The Reenchantment of the World Read online

  Viking Penguin Inc. for permission to quote excerpts from The World Turned Upside Down by Christopher Hill; copyright © 1972 by Christopher Hill; and an excerpt from Alternating Current by Octavio Paz; copyright © 1973 by Octavio Paz.

  Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. for excerpt from Claude Lévi-Strauss interview; reprinted from Psychology Today magazine; copyright © 1972, Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.

  Introduction:

  The Modern Landscape

  You see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives -- men who hate life though they fear death.

  -- William Morris, News from Nowhere (1891)

  For several years now I have intended to write a semipopular book, dealing with certain contemporary problems, and based on my knowledge of the history of science. In an earlier work, a very technical monograph, I was able only to hint at some of the problems that characterize life in the Western industrial nations, problems that I find profoundly disturbing.1 I began that study in the belief that the roots of our dilemma were social and economic in nature; by the time I had completed it, I was convinced that I had omitted a whole epistemological dimension. I began to feel, in other words, that something was wrong with our entire world view. Western life seems to be drifting toward increasing entropy, economic and technological chaos, ecological disaster, and ultimately, psychic dismemberment and disintegration; and I have come to doubt that sociology and economics can by themselves generate an adequate explanation for such a state of affairs.

  The present book, then, is an attempt to take my previous analysis one step further; to grasp the modern era, from the sixteenth century to the present, as a whole, and to come to terms with the metaphysical presuppositions that define this period. This is not to treat mind, or consciousness, as an independent entity, cut off from material life; I hardly believe such is the case. For purposes of discussion, however, it is often necessary to separate these two aspects of human experience; and although I shall make every effort to demonstrate their interpenetration, my primary focus in this book is the transformations of the human mind. This emphasis stems from my conviction that the fundamental issues confronted by any civilization in its history, or by any person in his or her life, are issues of meaning. And historically, our loss of meaning in an ultimate philosophical or religious sense -- the split between fact and value which characterizes the modern age -- is rooted in the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Why should this be so?

  The view of nature which predominated in the West down to the eve of the Scientific Revolution was that of an enchanted world. Rocks, trees, rivers, and clouds were all seen as wondrous, alive, and human beings felt at home in this environment. The cosmos, in short, was a place of belonging. A. member of this cosmos was not an alienated observer of it but a direct participant in its drama. His personal destiny was bound up with its destiny, and this relationship gave meaning to his life. This type of consciousness -- what I shall refer to in this book as "participating consciousness" -- involves merger, or identification, with one's surroundings, and bespeaks a psychic wholeness that has long since passed from the scene. Alchemy, as it turns out, was the last great coherent expression of participating consciousness in the West.

  The story of the modern epoch, at least on the level of mind, is one of progressive disenchantment. From the sixteenth century on, mind has been progressively expunged from the phenomenal world. At least in theory, the reference points for all scientific explanation are matter and motion -- what historians of science refer to as the "mechanical philosophy." Developments that have thrown this world view into question -- quantum mechanics, for example, or certain types of contemporary ecological research -- have not made any significant dent in the dominant mode of thinking. That mode can best be described as disenchantment, nonparticipation, for it insists on a rigid distinction between observer and observed. Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather total separation from it. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. I am not my experiences, and thus not really a part of the world around me. The logical end point of this world view is a feeling of total reification: everything is an object, alien, not-me; and I am ultimately an object too, an alienated "thing" in a world of other, equally meaningless things. This world is not of my own making; the cosmos cares nothing for me, and I do not really feel a sense of belonging to it. What I feel, in fact, is a sickness in the soul.

  Translated into everyday life, what does this disenchantment mean? It means that the modern landscape has become a scenario of "mass administration and blatant violence,"2 a state of affairs now clearly perceived by the man in the street. The alienation and futility that characterized the perceptions of a handful of intellectuals at the beginning of the century have come to characterize the consciousness of the common man at its end. Jobs are stupefying, relationships vapid and and transient, the arena of politics absurd. In the vacuum created by the collapse of traditional values, we have hysterical evangelical revivals, mass conversions to the Church of the Reverend Moon, and a general retreat into the oblivion provided by drugs, television, and tranquilizers. We also have a desperate search for therapy, by now a national obsession, as millions of Americans try to reconstruct their lives amidst a pervasive feeling of anomie and cultural disintegration. An age in which depression is a norm is a grim one indeed.

