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Treat yourself to feel good landings on an ultra-high stack of super-comfy, nitrogen-infused cushion that takes the edge off every step. Every day. The Brooks Ghost Max 2. You know, technically, they're a form of self-care. Brooks, let's run there. Head to BrooksRunning.com to learn more. Welcome to the new books network. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Montezahajisa, there from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Professor Jason Josephson Storm and about a wonderful book that he published with Chicago University Press, the book is called "The Myth of this Enchantment." Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of Human Sciences. The book was published in 2017, but the content of the book couldn't be any more relevant these days. And we'd need to discuss the book with Professor Jason. I've got a fellow friend, Said Garamarrudi, and I'll ask both of them to introduce themselves briefly. Jason and Said, welcome to the new books network. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Jason, you'll be the spotlight. So, before I come to our essay to very briefly introduce himself and tell us about his field of expertise. Because it's a bit different in this podcast because both of us will be asking you a few questions about your book. So, Said, you may go first. Sure. Absolutely. So, my name is Said and I'm a Jew Garamarrudi. And I'm a visiting assistant professor at University Illinois Wesleyan University. I teach psychology of religion. And I heard the news about you wanting to interview Dr. Storm. And I was like, absolutely, I want to be there too. And so, you were kind enough to have me in. So, it's such a huge pleasure. I usually use the content of his book in my class to set the stage for students saying that, yes, spirituality and transcendent type of thinking is still there. And so, I'm very happy and pleased to be here. Thank you. And Jason, would appreciate if you could give us a very brief introduction and to our audience. Jason has another wonderful book called Metamodernism, which is, which is already done a podcast on your books network. So please do listen to that one as well. Jason. Yeah, so I'm Jason Ananda Josephson storm. I'm a, I guess, historian and philosopher with a specialization on the one hand in Asia in Japan and on the other hand Western Europe, both in the time period from about 1600 to the present. And in both cases, I'm really interested in the issues around attempts to define things as religions or sciences. And right now, let's see what should I say else about myself. Right now I'm a visiting professor at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, and I have a permanent position at Williams College, where I am the Oakley 3rd century professor of religion and share of the science and technology studies program. The book we're talking about today is actually the second of three books and I have a fourth that I'm finishing now my first book was the invention of religion in Japan. My second book is this, the myth of disenchantment and the third one is called metamodernism, and the one I'm finishing now is called the genealogy of genealogy, and maybe I'll give you all those sort of hopefully catchy titles and just say again what a pleasure it is to be here and talking to folks about it. The book's a little old for me because it came out in 2017. So there may be moments where if I struggle to recall, it is merely remembering the former self that produced this book. So thank you. Great, thank you. I'm sort of active on social media myself, and I can't tell you how much I've been in trouble by some friends of mine or some not so much friends maybe for telling them look there's no really not really conflict between science and religion or disenchantment at all the myth we still really really love the idea of spirituality and in China and science hasn't really dispelled all these things. So to begin with, can you first have the disenchantment of course but can you first define modernity and disenchantment let's say in layman's terms to set this in for our audience. Sure, and part of what I'm doing in this book is some excavation work or we could say it's broadly deconstructive so I'm going to kind of undo both of those categories of modernity disenchantment but in slightly different ways so I'll say one of the impulses behind the book is a sense that modernity is an extraordinarily elastic category that is usually used to mark a rupture, but it bundles together a bunch of different things that are often underspecified, and that rupture is understood in very different terms and in even contradictory ways. So just to give you an example, the term modernist first emerges in the writings of a Roman priest named Cassiadorus in about 580 of the common era, and this is before the Middle Ages. He's talking about what we could translate as modern architecture, and what he means is a shift that's happening in late antiquity, basically, and modernity in its basic etymology just means of today. And in that respect it's a kind of been a historically moving target, but in particular, in the 19th century as part of European expansion and colonization of the rest of the globe. Modernity was not only sort of the central period name that people were using to describe themselves, but also became a particular political program called modernization, which was often imposed on other parts of the world that the Europeans were in the process of justifying its horrific colonial progressive policies. But in many cases, modernity had built in it already the idea that it was always somewhere else. So from the perspective of Britain, pre peak modernity was perhaps Paris, and the perspective of Paris it might have been Berlin and from Berlin it might have been, I don't know New York or whatever but modernity always had a kind of displacement built into it, even as it seemed to describe what was new and fresh. And in the book, there are many different ways we might want to define modernity and you could talk