The False Promise of Disenchantment

This is a rough transcript of my paper presented recently at the Francis Schaeffer Institute event held at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, MO. I plan to publish my presentation from the second day of the conference later this week.

I want to begin by talking about two short video excerpts, spaced out by almost 40 years exactly.

Man the Machine

The first is the “miracle of birth” scene in the 1983 Monty Python film The Meaning of Life. The scene opens with John Cleese and Graham Chapman, both playing doctors, in an empty room when a nurse comes in and says a woman’s contractions are getting closer together. The “doctors” tell the nurse to take the patient into the “fetus frightening room,” and then proceed to enter an operating room. The room is sparse, with only an operating table in the center. Puzzled, the doctors look around the room and note that something is missing: They realize they need the “machines,” including one they describe as “the machine that goes ‘bing!’” 

So they call for a variety of machines whose purpose is unknown, including “the most expensive machine in case the administrator comes by.” The nurses proceed to roll in the machines as well as the expectant mother, who is pushed out of sight in a corner. The doctors survey the room, are still puzzled as they look around the room, knowing that something is still missing.

They realize they have misplaced the patient and begin calling “patient, here patient,” as they try to find the mother. They discover her behind one of the machines, and then bring her to the operating table, advising the nurses to “mind the machines,” when they actually bump one of them while pushing the woman over. They prepare the woman for birth, explaining that she has nothing to worry about, “you won’t know what hit you,” and soon she will be “cured.” The mother looks up, asking what she is supposed to do. Cleese looks at her and goes “nothing, dear! You’re not qualified!”

Then the husband enters the room, Chapman asks who he is and upon finding out he is rushed out of the room because “only people who are involved are allowed in here,” even as the room fills up with a mob of hospital staff with no discernible medical purpose. Cleese and Chapman then proceed to tell the expectant mother about all the machines that are surrounding her, including how much they all cost, before concluding “aren’t you lucky?”

Then the hospital administrator, played perfectly by Michael Palin, walks in the room and asks what they are doing. Upon hearing that they are “doing” a birth, he looks puzzled and asks, “what is that?” Upon hearing he replies, “wonderful things we can do nowadays!” then explains how the hospital financed one of the expensive machines, before leaving the room.

As soon as he exits, the baby is born, isolated in a chamber, and whisked out of the room. In a bit of humor whose full weight couldn’t have been anticipated 40 years ago, the mother asks if the baby was a boy or girl. Chapman looks at her, says “I think it’s a bit early to be assigning roles, don’t you?” And walks out of the room—but not without telling her that she can purchase a recording of the birth, which will be available on three different formats. The scene goes dark, the machine that goes “bing!” bings one last time, and it ends.

Now we consider a clip from earlier this year: In it we see a woman outside hiking. She hits a certain point in the hike and pauses, at which point we see a large pendant hanging from her neck. She says “we made it,” and exuberantly shouts for a second, and then says, “I don’t know how to ‘whoo’ very good,” when a device vibrates. A message from "Amy" pops up, reading “at least we’re outside!” The woman says, “that’s fair,” and continues her hike.

The ad then continues to show a number of similar scenes, as individuals either alone or with friends, make comments about what they’re doing, then hear a vibration, and pull out their phone to read a message from a “friend.” The “friend” in this case is a device—the pendant hanging from the woman’s neck. The product, called “Friend,” in fact, is an AI-powered device that you wear around your neck, that “listens” to all your conversations, and which will occasionally send you messages, interacting with you as you go about your day. You can even send replies to this friend by pushing the pendant and speaking your reply, which the AI will then respond to.

What both of these clips suggest to us, I think, is a certain confusion around what the human person is, how persons ought to be treated, and what our needs actually are. One name we could give to this confusion is “disenchantment.”

So in the spirit of Francis Schaeffer, I want to begin this weekend by helping us get lost a bit as we first seek to name and identify this confusion around the human person and the creation. Schaeffer, of course, famously said that if he had one hour to share the Gospel with a man he would spend the first 45 minutes simply asking questions and seeking to understand the person he was speaking to. Only after doing that would he spend the remainder of his time telling them about Christ and the resurrection and the hope of the Gospel. 

So if we are to get ourselves lost, I want to suggest these two clips are a good place to begin, for together they help to name a kind of atrophied sense of the human which currently plagues us and which is itself tied to an atrophied sense of God’s created works more generally.

What is “disenchantment?”

Let’s start with a brief definition of what we mean by “disenchantment.” From there, I want to identify two particular trend lines that have developed over the past century and connect them to the particular problems we want to discuss with our time together this weekend.

