We all probably experience personal disenchantment as a process through our childhood - a transformation of the world from being a magic place of hidden motives and meanings (often sinister and malign) - to the mundane materialism of adult and mainstream life.
There is also a slower, social trend towards societal disenchantment - that I have both read-about and also experienced in my own life. in the 1970s and 80s, even such mundane materialistic bureaucratic "systems" as schools, universities, hospitals - and many cities - were still touched by a kind of residual-enchantment that was spontaneous, often unconscious.
And there were then still many people who remembered them as even more magical - and treated them as such - and added to the enchantment thereby.
As a romantic by nature; I felt these receding of enchantment in my life, and the world around me, very keenly at the time - and did my best to fight against it by holding-onto the residuum, and trying to build from it: but with little and lessening success.
I did this because it seemed then, and it seems now, that a mundane world and life - without enchantment, depth, spiritual resonance, in a dead and unconscious universe - is simply not worth living.
If life is nothing more than comfort, convenience, amusement, and excitement for the (temporarily) "fortunate" - and pain, disability, disease, degeneration, and death for the rest (and everybody, sooner or later) -- then such a life is a matter of indifference to the mass of mankind; as evidenced by the reluctance to have children, or indeed lift a finger, to defend it.
And it seems that (on the whole) the rest-of-the-world agrees with me on the worthless futility of a mundane life; because most people are actively-planning or diligently-implementing the end of civilization (thus themselves and their loved-ones); or are going-along-with-it in a state of denial and idle-incomprehension - having no better ideas or ideals.
But if clinging to the residuum of enchantment does not work; and since this disenchanted world cannot motivate us to sustain it; then it seems we must seek something else if we are not to fall inevitably into despair.
It seems that a viable re-enchantment of the world, to be attempted in some new kind of spirit, from some new kind of understanding, is actually the most important thing in the world?
I personally cannot let this subject alone; and when I am not brooding on it in a would-be constructive fashion, I feel as if I am neglecting my most fundamental duty.
I have encountered quite a few good ideas about what we ought to be doing towards a genuine and effective re-enchantment - for examples I have often referenced the likes of Steiner, Barfield, Arkle - but none of their practical ideas to encourage or create re-enchantment seem to work nowadays; and some seem counter-productive (although they probably did work, to an extent, in their eras).
My current conclusion is that the task has now devolved from the group to the individual; so that general plans and schemes, and recommendations of a generalized kind, have apparently ceased to be useful.
Since the necessity remains; this may imply that re-enchantment has become the work of the present day, or even hour.
We each must start afresh start from here-and-now and from our current personal state of being - whenever we become conscious of the need.
Very vague, I realize; and maybe yet another ineffective suggestion? But maybe not. Maybe there is little alternative; and maybe that is the way God has made it.
We can only do what we ought to do - if we are to do anything at all in the necessary direction.
And since God is the creator, and God loves each of us; we can assume that any small positive good we accomplish (in thought or action) and that is worth it; shall be noticed and amplified by God to ramify throughout his creation.
14 comments:
William Arkle’s Painting Game is enchantingly fun.
@Colin - I personally hate that kind of thing!
But I suspect that its success is very context dependent (specific persons involved, particular current motivations and moods etc), rather than being a generalizable technique of enchantment.
A generalizable technique of enchantment is exactly what (for instance) Rudolf Steiner claimed to offer his followers. After a century, this has been clearly a failure - and so have all the others of which I am aware.
“Morgoth’s Review” has an interesting take on this topic, which you may find consoling—or not: which is that world-wide re-enchantment is taking place before our eyes, though this is not necessarily a thing to be welcomed. For example, it is now a mainstream belief, and indeed is fairly obvious, and looks like becoming more so, that the rulers of our world are literally demonic. (Demons being as much enchanted beings as angels.) Further, as “Morgoth’s Review” notes, an age of Holy Wars is clearly returning. Wars, that is, where the extermination of the enemy, because of race or belief, is seen as an act of piety towards a divinity ( which may be a nation or ideology, and may actually be demonic). It became clear in the scamdemic that the general population cares nothing for science now, if they ever did; they went along with the Enlightenment because it gave material comforts and freed them from some “constraints” of Christianity, but their rulers will be able to whip them up into “enchanted” blood-frenzy easily enough when they desire, which it seems they do. So, as “Morgoth’s Review” says, be careful what you wish for.
@Andrew L - You'd need to read the linked posts to see what I mean by enchantment/ disenchantment. It's not the same a Morgoth - who (although a likeable chap) does not write or reason from (what I would recognize as) a Christian point of view.
I realize there is a prevalent kind-of-belief in demons but not God. It is like superstition, in which people still (sort-of) believe in bad luck etc - but don't link this conflicts with their metaphysical assumption that the whole of reality is accidental, purposeless, meaningless.
The trouble with incoherent bits and pieces of beliefs of this kind is that they are shallow, weakly-motivated - hence easily manipulated; because they don't make overall sense, and don't support each other.
Just bits and pieces of conflicting beliefs - like mainstream politics.
Funny you felt compelled to write this at this time of year, when to me Christmas always seems furthest away.