about, you know, the rise of mass print making or mass literacy or you could talk about the Industrial Revolution, or you could talk about capitalism and a particular historical trajectories. The one I'm most interested these all aren't the same thing and they actually lead toward very different understandings about what central and part of the trick is that modernity ties those all together and pretends that it's also a worldview or mentality or new outlook. And what I was interested in particular was a very common description of what was supposed to make the modern world modern, which is that it was supposed to be disenchanted and I was also suspicious of this description because it was also supposed to be the thing that demarcated the West from the rest. So the idea was, the West is disenchanted and modern and really rational, and the East unfortunately, you know, in this was seen as mystical enchanted and then also for that reason, on modern or maybe had failed modernity or something like that and we can see how this played into horrific notions of a clash of civilizations. We can see how this played into the colonization of Africa, but we can also see if we get even more specific that modernity disenchanted modernity was only ever supposed to describe certain parts of North America and Western Europe. And more specifically to take to take you to the next and then I think it's wrong. The main thing is I think that that particular version of modernity is a myth. But to take that second term that you asked me about disenchantment, I think it'd be helpful for your listeners to know that in the book is a response to one of my all time favorite books, which is workheimer and adornos dialectic of enlightenment, which is just for anybody who's into Frankfurt school critical theory or just critical theory in general. It's an incredible book it's a mind blowing book, what I'm arguing with I'm sort of shadow boxing with for the whole of my monograph and alternative title of my book was going to be dialectic of darkness but then people thought I was saying dialect of darkness it just confused so it didn't end up with that as the title, but horkheimer and adorno describe the central feature of enlightenment as and zalborong as disenchantment. And they're very specific that what disenchantment means is a lack of belief in magic slash occult forces which they treat as equivalent, an end of belief in spirits and an end of belief in myth. Those are the three things that the disenchantment means for them. And so I started from that book and worked backward and then I noted that notions of enchantment and disenchantment are fluid and they mean different things for different thinkers and what exactly counts as magic means different things in different contexts, et cetera, but that was my sort of departing point from for the book as a whole. Yeah, I can monologue a bit much sorry I was doing my lecture course earlier today so I can see the passion and you raised a lot of fascinating points which we will try to unpack as we go ahead. One thing I really really like was that idea of rupture that myth of rupture let's say you have all these, for example, the middle ages and they suddenly rupture, you draw the curtains and Renaissance is born, and then you have modernity and an enlightenment. And also that divide between East and West, I've been reading more about this history of science in the East as well, and it's quite interesting how some of the ideas that didn't really reconcile with the conventional beliefs or frameworks of the Westerners were called occult sciences or magic or spirituality or whatever, and the other point that you raised that I really loved is this idea that the West is maybe the West is not the right term but again there is this decline of religion which more or less you can see North America Western Europe but again even in these countries, I guess there's a search for religion without religion or some sort of spirituality, but we'll pick that up and yeah totally and I kind of just one of the things that I'm doing in the book and I'm one of the things that I should have been more explicit about but I always have to tell people is that I am distinguishing secularization from disenchantment for reasons that if we get to the first full chapter which is the sociological chapter I can explain in more detail but but basically one of the interesting things is that as let's say many of the markers of secularization decline for instance if you look at declining church attendance across Western Europe or parts of North America or people's reported respect for the authority of the church. When this happens which looks like secularization, older theorists other than me had imagined that that meant people were stripping away all of their beliefs after that. But actually if you look at the sociological evidence as institutional religion declines in authority, people's have more belief in ghosts more belief in spirits they have unmet needs we could even imagine that there's a sort of psychology that is the unmet needs although I don't speculate about why but in any case they don't they don't stop believing in you know let's say magic myth and spirits at the very least there seems to be an inverse correlation between belief in God and belief in ghosts so there was a sociological study in England that should people reporting belief in God was going down as people pro to believe in ghosts was going up. And I think we see similar patterns in places like the Czech Republic and elsewhere so for that reason. I think one of the things that actually fuels so called enchantment or you know the alternative to disenchantment is actually a decline of institutionalized religion. At least, and a kind of fragmentation of belief that causes more things to appear that call that makes people read each other as either superstitious or believing in magic or spirits etc. So anyway that's part of the sociological stuff but we could take step back to the other thing that you mentioned that I want to underscore for your readers is it exactly, you're