To begin, the idea of “disenchantment," though popular in secularism discourse for a long time, received a more searching and wide-ranging treatment from the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. In his book A Secular Age Taylor wanted to identify how it was that ideas that were unthinkable at the dawn of modernity, such as atheism, became not only thinkable, but almost the default setting for people today. 

One aspect of Taylor’s answer is something he calls “disenchantment.” By “disenchantment,” Taylor means a process in which the world becomes hardened, you might say, solidified, gutted of the mysterious and supernatural. 

One way he gets at this idea is through the concept of porous and buffered selves. In the pre-modern world, Taylor argues, the self was experienced as being “porous,” which is to say we lived in a world in which forces outside of us and outside of our control interpenetrated with our own sense of self and changed us. Our sense of selfhood was open to the world, one might say. Now, this wasn’t unambiguously good: A self that could be easily penetrated by benevolent supernatural forces was also vulnerable in a unique way to the demonic. But this is what Taylor means by the “porous self.”

This had other knockdown effects as well: First, to reject God in a world of porous selves seemed inherently fraught—you were left to navigate the world of dryads and nyads and angels and demons without the aid of the divine, a rather terrifying thought. But further the world of porous selves also meant that reality was located outside the self and could act on you and even against you. The buffered self, in contrast, is a self-contained thing closed off to presences and forces outside of it. Reality outside the human self loses its capacity to act, which is to say it loses its sense of being and of agency. Reality is now no longer something that is found outside of ourselves, but is, as James K. A. Smith has noted in his work on Taylor, now something created from within through the use of our mind and our ability to impose order onto the world of raw matter outside of us through the use of our reason.

C. S. Lewis is a helpful guide in understanding this transformation in a variety of ways, one of which is in his ability to explain this shift in how we define what is “real.” Consider this representative passage from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third of the Narnia books. In this passage several children, Edmund and Lucy Pevensey as well as King Caspian and the Pevenseys cousin Eustace Scrubb, are speaking with an old man they have met on their journey, who it turns out is not a human at all, but a fallen star:

“And are we near the World’s End now, Sir?” asked Caspian. “Have you any knowledge of the seas and lands further east than this?”
“I saw them long ago,” said the Old Man, “but it was from a great height. I cannot tell you such things as sailors need to know.”
“Do you mean you were flying in the air?” Eustace blurted out.
“I was a long way above the air, my son,” replied the Old Man. “I am Ramandu. But I see that you stare at one another and have not heard this name. And no wonder, for the days when I was a star had ceased long before any of you knew this world, and all the constellations have changed.”
“Golly,” said Edmund under his breath. “He’s a retired star.”
“Aren’t you a star any longer?” asked Lucy.
“I am a star at rest, my daughter,” answered Ramandu.
"When I set for the last time, decrepit and old beyond all that you can reckon, I was carried to this island. I am not so old now as I was then. Every morning a bird brings me a fire-berry from the valleys in the Sun, and each fire-berry takes away a little of my age. And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth’s eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance.”
“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

This, then, is the distinction: In a disenchanted world, what a thing is equals what a thing is made of. Or to put it another way, we might say that in a disenchanted world, only things that can be measured are thought to be real. 

But in an enchanted world one can distinguish between what a thing is made of and what a thing is. One understands that the things we encounter in the world have some sort of quality of their own, one which often means they can act on us just as we act on them. 

When that quality is lost and you are left only with raw material, reality itself becomes inert, less a thing that we act on and that acts on us which we then listen and respond to and more a kind of grown-up Playdoh that people can shape in whatever ways suit them.

This distinction is one of more than simple philosophic interest and will shape what we will say this weekend.

Common Life and Disenchantment

What is interesting about disenchantment is that while many people might find the concept kind of deadening or stultifying, that isn’t how the idea has always been received. If the world is inert matter that is free to manipulate as we desire and are able, one can take that as being extremely good news: It means that injustice, suffering, poverty, and a host of other evils might be solvable. The world might be disenchanted, but there was a kind of new enchantment around men and our ability to improve ourselves, to remake the world.

And you can pick up on this thought in much western political thought during earlier eras of modernity. There is an optimistic streak of this kind in Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine in the American Revolution, for example. Paine went so far as to say, in the bestselling pamphlet Common Sense that we could begin the world again—the ways in which man replaces God in this schema should be obvious. Meanwhile in France, which did not have the New England Puritan influence that we did in America, this same sort of optimism ran rampant in the French Revolution. And you can argue that throughout much of America and Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries there is a deep streak of political utopianism born precisely of disenchantment. Disenchantment brought the world within our grasp, you might say, and made it a thing we could control. Or perhaps it is better to say that as man became disenchanted with regards to God and the cosmos, he became enchanted instead with himself and his own potential.