  Perhaps nothing is more symptomatic of this general malaise than the inability of the industrial economies to provide meaningful work. Some years ago, Herbert Marcuse described the blue- and white-collar classes in America as "one-dimensional." "When technics becomes the universal form of material production," he wrote, "it circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality -- a 'world.'" One cannot speak of alienation as such, he went on, because there is no longer a self to be alienated. We have all been bought off, we all sold out to the System long ago and now identify with it completely. 'People recognize themselves in their commodities," Marcuse concluded; they have become what they own.3

  Marcuse's is a plausible thesis. We all know the next-door neighbor who is out there every Sunday, lovingly washing his car with an ardor that is almost sexual. Yet the actual data on the day-to-day life of the middle and working classes tend to refute Marcuse's notion that for these people, self and commodities have merged, producing what he terms the "Happy Consciousness." To take only two examples, Studs Terkel's interviews with hundreds of Americans, drawn from all walks of life, revealed how hollow and meaningless they saw their own vocations. Dragging themselves to work, pushing themselves through the daily tedium of typing, filing, collecting insurance premiums, parking cars, interviewing welfare applicants, and largely fantasizing on the job -- these people, says Terkel, are no longer characters out of Charles Dickens, but out of Samuel Beckett.4 The second study, by Sennett and Cobb, found that Marcuse's notion of the mindless consumer was totally in error. The worker is not buying goods because he identifies with the American Way of Life, but because he has enormous anxiety about his self, which he feels possessions might assuage. Consumerism is paradoxically seen as a way out of a system that has damaged him and that he secretly despises; it is a way of trying to keep free from the emotional grip of this system.5

  But keeping free from the System is not a viable option. As technological and bureaucratic modes of thought permeate the deepest recesses of our minds, the preservation of psychic space has become almost impossible.6 "High-potential candidates for management positions in American corporations customarily undergo a type of finishing-school education that teaches them how to communicate persuasively, facilitate social interaction, read body language, and so on. This mental framework is then imported into the sphere of personal and sexual relations. One thus learns, for example, how to discard friends who may prove to be career obstacles and to acquire new acquaintances who will assist in one's adv
ancement. The employee's wife is also evaluated as an asset or liability in terms of her diplomatic skills. And for most males in the industrial nations, the sex act itself has literally become a project, a matter of carrying out the proper techniques so as to achieve the prescribed goal and thus win the desired approval. Pleasure and intimacy are seen almostas a hindrance to the act. But once the ethos of technique and management has permeated the spheres of sexuality and friendship, there is literally no place left to hide. The "widespread climate of anxiety and neurosis" in which we are immersed is thus inevitable.7

  These details of the inner psychological landscape lay bare the workings of the System most completely. In a study that purported to be about schizophrenia, but that was for the most part a profile of the psychopathology of everyday Life, R.D. Laing showed how the psyche splits, creating false selves, in an attempt to protect itself from all this manipulation.8 If we were asked to characterize our usual relations with other persons, we might (as a first guess) describe them as pictured in Figure 1 (see above). Here we have self and other in direct interaction, engaging each other in an immediate way. As a result, perception is real, action is meaningful, and the self feels embodied, vital (enchanted). But as the discussion above clearly indicates, such direct interaction almost never takes place. We are "whole" to almost no one, least of all ourselves. Instead we move in a world of social roles, interaction rituals, and elaborate game-playing that forces us to try to protect the self by developing what Laing calls a "false-self system."