exactly right it's there's this myth of rupture. And it's a myth, because it keeps being told about different time periods, it's supposed to be like it's like the moment where everything everyone got rational and people are like oh that happened in the Protestant Reformation or that happened in the scientific revolution, or that happened with a printing press or that happened with the rise of let's say a particular stage in capitalism where it happened you know there's a repeated story about this moment where everything got rational. One of the things I discuss in the book is that that story that there was a rupture a moment emerges first in a very significant way in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century, and then it becomes a myth in search of its own time period so even before, you know, people had identified the enlightenment or even had an even notion that there had been a period called the Enlightenment, they back projected a moment of rupture and in a very tight period of about 50 years, all of those different possible moments that could have been the rupture were generated back projected basically so it's a myth in search of history in some particular sense. Anyway, yeah I'm sorry to take us in a different direction so that's my passion actually site the other question. Sure yeah so I have something to add here so there are things that we can think of that has been disenchanted when we look around when we look at our look, our Iranian culture or more general Eastern culture. For example, people used to take a lightning as a sign from the gods or a sign of a spiritual realm, they don't do that anymore. So that's I guess some something that has something to do with this enchantment, something that is not disenchanted really and I don't know that we can ever get that disenchanted is the mind itself is like the mind is the soul is the consciousness. So I want to see do you see a difference between these two levels of like mind has always been something mysterious but some of the phenomena that used to project are the content of our psyche to those phenomena. That thing we can say there is a disenchanted going on about those external phenomena. Well so I would say, I mean I'm definitely not a specialist in the Iranian case so I can only I do know I have a great friendly colleague to Ranga Zadi who does great work on some some contemporary beliefs among Iranian diasporic communities and there's so called enchanted beliefs but but I will say that I'm not arguing that there's no change a point of fact beliefs that do change a lot over time, but they change in ways that don't fit linear or straightforward trajectories and there are local patterns so for instance, belief in let's say angelic magic goes out of vogue in one period and belief in the paranormal increases in the same period and that's not an exact example but but but you see those kind of patterns or more specifically the notion of spirit or spirits globalizes and begins to absorb a huge range of local entities so that today the majority of people depending on how you the vocabulary used for your survey data believe in spirits, but that wouldn't but that's heavily collapsing what in many different cultures were complex folk ontologies that included all sorts of different kinds of creatures from, you know, things radically different creatures that just gets collapsed together. So I'm definitely not saying that there is no change, and there are also local deviations so for instance, there are periods that get very interested in conformity, and then therefore try and flush non conformist or you know or they get very interested in modernization and flush certain kinds of beliefs that they flag is anti modern. So for instance, but it often fails. So I'm not saying that nobody ever tries to disenchant but actually that the process of it is unsuccessful. I'll give you an example from my first book. In the 19th century Japan, the Japanese state decided that as part of a cultural campaign toward what they called would make haika so enlightenment and civilization or enlightenment and modernization. They needed to get rid of backward beliefs. And so they put out these proclamations and they said, you should not anymore believe in possessing spirit foxes. Do not anymore believe in winged goblins. What happened was, they started getting petitions from people who said, my wife is possessed by a spirit fox and you're telling me these don't exist. What do you want me to do about this. And then also strikingly, and this was one of the things that tipped me toward this book. In the other Japanese state is doing that they then are looking at what happens in the West and they hear about a revival or a big massive movement but we would now call spiritualism of table turning and seances. The Japanese state goes okay spirit foxes definitely out winged goblins which were not that widely believed in any way in different parts of Japan. Nope, no good. They're often supposed to be anti government figures and so those they have to be gotten rid of. But ghosts, they might really exist and then the Japanese state ends up committing itself the certain kinds of psychical research or at least funding it is in various ways. All that is to say, I'm not describing a kind of stasis but there, but that there's not like a linear trajectory where civilization gets more and more rational or disenchanted. Those mean slightly different things but we could tease out the nuances. But yeah, anyway, that's kind of what I'm examining in the book. Yeah. I tell banana republic, butcher box and glossier all have in common. They power their businesses with Shopify. Shopify is the most innovative and scaled commerce platform on the planet. That also happens to have the best converting checkout on the planet. And that's no industry secret. That's Shopify. Learn more at Shopify dot com slash enterprise. And one speaking of modernity, I guess one of the myths is that is a conflict in science and religion that you do speak about in the book that we have this world of superstitions and magic and religion and faith and suddenly science was born. Completely disabuses of all those notions which I guess again sort of touches upon what say it asking what we've been talking about. Can you talk about that? How is it a myth? That's one part of the question. The second part of the question that I have is that even with the birth of science, characters such as Newton, for example, or Galileo, they describe that as divine sciences. So it wasn't still a rupture or complete, let's say, demarcation. What does that mean, divine sciences. Yeah, so, so there are two things that I'm interested in sort of analytically in in that question and I'll separate them out. One of them is this question about the terms religion and science and, and we can get. I can get really preoccupied with it because, as it turns out, those terms are both both come to dominance in a very staggered way. They're not old terms, the let's just say, let's depends on which European language or analyzing I can, I use a bunch of different ones in the book but say, you know, in most European languages, the notion of religion basically is a non existent in its vocabulary formulations, except for the religious who are supposed to be priests until the Protestant Reformation and this notion of religion emerges as a society and then over time, only much later in the 18th century becomes an anthropological category, but the notion of science also doesn't solidify in this in the period that we're talking about in terms of the scientific revolution or that is back projected scientific revolution. So, for instance, in Newton's day, that only was the word physicist not a word in his vocabulary but also scientist was not a word. And insofar as the term science was used CNTI in Latin, it was used to describe any kind of robust knowledge, but the kind of that was thought of as the most robust was not empirical knowledge, knowledge that came from the external world but knowledge that was logically demonstrable. So the archetypal science in the 18th century was something that you had logical proof for, not something that you experienced by measuring the world. And so it was literally period when people like Newton or Boyle or Francis Bacon who I spend a lot more time with on the book, we're articulating what would later come to be called the scientific method basically or early examples of science. They did so in a context that was heavily Protestant or Emily Christian if they were continental figures like Galileo etc. And they often thought that what they were doing was advancing a kind of divine knowledge and so this is to get to the divine science part of your question. So for instance, Isaac Newton spent most of his time working on looking for codes in the Bible and practicing alchemy than he did writing physics. And not only that but even in his published physics, the cosmology that he described often criticized, you know, for being the birth of the actual picture, actually had the supernatural built into it because Newton was trying to explain why gravity doesn't cause everything to just spiral inward and collapse, or why the, the, if the gravity's been universal and they're all along, why isn't the universe just some mushed up ball. And he suggested that it was because of regular divine intervention and he used the word supernatural to describe that and so he did not believe that there was a conflict between religion and science the word science hadn't yet taken on its, its current and even the word religion for him meant something somewhat different than what we would use it to mean today. So it's only in the 19th century, basically, I'll put a hashtag footnote on here we can talk about the nuances of this. But the word scientist emerges in English in the writings of a man named you will in the early 1830s or thereabouts, and that notion of a conflict between religion and science appears famously in the title of a book by a man named Draper in something like the 1860s. And then that we have this idea and and when Draper articulates it's actually he's actually saying a version of the argument that certain forms of Protestantism are not in conflict with science, it's actually a kind of anti Catholic maneuver and so he's saying, there's a conflict between religion and because the Catholics are backward, but if you had it, if you were really enlightened Protestant, you wouldn't have a conflict. And so this idea of the conflict is quite late. And at the very moment people start describing and investing in this notion of conflict, other people start trying to solve the problem. So the period that saw the first writings about a conflict between religion and science, you had a bunch of new movements, new religions of science, for instance, like a monism which was originally a new religious movement centered around, like a kind of pantheism, or you had things like Christian science which saw themselves as religious sciences in a different way or more famously as I talk about in the book you had quote unquote occult sciences or spiritualism, all of which thought that they were solving this problem of the conflict between religion and science. But what did happen to give you so any so this notion of a conflict between religion and sciences heavily has to be heavily fudged, and in the process of arguing that there was a conflict between religion and science folks like Draper back projected various points, like the idea that Darwin had, you know, set out to destroy God or an over exaggerated account of Galileo's imprisonment that's the closest you can get to a scientific martyrs Galileo, but the story is more complicated or they pretended that you know, for instance, had been the first scientific martyr, but but but a point of fact, Jordan Bruno got in trouble because he was trying to lead a Christian Reformation and because he was also deeply invested in magic and those two things more problems than anything having to do with quote unquote science which would as an anachronism that he could like solve the rupture between the churches by promoting his own version of Christianity that had a bigger vast or cosmos and also had little spirits in it and that did not go over very well, but that was not a conflict between religion and science so we can talk about how things that you know we could keep carrying that story forward and talk about both institutional changes and also increasingly narrow definitions of science and narrow definitions of religion, but I just want to say forwardly, this notion of conflict, it's kind of like, yeah it's it's something that the idea of the conflict drives cultural change, but most historians of quote unquote religion and science, including myself, don't think of it as an accurate description of history, and so it's like one of those things I actually described it recently as like where like hydro killers because the head of it keeps popping up, I often get people my students, even colleagues in the department saying to me, but we're religion and science and fundamental conflict and you know blah blah blah blah and aren't they in fundamental conflict today and, and then I say no no but all of us in the field don't take this very seriously and I start listing books I know you interviewed Peter Harrison he's, you know, an background but he's been at been in a critique of this opposition, and the point of the fact is what you get is complexity in some moments pieces of religion and science are in conflict, and specific religions and specific sciences, but the idea of a grand conflict as a defining narrative turns out to be largely, and I say largely not completely mythological yeah there's more to it than, than disenchantment but but only slightly, yeah. Okay, so that was, that was fascinating. So talking about science and religion, this idea of unity of sciences is very critical and very relevant so there is a book by Gary Enriquez, the tree of knowledge, and he's the type of psychologist that is like a big picture and so I opened opened the book first chapter it says metal modernism which is the topic of your second book and yeah and Greg and I have been on a I've met him for the first time. This last summer and we were you know was it made in the spring we were on a conference panel together a zoom panel together. Yeah, there's separate conversations about, yeah I mean I guess we could take it into the question of metamodernism I mean, that would be to take on the next book project but I'll just note that the idea that he's trying to produce a unity of sciences. But historically, the idea that there is a unity of sciences is very easy to critique philosophically I think he's doing a lot of other interesting things and I don't want to knock, for instance, his account of the breakdown in psychology and a greater need to formulate notions of the mind that that that are also that are epistemologically robust he's a very interesting thinker and I hadn't read him when I read my metamodernism book but I actually, you know, read some of his work more more recently than that. But the idea of a unity of sciences is an ideal and it's an ideal that is, is only ever going to be an ideal because as it turns out there's not one scientific method. Sciences themselves are have very different forms of investigation there's not one scientific ontology, contracoon, they're not uniform paradigms in different sciences different sciences often have conflicting or multiple paradigms, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It would be great if sciences were able to talk to each other and deal with more interface layers and I'm not opposed to that. And I do think that there are ways in which in English, there's a, there's an oddity of the English language which is a bifurcation between science and other forms of knowledge that in other languages also get called sciences so in English, when we say science I think my students think about physics, I mentioned social sciences and they're always like now they're not really sciences, but if you say signals in French or if you say visit shop in German, you mean systematic and organized forms of knowledge, and there may be fundamental epistemological principles for how one might want to advance knowledge, but it'll turn out that there are well verified epistemological claims that are not located in sciences, just as it turns out that they're badly verified epistemological claims that are in sciences so for English, we wouldn't talk treat history as a science but the death of, you know, that Napoleon crowned himself emperor of France is a well verified historical fact with many witnesses that were unlikely to change our mind about. Whereas string theory, although it's located in physics has at least at current moment no empirical evidence for it, and it's not a verified claim. We're taking you off onto the other books so we should probably work back to the to the myth book but anyway but the questions of knowledge are very important. Yeah. And science is an etymologically is a word that used to mean knowledge, you know, or it stands and and see also all mean knowledge and one way or another but they're often blinders built into what gets counted in that category. And just one more thing and and that's this for for for this this part. So do you think this connection between humanities and natural sciences, which involves the kind of marriage between interpretation and fact, do you think that's a kind of connection that works or. Well I think both have interpretation and fact built into them so I wouldn't say that anything is interpretation free. And I would also say that both notions that fact is very, very clumsy as a term. But, you know, I'm reminded I'm always reminded of in the, you know, 2016 presidential election which ended so disastrously and I hope we're not in the process of repeating anyway, bracket that for the moment. The Clinton campaign thought that it could just slap the word fact on things and that was going to convince people so they would just say, X is a fact, and they often try to produce these things that were basically like memes, but they were supposed to be like facty memes so