and redistributive conflict between left and right is waning. In its place, a new conflict between nationalist and socially conservative versus cosmopolitan and socially progressive positions has emerged. These changing dimensions of political conflict are apparent from voting outcomes and the positioning of political parties (Inglehart and Norris 2019), from changes in the composition of party supporters (Piketty 2018), and from survey data (Gennaioli and Tabellini 2019).

2. Support for traditional social democratic parties has shrunk, and new parties have emerged and have rapidly gained consensus, positioning themselves on the new dimension of political conflict.

3. Many of these new parties, so-called populists, campaign on anti-establishment and anti-elite platforms, and claim to represent the ‘true interests’ of the people at large (depicting the latter as a homogeneous group). — The Rise of Populism

I didn't mean to suggest that populism was equivalent to nationalism, but they seemed to belong together, and do sometimes go together in the real world.

Progress / Decline / Catastrophe: these are narratives that frame the way we perceive and describe the world. On the one hand there is the view that everything is getting worse (you seem to be under the power of this spell sometimes yourself), and on the other hand (Pinker) there is the view that capitalism and science are super and will lead us onwards and upwards unless we lose our nerve. I suggested them as candidate magic spells because of the way they work as articles of faith, or as real forces rather than mere ideas.

Consumerism: this is quite commonly identified as an ideology, meaning a system of false beliefs that obscures reality (and in the OP I’m conflating ideology with magic and enchantment). Consumerism is the belief that buying stuff will make you happy or help you to forge a meaningful identity or raise your status. I think it’s also connected with commodity fetishism, fetishism being a concept from the anthropology of magic.

As for scientism:

Well I think one can find the same kind of rigidity on these boards very easily. There is no science of morality, or subjectivity, or aesthetics or value, therefore these things do not exist. — unenlightened

No. Taken in, possibly, but not enchanted. And the taking-in is both conditional (Will this potion put me one up on my rival?) and temporary (a new fad will replace it; a new idol will replace him). We now have the attention-span of flies: we're all for something as long as it smells good.

Thanks to the CEO's (whom most Americans revere and value - I don't think it's the same in Europe) and their armies of ad-men, we want everything for a very short time and hate everything for only slightly longer. The magic of divine right, class privilege and noblesse oblige was longevity, stability, the security of permanence. I think we miss that. While turnstile novelty keeps the adrenaline pumping, it leaves us very anxious. — Vera Mont

I don't really disagree, but I think it's probably compatible with what I was saying. I'm not denying there's a huge difference between, on the one hand, the magic of divine right and a world infused with God, etc., and on the other hand the magical pull of a new pair of Nikes. And yet it doesn't seem too mistaken to describe them both as magical in the way that Weber seemed to be suggesting, as being like the difference between theism and polytheism.

That's off-the-top and I'm aware that this enormous topic requires a good deal more thought, but I'll take a drive-by at the questions. — Vera Mont

Off-the-top answers are welcome. The OP was rather off-the-top itself.

No, we always had those, and scapegoats to go with them.
No, we always had those as well. How do you get to be a god's chosen people, except though a belief in your tribe's specialness? (I don't think alt-right belongs there; the flag-carrier can as easily shout "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" as "Germany, Germany, Above All" or "For King and Country")
Yes, absolutely. Quantum Entropy has a lot of candle-power.
No, that's more personal; flakes don't do lock-step.
That's just a description of how we as a species operate.
That's a compensation for the loss of something - maybe enchantment, conviction, fulfillment, recognition, self-esteem - like gluttony and alcoholism. — Vera Mont

Again, while I don't disagree with your characterizations, I do think they might be compatible with my position. Having said that, I'm not really wedded to my suggestion, that these are all magic spells equivalent to Enchantment with a capital E.

Good point about "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". This has been a French motto since the Revolution but it didn't stop them suppressing slave revolts and colonizing all over the place.

Regarding consumerism, first, just because it's a compensation doesn't mean it can't be viewed as some kind of magic; and second, I think it's much more than a compensation--it seems it can be more like a default belief or behaviour, no longer confined to the rich or available to people merely when things go wrong. It's more like we begin in consumerism and when that doesn't satisfy us, that's when we turn to alcohol. (That was merely half serious, but the serious half is very serious)

So why would workers find it more difficult to submit to captains of industry? Because they don't see a real difference in them, they are just as base as the workers and so there is no perceived natural difference in rank between them that maybe could justify their "rule". — ChatteringMonkey

Yes, exactly.

Maybe you could say some of the current ideas are substitutes for the religions of old in that they employ some of the same methods. In Nietzsche conception though the problem is rather with the valuations they promote, not necessarily with the method. Capitalism seeks to merely fulfill desires in the most efficient manner, it strives for contentment, happiness for the largest number. Mere utility therefor is its main value. Religions of old, and Nietzsche, saw those as something to be overcome... the aim should be over-man. — ChatteringMonkey

Yes, thanks. I wasn't really exploring Nietzsche's angle on it, merely reacting to one of his insights about the perception of those in power as ordinary, in which I saw a parallel with Weber's concept of disenchantment.

Left it too late. My mind moves fast.

Yep, you don’t have to stay in the Ukraine thread if you don’t feel like it. :wink:

I think I understand and pretty much agree with all of your points, but I've run out of steam on this topic.

It doesn't look like your argument construes things getting better as part of any narrative or ideology. Pinker's quote attributes the "successful way of thinking" to be "Enlightenment". You've left it unspecified. — fdrake

I now think that the steel man argument was a distraction and wasn't well thought-out. I think I left the Enlightenment unspecified to allow me to focus on Progress (general progress, or progressive history) rather than attempting to encompass everything in the quotation. In which case I should have proposed a different argument, omitting any mention of "ways of thinking," which was just an allusion to the Enlightenment.

Where I was going with it was to prompt myself to properly justify my attribution of myth, or irrational faith, to the concept of "primitive conditions", and thereby to Progress--before we even got to the ideology that might be thought to ensure it, i.e., Enlightenment. Whether they can be divided up neatly like that, I'm not sure.

This was productive — Benj96

I prefer enlightenment to productivity, seeking the truth to maximizing profits. But whatever works for you :smile: