Entauberung, Wang Huning on Max Weber

Wang Huning is a member of the Chinese pulitburo. He is widely considered on of the most powerful theoreticians in China, and works as head of the Chinese Policy Research Office and chairman of the Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization.

In this chapter of America Against America, Huning discusses Max Weber’s concept of entzauberung, or disenchantment, the tendency of modern, capitalist, societies to rationalize away the various folk beliefs and taboos of traditional societies.


Disenchantment

America Against America, Chapter III pt. III

American society is profoundly disenchanted(非神秘化).1People grow up in this society with little mystery about anything. This is an inseparable part of the American culture. Many cultures have a strong sense of mystery, which is present in Africa, Latin America, and some elements of Western European culture. It is worth exploring what role mystery plays in the development of a society, or at least how it can be a bulwark around many traditional ideas and institutions. The same is true for nature. The progress of science and technology comes from the continuous conquest and victory over nature. Americans have few taboos in this regard, or rather taboos do not become taboo. On the other hand, the development of society is the development of human beings themselves, and it is difficult to develop the cultural and social institutions of humanity if we do not strive to understand people themselves.

Let us examine how Entzauberung2 happens:

There is little mystery in children’s education, which is a mechanism for the socialization of entzauberung. Americans have almost no belief in ghosts. Americans invent and conceive of many ghosts, probably more than any other country in the world, but do not believe in ghosts. Children have no fear of ghosts, and during Halloween, children dress up as all kinds of ghosts and move around the neighbourhood. Americans grow up with the mentality that ghosts are not scary, but that it is people who are scary. In some societies, the opposite is true: people are not scary, ghosts are scary. It would certainly be interesting to discuss what the consequences of these two different creeds are.

Entzauberung has both advantages and disadvantages for social development. There are always negative and positive aspects of everything, good and bad, and this condition often constitutes a major paradox in the development of human society. Entzauberung has undoubtedly advanced Americans’ knowledge of nature, of themselves, and of society, thus advancing social progress. On the other hand, entzauberung constitutes a major challenge to the management of American society. Entzauberung has the tendency to make people lack authority, moderation, self-sufficiency, and self-confidence. A culture in which believes in nothing can be a great driving force, or a great destructive force. This is what I mean by the paradox of human society: we can’t progress without knowing, and we can’t live without mystery.

The question is how this secular culture has been formed. This is a subject too complex to cover in a glance, I’m afraid, but let’s take a look. American society developed in a land that did not have a long history of culture. The abundance of natural resources and open spaces made early Americans discover that anyone’s practical efforts would be generously rewarded, although this was restricted mainly to cultivation of the land at first. There were no cultural myths to sacralize, and everyday life taught that recognizing simple and universal truths would be rewarding. The long-standing preoccupation with pragmatism and focus on economic development thus advanced entzauberung. One might even say that money has created entzauberung. Driven by money, people are forced to conceive of objects as exchangeable commodities, and this mindset later extended to man himself and the society of which he is a part. Economic development requires entzauberung, and entzauberung can, under certain conditions, promote economic and social development. This is twofold: first, Americans like to be different and original; second, Americans are used to challenge and conquest. American culture is an aggressive culture and Chinese culture is a defensive culture.

What does mystery (神秘) mean? Mystery is the belief that there are things that are beyond the ability of ordinary people to understand and change, or matters that do not belong to ordinary people. Naturally, I do not mean supernatural here. Supernatural speaks of the relationship between man and supernatural forces, and mystery speaks of the relationship between man and himself.


1The Chinese expression used here, “非 / 神秘 / 化” (非-non, 神秘-mystery, 化-“-ify, -ize, -ization”) is a faithful translation of the German “Entzauberung, an expression used by Max Weber to describe Western Society’s tendancy to seek secular, mechanistic explenations of the world. Although generally translated into English as “disenchantment,” due to the highly specific meaning of the word it has been preserved here in the original German. Concurrently “神秘”, the German “zauber”, has been traslated as “mystery”.

2“Thus the growing process of intellectualization and rationalization does not imply a growing understanding of the conditions under which we live. It means something quite different. It is the knowledge or the conviction that if only we wished to understand them we could do so at any time. It means that in principle, then, we are not ruled by mysterious, unpredictable forces, but that, on the contrary, we can in principle control everything by means of calculation. That in turn means the disenchantment of the world. (Entzauberung der Welt) Unlike the savage for whom such forces existed, we need no longer have recourse to magic in order to control the spirits or pray to them. Instead, technology and calculation achieve our ends. This is the primary meaning of the process of intellectualization.” —Weber, Max, David S. Owen, Tracy B. Strong, Rodney Livingstone, Max Weber, and Max Weber. The vocation lectures. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 2004.


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