This optimism died in the early 20th century as two cataclysmic world wars killed tens of millions of people and the great promises of better living through science were exposed as fictions in the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the aftermath of this disaster, our political disenchantment took a new form. After World War II the goal of the western world became much simpler: Communism and the Soviet Union had to be defeated. But, significantly, this wasn’t really done through constructing a rival utopian vision to challenge that of Communism. In a telling scene in the Cold War era spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy the protagonist, a British spy named George Smiley, is trying to tempt a Soviet spy to cross over to the west and betray the Soviet Union. What he promises him is not a rival political vision, but a comfortable life. He even says, “can’t you see there is as little of worth in your side as there is in ours?”

After first becoming disenchanted with God, the post-war settlement in the west involved becoming disenchanted with man, at least man as a maker of utopias and creator of justice. What remained was simply man as a material creature, a creature who desired comfort, wealth, and security. That was the promise the west made contrary to the revolutionary utopianism of the Soviets. We can’t give you a world without suffering or pain or injustice. But we can give you a secure life, growing income, and material comforts.

This was the next step in disenchantment—all that remained was what scholar Eugene McCarraher calls the enchantment of mammon. This might also sound familiar to some of you, for one of the first Christian critics to recognize the hollowness of this new enchantment was Francis Schaeffer. He argued that what the post-war western value system amounted to was two cardinal values, two horrendous values he said in How Now Shall We Live?. Those values, according to Schaeffer, are personal peace and affluence. The promise of the post-war west was “give up the strong claims of religion, give up the strong claims of utopian politics, give up any hard truth claims that undermine economic growth—and you will have peace, security, and comfort.”

The problem we are facing today is that that world is unworkable for two reasons. First, the actual economic conditions that allowed for the post-war boom years in which we really did generate historically unprecedented amounts of wealth, no longer hold. The baby boomers are broadly retired, their capital has come out of the markets, and in much of the world there simply are not enough people coming in behind to replace them—in east Asia and much of Europe their post-war generations simply did not have many children and now as their boomers retire they find they do not have enough workers to maintain their systems. Even in America where our boomers did have kids, our millennial generation mostly is not.

So we will potentially trend in the same direction as South Korea, China, Japan, Germany, Italy, and the others, just about 20-30 years behind. In addition to a lack of sufficient workers to maintain that economic system, the other key piece that allowed for the enchantments of mammon to hold, for a time, was America’s will to secure global supply lines. When America promised other nations their own version of personal peace and affluence, if only they wouldn’t align with the Soviets, America had to be able to deliver: And they did that by using their navy to secure global shipping lines. But without the threat of communism, with diminishing military recruitment, and far diminished political will in the United States, America is not securing those supply lines in the same way we once did. The outcome is that the economic structures that made the world of personal peace and affluence possible are slowly unwinding now.

But there is a second problem here: If the point of our common life together is simply to secure material comforts for ourselves, with which we will then do whatever we like, provided it doesn’t harm someone else, then there isn’t really any basis there for common life beyond material necessity. All of our relationships become a bit like a work relationship, in this sense, in which the chief question at the heart of the relationship is what you can do for me, how you can help me secure my preferred lifestyle and level of comfort.

Writing in Plough James Wood made this point forcefully in sharing his own story of coming to faith:

I remember the moment I told myself I would never talk to my dad again. I was sixteen years old, and my dad’s adoptive parents had just surprised me with my first car: a bright yellow used Geo Tracker (that I would soon trade for a truck). After a slight disagreement, we split into separate vehicles to drive back to my mother’s house. In the other car my dad was drinking while driving my little brother, and I drove my new car with his new wife. When we arrived at my mom’s, she chastised my dad because we were much later than expected (at this time we did not have cellphones) and she noticed the alcohol on his breath. He got out and yelled at her. And then he took my keys and told me he was going to tell my grandparents I didn’t want the car. For the first time in my life, I gave verbal expression to the anger I had internalized for years: “Get out of here. You can’t treat us like this. We don’t need you.”

I come from a stock of relationship-quitters. During my childhood, pretty much everyone in my life had divorced at least once, extended family connections were strained, long-term friends were nonexistent, and moves were frequent. Over time I came to adopt a conception of freedom that had destroyed the lives of many around me, and which would threaten to destroy my own as well: the popular idea of freedom as unconstrained choice. Since this is impossible, the default was a more achievable version: the ability to drop commitments and relationships at any point when they become too complicated. Freedom as the license to leave when things get tough. Live by the mantra of Robert De Niro’s character in *Heat*: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” If complications come, don’t worry. You can always go.