it was like, you know, the population of France is such a fact, but the problem is that all those things could be challenged and even, you know, facts, even in a scientific context, facts are the product of various kinds of consensus that are historically determined and that vary. So I'm not saying that there is no such thing as evidence I think evidence is super important, but the idea that there is a context free fact is a little bit is a slight of hand. So, you know, anyway, but that, again, now we're moving into the metamanas and book instead of. So the metamanas and book I'm trying to do my own philosophy rather than do history which is what I'm doing in the myth book so. But, you know, these are all topical issues but I do think that the it turns out that the yeah. I think interpretation is bit is built in from the ground up as part of being finite beings in a world in which we do not have a complete and perfect knowledge so you know, there's no reason to think, you know, we evolved to be able to make certain kinds of judgments quite well, but there's no reason to think that the categories that we have with us are that we either have a raw and unmediated experience of the world, nor that any given sets of categories that we have. The categories that we have are jointed the world is in jointed in exactly that way the world is messier it's clumpier. It has more heterogeneity built into it then. And their questions of perception and questions of our own human limitations as, you know, finite beings out so that we're always engaged in interpretation. I think that every interpretation is equally valid that they're often multiply equally good interpretations, but there's not the idea that every interpretation goes equally well so one of my fights with people in English departments is around that just as my focus on the science side who assume that there's only one possible interpretation, you know, I'm, you know, between two extremes here, but anyway, I can talk about that in more or less detail. That's the philosopher hat, then now back to the historian hat if you will. Yeah. When I was doing my PhD I had this really good friend of mine. We're sharing the same office I was into humanities more and he was into evolutionary psychology. And we always got into these endless arguments. I did appreciate the science part of it and I agreed I can't disagree with what now has been established as science. But the problem was that he was not willing to see the other side of the argument at least like the lived experience or, you know, the social social sciences also have something to say but just because it doesn't come under that scientific method it doesn't mean it's all crap. And yeah. Yeah, there's a famous joke about science, which goes, a cop once stumbled across a drunkard who was filling around on the ground under a street light, and the cop bends down and he's like what are you doing in the man says I'm looking for my keys. And after the cop is you know helping him for a little bit he doesn't find the keys in and he says the cops said you know I can't find them where did you lose your keys and the and the drunk says oh all the way over there and the cops is but why are you looking here and he says, because this is where the light is. Well, a lot of science is you know in attempt to look at those places where we have a lot of evidence and where we can produce natural sciences where we can produce a lot of robust evidence, but there's a lot of stuff around which is very, very important stuff, which just is not possible to certain kinds of quantitative let's say analysis and so that isn't default the kind of analysis that is going on in the place that the light is focused but just to say that's not the whole picture of the world. And anyway, but that's again, a tangential conversation. I want to make sure that listeners of the of your podcast who are still with us at this point. No, one more thing about what the myth book is which is just to say that in a most basic sense, the operation of the myth of disenchantment book is kind of is a project of intellectual history what what I then it's. It emerges out of this basic question a lot of people say that the current moment is disenchanted. And we white one ask how did we get this idea and it turns out we got that idea. We I mean, those of us at, you know, it institutions that are anglophone or European in their formulation have gotten that idea in part and these have globalized but anyway, how do we get that idea well, the idea emerged basically in the 19th century, the idea of disenchantment and it emerged in a European context that can be experienced, and it emerged in a moment when great Britain, Germany, France, we're in the midst of a cult revivals and in which movements like the the esophical society spiritual is a chrolean magic etc were taking off. And in the book it's a it's kind of old fashioned intellectual history in this way I go through the various theorists of disenchantment, the ones who have different versions of that particular story, and I looking at their letters their their diaries and other archival materials. As curious how much did they know about did they just not know about I don't know spiritualism or whatever and then I often discovered that many of these thinkers with themselves profoundly enmeshed in these millions and that the descriptions of disenchantment were sometimes descriptions of longing as much as they were that the disenchant their subscribers of disenchantment and the magicians were sometimes fellow travelers if not often the same people. And then one of the insights of the book in particular is also that the narrative that magic in particular or that fairy belief in particular or spiritual belief in particular is departing are old tropes in the European historical context so some of the earliest spell books that we have in say, you know, like the lesser and greater keys of salt versions of the lesser and greater keys of Solomon or whatever you say, you know, magic which is otherwise lost as being preserved only in this book