The Reenchantment of the World Read Online Free Page A

meaning of individual lives

begins to surface as a disturbing problem, and people become preoccupied

with the meaning of meaning itself. It appears a necessary concomitant

of this preoccupation that such periods are characterized by a sharp

increase in the incidence of madness, or more precisely, of what is seen

to define madness.12 For value systems hold us ( all of us, not merely

"intellectuals"). together, and when these systems start to crumble,

so do the individuals who live by them. The last sudden upsurge in

depression and psychosis (or "melancholia," as these states of mind

were then called) occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

during which time it became increasingly difficult to maintain notions

of salvation and God's interest in human affairs. The situation was

ultimately stabilized by the emergence of the new mental framework of

capitalism, and the new definition of reality based on the scientific

mode of experiment, quantification, and technical mastery. The problem

is that this whole constellation of factors -- technological manipulation

of the environment, capital accumulation based on it, notions of secular

salvation that fueled it and were fueled by it -- has apparently run

its course. In particular, the modern scientific paradigm has become

as difficult to maintain in the late twentieth century as was the

religious paradigm in the seventeenth. The collapse of capitalism, the

general dysfunction of institutions, the revulsion against ecological

spoliation, the increasing inability of the scientific world view to

explain the things that really matter, the loss of interest in work, and

the statistical rise in depression, anxiety, and outright psychosis are

all of a piece. As in the seventeenth century, we are again destabilized,

cast adrift, floating. We have, as Dante wrote in the "Divine Comedy,"

awoken to find ourselves in a dark woods.
     
     
What will serve to stabilize things today is fairly obscure; but it is a

major premise of this book that because disenchantment is intrinsic to the

scientific world view, the modern epoch contained, from its inception, an

inherent instability that severely limited its ability to sustain itself

for more than a few centuries. For more than 99 percent of human history,

the world was enchanted and man saw himself as an integral part of it. The

complete reversal of this perception in a mere four hundred years or so

has destroyed the continuity of the human experience and the integrity

of the human psyche. It has very nearly wrecked the planet as well. The

only hope, or so it seems to me, lies in a reenchantment of the world.
     
     
Here, then, is the crux of the modern dilemma. We cannot go back

to alchemy or animism -- at least that does not seem likely; but the

alternative is the grim, scientistic, totally controlled world of nuclear

reactors, microprocessors, and genetic engineering -- a world that is

virtually upon us already. Some type of holistic, or participating,

consciousness and a corresponding sociopolitical formation have to emerge

if we are to survive as a species. At this point, as I have said, it is

not at all evident what this change will involve; but the implication

is that a way of life is slowly coming into being which will be vastly

different from the epoch that has so deeply colored, in fact created,

the details of our lives. Robert Heilbroner has suggested that a time

might come, perhaps two hundred years hence, when people will visit the

Houston computer center or Wall Street as curious relics of a vanished

civilization, but this will necessarily involve a dramatically altered

perception of reality.13 Just as we recognize in a medieval tapestry

or alchemical text a world vastly different from our own, so may those

people who visit Houston or the tip of Manhattan two centuries from now

find our own mental outlook, from the assumptions of nineteenth-century

physics to the practice of