So in terms of our political life together, we are coming to a crisis point now because the value system of personal peace and affluence that defined western politics for 75 years is collapsing both because the material structures that made it possible are failing and because it is not existentially satisfying in the first place. We now find ourselves enacting in the real world C. S. Lewis’s vision of hell in The Great Divorce: Unable to exist among other people, we simply walk away from one another, becoming smaller and smaller over time and ever more estranged.

Machine Men as Existential Disenchantment

Now let’s consider our own private experiences of the world. When the wold is hollowed out in this way, it changes the way we encounter it.

On the one hand, a disenchanted world does not feel as dangerous—there aren’t dryads in the woods, no ancestral curses that can bind you, no demons desiring to assail you. And yet: If the world is inert and raw matter waiting for you to shape it, well… that’s what it is. Now you have to go out and make of it what you will. And when you try to do that, you’ll find that it is difficult. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has said that in modernity we encounter the world as “a point of aggression,” that we must bring under control. Specifically he describes how this happens in four steps:

First, we seek to make the world visible or knowable. We find ways of expanding our knowledge of what is there:

So we use telescopes to peer ever farther into outer space, microscopes to to look ever deeper and more closely into the smallest matter, and electric light to make the world visible and thus controllable even at night.

Second, we make the world controllable by making it accessible.

We reach the moon via rockets, the deep ocean via submarines, and even the sunken worlds of the past via archaeology.

This is not really objectionable for the most part—one can easily argue that part of fulfilling our calling given to us by God in Genesis 1 is precisely through coming to know the world in new ways and studying it more deeply, which is what much of these first two steps are about. The difficulty is that if you recognize the world as the theatre of God, in Calvin’s wonderful phrase, then you recognize that the world is not infinitely malleable. You relate to the world with a sense of propriety and restraint. But when you lack that understanding and the world appears you to as mere matter, you have little reason for restraint and the entire concept of “propriety” becomes incoherent.

Thus Rosa’s third step: we make the world manageable.

The history of our modern relationship to the world is a history of conquering and dominating the night with electric light, the sky with airplanes, the seas with ships, the body with medicine, the temperature of our surroundings with air conditioning, and so on.

Finally, we make the world controllable by making it useful.

Here the point is not simply to bring the world under our control, but to make it into an instrument for our own purposes. This also means shaping, designing, producing world. What is there, what is present is instrumentalized.

This temptation is perhaps stronger in our own moment because we now possess tools and technology that genuinely allow an unprecedented degree of control over reality: we can blow the tops off mountains, remake human bodies, build skyscrapers that reach unto the heavens, and much else besides. 

And yet isn’t it the case that so much of what makes our encounters with the world delightful is precisely those things we cannot anticipate or control or manage? The relationships we value most, I think, are not the ones we control, but the ones in which are often recipients of things we cannot make or produce on our own. When a thing becomes fully controllable we might lose some measure of fear or anxiety, but we also lose something more basic and essential to the good life, don’t we?

It is one thing if I come home and a smart speaker, perhaps one powered by an AI like the “friend” product we already mentioned, “greets” me and asks how my day was. It is another thing if I come through the door and am tackled by two small children, eager to play or show me what they drew earlier in the day. The former is a thing I control through my purchasing power or my programming savvy. The latter is something I receive as a gift. I cannot control those children and, indeed, their presence my home likely produces some measure of the sort of chaos that we deeply desire to control and manage. But if I replaced uncontrollable human persons with fully programmable devices, I am losing the chaos, but am also losing many other things that can’t be easily quantified or measured.

Specifically, when we deny the reality of these softer, less definable experiences and desires we lose the ability to ascribe any sort of inherent dignity or value to human persons. Consider a forgotten scene from the opening season of Breaking Bad when Walter White, the future drug kingpin and villain at the heart of the series, is beginning his fall into horrifying evil. He recalls a conversation he had in graduate school while he was studying chemistry with a woman who was his girlfriend at the time. They are adding up the elements that make up the human body, before noting that the elements, as percentages, don’t quite add up to “1.”

Walt pauses. “There’s something missing,” he says. His girlfriend looks at him and quietly suggests, “the soul?” Walt scoffs before leaning in to kiss her, saying, “there’s only chemistry here.” The story of Breaking Bad is largely the story of what happens as a person comes to believe that more and more. “There is no soul, but only matter,” quickly becomes a quite brutal approach to the world in which human beings themselves become things that we seek to manage and make useful to our own ends, however horrifying.

This is the cruelty of disenchantment, but also the source of evangelistic opportunity.

The Persistent Witness of Beauty

The 19th century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins captures something of this in his poem “God’s Grandeur” which draws together the beauty of the earth with the glory of God:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.