of spells, or in terms of the description of the fairies, and this is the chapters in the book, a common folkloric trope is the idea that the fairies are departed that nobody can, there used to be fairies but nobody can see them anymore, the world used to be full of spirits, but the spirits have left. And that narrative goes back at least as far as Chaucer and arguably, we can trace it back, you know, into classical antiquity with accounts of the death of pan, etc. I only go back for back as Chaucer in that particular text, but anyway becomes a trope of both magic and often of certain kinds of folk beliefs themselves. And so part of it is about many a magician has described themselves as the recoverer, or the response to a world that has otherwise been stripped of magic. And many a theorist of disenchantment has often longed themselves for belief in the magic that they described as absent from the world around them. Anyway, so that's part of the narrative of the book and then it's, it goes through a bunch of chapters, originally was going to end with a donor and horkheimer but then I realized that they were getting their key vocabulary from the German sociologist Max Weber. And so I had to kind of put him at the end although chronologically he's not the last. And then also there's a chapter on the Vienna positivists, which I brought in because they were the people that in a concrete and proximate way. I don't know and horkheimer thought they were criticizing, but then it turns out the the surprise is spoiler alert. I guess if academic books have spoilers is that the Vienna positivists also often actually believed in did paranormal research, or described positivism itself in terms of magic for reasons that we could, couldn't not get into but anyway, I just want to make sure that since we probably only got another 20 minutes or so that listeners to the podcast got the bigger architecture of the book. And hopefully, yeah, anyway, yeah, so they know, yeah they know the big picture of it. Yeah. When I was preparing myself for this podcast I was actually going to ask you about every single one of those people you talk about, about spiritualism in the 19th century but I know it's not possible to go through all the list but I do strongly encourage listeners. I think I was one of the most fascinating chapters, and part of the reason is that even really, really famous scientists such as Madam Curie, who was also involved in these these let's say, spiritual I wonder how come I didn't know about this fascinating British figure. But anyhow, he was so fissing. So in a way I guess I read somewhere that it did manage to bring some to bring philosophy and science closer to one another in the 19th century as well. Yeah, so there was an audio click right when you said that sense. Can you say what you said? Yeah, my question is that is it right to assume that Theosophism managed to bring science and philosophy? And I'm going to be very careful. I don't know whether to call the cult sciences or whatever, spiritualism, anyhow, bring them closer to one another in the 19th century. Yeah, so to take a step back there are a couple different things called the theosophy or the theosophs. But there was a for listeners who are interested in this. There was a massive movement in the 1870s called Theosophical Society, founded by a couple of people, Helena Blavatsky, and was the most famous she was kind of the like the guru of the of this Theosophical Society and she claimed to be doing a science of religion. And that's what she thought she was what she was doing, and she was trying to bring, you know, religion, philosophy, science and kind of magic together but what she actually did was build a broad transnational institution that had a lot of people invested in it, and brought some very influential, it's influential connections between specifically India and North America and Western Europe. And I'll cross those those channels ended up radically transforming popular life and popular religion in North America. And, and in India as well but but we see it especially strongly North America, I'll just give you some great examples. The word new age comes out of the esophical context, the idea that karma is something that Western people know what it is. And that as a particular, or the term reincarnation as a translation term becomes popular in the esophical circles the rise of yoga is primarily a result of this Theosophical Society. All this stuff that we would I don't know I as my parents are old hippies and so I associated with them but it turned out it wasn't a product of the 1960s it was actually a product of the 1870s, when all that stuff kind of got big. And I thought that in that content and then concretely, and more specifically also that the esophical society tried to bridge religion science and philosophy in a new way. And they were taking an old term the theosophy which had been already articulated during the Enlightenment as the opposite of philosophy. The other thing that you listeners should know if any of them happen to be scholars of religion is that the early discipline of religious studies was heavily funded by theosophists, and indeed many established chairs, and institutions were paid for by the esophical money. So I have recently co edited a book with Charles Stang at Harvard, and the book is called Theosophy in the Study of Religion it's one of those real books that costs a lot of money. So you might just want to check it out from your library or glance at it but it started from this observation which is the Center for the Study of World Religion to which I'm also an affiliate at the moment. He really took over as the director of it he went through its archives and discovered that they had actually been funded by the esophical society. And so, and this is like a major institution for the study of quote unquote world religions in the United States and this connection had been otherwise a book the myth book had already come out at that point, and this connection between this Harvard institution and theosophy hadn't yet been