  In Figure 2, the self has split in two, the "inner" self retreating from the interaction and leaving the body -- now perceived as false, or dead (disenchanted) -- to deal with the other in a way that is pure theater, while the "inner" self looks on like a scientific observer. Perception is thus unreal, and action correspondingly futile. As Laing points out, we retreat into fantasies at work -- and in "love -- and establish a false self (identified with the body and its mechanical actions) which performs the rituals necessary for us to succeed in our tasks. This process begins sometime during the third year of life, is rexnforced in kindergarten and grammar school, continues on into the dreary reality of high school, and finally becomes the daily fare of working life.9 Everyone, says Laing -- executives, physicians, waiters, or whatever -- playacts, manipulates, in order to avoid being manipulated himself. The aim is the protection of the self, but since that self is in fact cut off from any meaningful intercourse, it suffocates. The environment becomes increasingly unreal as human beings distance themselves from the events of their own lives. As this process accelerates, the self begins to fight back, to nag itself (and thus create a further split) about the existential guilt it has come to feel. We are haunted by our phoniness, our playacting, our flight from trying to become what we truly are or could be. As the guilt mounts, we silence the nagging voice with drugs, alcohol, spectator sports -- anything to avoid facing the reality of the situation. When the self-mystification we practice, or the effect of the pills, wears off, we are left with the terror of our own betrayal, and the emptiness of our manipulated "successes."

  The statistics that reflect this condition in America alone are so grim as to defy comprehension. There is now a significant suicide rate among the seven-to-ten age group, and teenage suicides tripled between 1966 and 1976 to roughly thirty per day. More than half the patients in American mental hospitals are under twenty-one. In 1977, a survey of nine- to eleven-year-olds on the West Coast found that nearly half the children were regular users of alcohol, and that huge numbers in this age group regularly came to school drunk. Dr. Darold Treffert, of Wisconsin's Mental Health Institute, observed that millions of children and young adults are now plagued by a gnawing emptiness or meaninglessness expressed not as a fear of what may happen to them, but rather as a fear that nothing will happen to them." Official figures from government reports released during 1971-72 recorded that the United States has 4 million schizophrenics, 4 million seriously disturbed children, 9 million alcoholics, and 10 million people suffering from severely disabling depression. In the early 1970s, it was reported that 25 million adults were using Valium; by 1980, Food and Drug Administration figures indicated that Americans were downing benzodiazepines (the class of tranquilizers which includes Valium) at a rate of 5 billion pills a year. Hundreds of thousands of the nation's children, according to "The Myth of the Hyperactive Child" by Peter Schrag and Diane Divoky (1975), are being drugged in the schools, and one-fourth of the American female population in the thirty-to-sixty age group uses psychoactive prescription drugs on a regular basis. Articles in popular magazines such as "Cosmopolitan" urge sufferers from depression to drop in to the local mental hospital for drugs or shock treatments, so that they can return to their jobs as quickly as possible. "The drug and the mental hospital," writes one political scientist, "have become the indispensable lubricating oil and reservicing factory needed to prevent the complete breakdown of the human engine."10

  These figures are American in degree, but not in kind. Poland and Russia are world leaders in the consumption of hard liquor; the suicide rate in France has been growing steadily; in West Germany, the suicide rate doubled between 1966 and 1976.11 The insanity of Los Angeles and Pittsburgh is archetypal, and the "misery index" has been climbing in Leningrad, Stockholm, Milan, Frankfurt and other cities since midcentury. If America is the frontier of the Great Collapse, the other industrial nations are not far behind.

  It is an argument of this book that we are not witnessing a peculiar twist in the fortunes of postwar Europe and America, an aberration that can be tied to such late twentieth-century problems as inflation, loss of empire, and the like. Rather, we are witnessing the inevitable outcome of a logic that is already centuries old, and which is being played out in our own lifetime. I am not trying to argue that science is the cause of our predicament; causality is a type of historical explanation which I find singularly unconvincing. What I am arguing is that the scientific world view is integral to modernity, mass society, and the situation described above. It is our consciousness, in the Western industrial nations -- uniquely so -- and it is intimately bound up with the emergence of our way of life from the Renaissance to the present. Science, and our way of life, have been mutually reinforcing, and it is tor this reason that the scientific world view has come under serious scrutiny at the same time that the industrial nations are beginning to show signs of severe strain, if not actual disintegration.

  From this perspective, the transformations I shall be discussing, and the solutions I dimly perceive, are epochal, and this is all the more reason not to relegate them to the realm of theoretical abstraction. Indeed, I shall argue that such fundamental transformations impinge upon the details of our daily lives far more directly than the things we may think to be most urgent: this Presidential candidate, that piece of pressing legislation, and so on. There have been other periods in human history when the accelerated pace of transformation has had such an impact on individual lives, the Renaissance being the most recent example prior to the present. During such periods, the 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 -- technol
ogical 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.