My aspiration in this life is to awaken a few humans, even two or a single one, as I was awakened; through the partaking and contribution to creation.
@Mia - "you felt compelled to write this "
That's how it works with blogging (although I could of course *resist* the compulsion!... maybe "felt inspired" would be more accurate as a term?) - as a consequence, it is surprising how often I seem to hit the spot for somebody or another, among my small readership.
Synchronicity - which I interpret as evidence we live in the creation of a loving God, who helps us in this kind of way.
cecil1 has left a comment:
"Perhaps this is unusual, but it took a long time for me to lose the enchanted experience to the world, long into being an adult. In fact only just before a few years before the [Birdemic], in my late 30's.
"Somehow it seemed to drift away. I remember noticing. Before that even the seasons had an enchantment, holidays, much else. I still expect it to return, as I don't like its absence--even though it doesn't seem like its something you can just choose.
"It's interesting that you even bring this up--- as while I've been aware of the 'enchanted' aspect to much of experience, and a strong awareness of when experience loses this quality, I have hardly ever heard people discuss this.
"Really not adults much at all. With kids of course, and even teenagers, there is often this awareness, this approach to the world, -- but not adults.
"I'm sure most adults would call this thinking childish -- but I've never thought it that."
I am mostly familiar with the enchantment/disenchantment/reenchantment opposition through the discussions of Charles Taylor, but he relates his usage to the original coining by Max Weber. Here disenchantment is the emptying of meaning and value from the world through scientism and materialism. Your use is more personal and experiential, but seems to me fundamentally alike—the bureaucratization you deplore is the result of scientism and materialism. So it still seems to me that recognition of evil is disruptive of disenchantment and is reenchanting in your meaning. Evil—real evil, not bad blood or bad genes or other scientific attempts to explain it away—is not compatible with scientism and materialism, giving (negative) value and (horrific) meaning.
This incompatibility of evil with scientism and materialism is what Morgoth meant (though I don’t take him for a Christian and disagree with many of his opinions), he got the idea from the fiction of H.P.Lovecraft and the Lovecraftian dystopian scifi of Warhammer 40k. The contradiction may cause what Alasdair MacIntyre calls an “epistemological crisis”, which may also be called a metaphysical crisis—similar to the crises in normal science Thomas Kuhn observes precede scientific revolutions resulting in paradigm shifts. It is true that the incongruent evil may be dismissed as an anomaly, but it is also possible that this unassimilable element may be joined by others to cause a waning of belief in scientism and materialism and eventually a paradigm shift!
@Andrew L - The distinction wrt disenchantment, is that without God disenchantment is an hedonic state, an emotion or feeling - and re-enchantment is a restoration of the enchanted feeling.
My understanding does not dismiss feelings; but regards the bottom line of enchantment as being aligned with God's creation. This is rooted in the analyses of Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield; that there is an original or primary situation in which children and "tribal" humans (like most animals and plants) are spontaneously unconsciously immersed "in" divine creation.
It is this enchantment which has dwindled to little or nothing in modern Western adults - we do not have that spontaneous and unconscious experience of being part of nature - and this includes an assumed and implicit basing of life on god/s, the presence of spirits, continued existence after death and so on.
So the original state of enchantment is part of this - with whatever emotions or feelings result from it. The disenchanted feelings are secondary to a changed experience of the nature of reality.
Can evil things be enchanted? You know, in a "way", or experienced as such?
If so, perhaps it's better if the modern masses remain feeling as if life is mundane. The allure and glamour of evil might be too much for them. There were people especially in the 19th century (and around there) who were/are quite successful in making evil (or at least "dark") things seem enchanted, full of life etc.
Put simply, I'm thinking that living life in an enchanted way is a high risk, high reward sort of thing.
@EP - See previous comment. Of course value inversion is mainstream nowadays, so the good and evil are reversed in official/ media/ corporate discourse as a matter of routine. So people can experience this.
" life in an enchanted way is a high risk, high reward sort of thing."
There is no low risk way of being Good, of attaining salvation, here-and-now; because all the normal, conventional, institutional paths are so thoroughly corrupted.
Indeed, anyone who set-out to be obedient, conscientious, correct - and stick to the consensus-approved paths - will be on a path to Hell, for sure.
Interesting that you are still dissatisfied with solutions to this problem, that you feel a sense of duty to keep grinding away at it.
The sexual revolution seems to have been a corruption of spiritual energy intended by the Kingdom of Heaven to produce a family love revolution. What that means in its entirety, and the kind of world it would have produced if it had been successfully received, is still a mystery to me.
I know that for myself, I have an intense feeling for classmates and coworkers that the modern world would consider abnormal or weird. We are meant by our slave-masters to move through workplaces and schools without any feeling or attachment to others - we are certainly not meant by them to love them as family in any sense. I don't know.
I sometimes wonder if the entry of women into the workplace would have indeed been a phase in the true angelic plan, but that women would not have been there to work so much as to join together the schism between work and home somehow. The great social atomization of the West seems to have come about because the God-given social engineering genius of women has been covertly sabotaged.
@Epi - Very interesting comment!
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