Entzauberung

America Against America, Chapter III pt. III

American society is profoundly disenchanted (非神秘化).[1] People grow up in this society with little enchantment 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 Disenchantment[2] happens:

Many peoples harbour a enchanted feeling of deep faith in the heavens. Americans have strong religious feelings, but such feelings have not caused most of them to enchant the heavens. The Apollo moon landing program, the space shuttle, etc. all are efforts at disenchantment. The Star Wars program, also, saw the heavens as part of something that people could manipulate and exploit. The heavens are in the American mind as a place where God lives, but this place has never been enchanted. Star Wars, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were more a product of disenchantment than mystery. Yet in America religious preachers are extremely powerful, another proof of the enchantment of religion and God.

Nature tends to carry an air of enchantment among many peoples; Americans harbor less enchantment about the natural world, and they constantly dissect and disenchant it. This cultural factor is, I fear, a discursive force that drives the development of American society. One of the primary conditions for the development of science and technology is be the belief that nothing is outside of man’s ability to know and create.

Americans also have the least amount of enchantment about man himself. Religious people know that the Bible says God made man. But society continues to break down the enchantment surrounding man. It is common for doctors to open chest cavities and skulls and move around hearts and brains, and these operations are purely technical, without metaphysical elements. Americans are most interested in transplanting artificial hearts. Americans have one of the highest number of IVFs in the world. Disenchantment is thus pushing Americans towards becoming inorganic people. Sex education in adolescence is also a product of disenchantment. The issue of sex is shrouded in enchantment in many societies. In American society, sex is commonplace. Pornography, though opposed by some, is taken for granted by most people, even those who have no particular interest in reading them. This attitude toward man himself affects not only the natural sciences, but also the social sciences. If human beings are truly understood, there will be no enchantment in any respect.

Politics is full of enchantment in many societies, but this is not the case in America. Sometimes one gets the impression that Americans are too practical and pragmatic. Politics is run like an economic activity, and lacks any cultural element. The disenchantment of culture plays an undervalued role in maintaining the political system. Political cartoons amply demonstrate this. Prominent politicians are often the stars of political cartoons. In the case of the 1988 presidential campaign, political cartoonist Joe Sharpnack drew a picture of a child rolling around in bed, crying and screaming, saying, “I want to be vice president! I want it! I want it!” Another person, who looks like Bush, holds a flag and says, “Okay, okay, look, Daddy made you a new coat.” This is a satire of Republican presidential candidates Bush and Quayle. The disenchantment of politics is demonstrated by the press, which is very active in political coverage. The Watergate scandal, for example, was staged by the press. Iran-Contra, the Department of Defense bribery case, and so on, are all caused by the mixture of journalists and politics. Politics is like every other activity, not many people interested in it; a candidate for Congress has to drive their own car around to canvass for votes.

There is no enchantment in technology, either. Technology is a creation of man, and not the other way around. As long as it exists, it can be reinvented. Recently a university student in computer science created a program that, when this program was fed into the Pentagon’s network, destroyed the Pentagon’s database. His program became a “computer virus” that keeps growing. Americans in particular have no sense of wonder about what people create and build for themselves. If you can create it once, you can create it again.

There is little enchantment in children’s education, which is a mechanism for the socialization of disenchantment. 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.

Disenchantment 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. Disenchantment has undoubtedly advanced Americans’ knowledge of nature, of themselves, and of society, thus advancing social progress. On the other hand, disenchantment constitutes a major challenge to the management of American society. Disenchantment 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 enchantment.

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 disenchantment. One might even say that money has created disenchantment. 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 disenchantment, and disenchantment 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 Enchantment (神秘) mean? Enchantment 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 enchantment speaks of the relationship between man and himself.

[1] The 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 “enchantment”.

[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.