There are gaps in the world again. Post-modernism is flawed in being non-constructive, except that it releases us. Yes, the release is exaggerated, but the post-modern critique has enough force that we cannot return to Positivist certainty.

Very nice article, until the diagnosis of the present.

I am tempted to say the following, with the greatest respect: I believe you are mythologising the past. We do live in an enchanted world. Today’s enchantment is different, to be sure. Does it make sense to make such a general claim?: “we live in a much less enchanted world.” Enchantment has simply changed, dear professor. It remains with us in all too recognisable a form.

All the best.

We moderns question, and buffer ourselves. Perhaps our questioning and empiricism have given us enough explanations of natural phenomena for us to question even those phenomenon that are unexplained, such as God experiences that still haunt us.

Terrence McKenna posits a whole realm of biological intelligences that communicate with us through chemicals. It may be that we have buffered ourselves from interactions with the biosphere well enough to ignore it except by choice through ingestion. Certainly, the world is now, and always has been, dominated by organisms of one cell and smaller. To assume they have no influence on consciousness denies our known experiences with phytochemical hallucinogens.

This is an interesting line of thought, but I’m not so sure that it’s altogether true. The work of Paul Rozin and colleagues shows clearly that modern westerners still harbour behaviourally important ideas about the moral significance of inanimate matter. In essence, a lot of “moderns” implicitly think along the lines of sympathetic magic, such that, for example, clothing worn by nominally evil or bad people are perceived to “magically” take on some of those moral qualities. Check out his website for references.

I wonder, however, whether the sharp demarcation between self and world that you describe, and the disenchantment that Weber described so long ago, represents an actual shift in the nature of human experience, or whether it has instead become an alibi for much more powerful forces. Is the modern self truly nonporous, territorialized, and closed? Is the cybernetic metaphor of control all that is left to us? Or are we just as enchanted, just as confident in the mystical power of our science and our tools, as we were millennia ago?

When we “disengage” from the world by embracing a metaphysics of control and direct causality, I’m not sure that we are truly doing so. Our technologies, perhaps what Foucault would have called “technologies of self” in an earlier biomedical era, in fact open us up to all kinds of interventions and blur the boundaries between self and other, culture and nature. But could it in fact be argued that bodily technologies—drugs, prosthetics, medicine—require an intimate, even porous engagement with the world around us?

There seems to be something different about the experience of difference and boundaries in modernity, but I’m not sure we are any more demarcated or set apart than we were long ago. Thanks again for such a thoughtful piece.