known and then tracing it through, we have an ended volume where people look at a lot of different figures in the study religion and how they connected up to the theosophical society. Yeah. And another part of the book that I really like and I want our listeners to know about that is, you mentioned Vienna Circle and also, there's a wonderful chapter about about the myth, the absence of a myth is a myth which is about German philosophers we may not have to read to go through that Vienna Circle is an interesting one. So the very founders of Vienna Circle the logical positivism they were, they could be considered as revival of magic and I'm also interested to know how critical theory is also indebted to esoterism Yeah, so there are two things so part of the background something that I think may surprise contemporary listeners is that in, and part because it's a very common misreading so in the 19th century there were a lot of discussions about magic and magic's relation to rationality the presupposition that a lot of people have today is that magic is the opposite of rationality. But in the 19th century many of the most influential theorists including for instance Max Faber himself thought that magic was itself instrumentally rational, and the idea was, and this is also can be also found he's getting it in away from Frazier who James Frazier who is himself adapting it slightly from August comp you can create a particular lineage there of ideas and shifting ideas, but many folks in the positive circles inherited the idea that basically history people had believed in magic magic was kind of instrumental religion emerges religion they thought of negatively as kind of metaphysics, and then you get an era of science but science with something a little bit missing. But there's a pattern in August comp to there's a pattern that's latent but but I think in a couple places in Frazier, and there hints of this same pattern in Weber, which is what the scholar Abrams and I forget his first name but it called the romantic spiral, which is this idea that was popular in that same period in Germany when they came up with the idea of them, the myth of mythlessness, a mythless modernity is the idea the idea of the magic spiral is is that the history is a return in a higher key. I can see the influence on this on the early Hegel for instance and dialectics and other things, but the idea that a bunch of folks had and including some positivists was that positivism was the return of the instrumentality of magic but now purged of its metaphysics. In particular in the writings of a figure named Otto Noira to his very influential but was part of red Vienna he was back, although today the logical positivists have the reputation of being dry as dirt, a political people who are all just about facts. In the period in the 1930s and a little bit earlier when they were originally formulating as a movement, they were often connected to Marxist or communist circles and the central figure in that was Otto Noira and Noira thought that science and magic were two sides of the same coin and but that there was, and that he could connect with the kind of basic instrumental understanding of the ordinary working class people, if he even furthered the connections between science, common sense, positivism, and magic. But also, he had some disagreements with another more famous member of that circle, but car nap, Rudolph car nap, who moved to the United States ultimately and became, you know, the poster boy for logical positivism here. Car nap, Kornap purged his own red credentials during the Cold War scare, but car nap was super interested in psychical research and in the paranormal, and he was very interested in as I excavate trying to recover, or investigate the reality of psychic powers of the and a number of positivists went along with him, including other early founders of the movement, who, you know, took seriously ideas about the reality of possible reality of telepathy and psychics or ghosts, even as they were sometimes debunking them so sometimes they thought they were real, sometimes they thought that they were going to be debunking them but in that circle, and in particular in that one of the things that struck me doing the archive was that there's a famous falling out between Wittgenstein and car nap, and they both narrated a little bit differently but if you look at their two respective accounts. What basically happened was that, in a way, Wittgenstein saw car nap's psychical research stuff, his books etc and thought that that was kind of crazy, and car nap saw Wittgenstein's quote unquote mysticism as too crazy so even because Wittgenstein, although he's famous for saying in the process, about that which we cannot speak we must remain silent Wittgenstein didn't think that was everything he actually had a notion of a vast kind of perhaps even divine silence, and that is beyond discursive thought and that was where he incarnate a clash, but we return to the second part of your question and I apologize when I get excited I go a little bit quickly so if you're listeners need to slow me down and replay a bit I understand I'm sorry about that. For the question about critical theory, there was an interesting thing that partially motivated the project to which is this, if you go into the footnotes of orchimer and adornos dialectic of enlightenment, there is a moment where they say there's this guy who got who recognized disenchantment correctly, but he his solution to it was all wrong, and me being the kind of pedantic intellectual historian that I am, when I see a footnote like that I'm like, who was this guy what was his deal, and that guy turned out to be a figure named Thomas, who was a super influential, let's say lay philosopher and neo pagan mystic, who lived in the period who write, you know, right before orchimer and we're doing the writing, and he turned out to have a fundamental connections with other figures in the critical history of critical theory more closely, for instance, Walter Benjamin, who I love and I've always found also very provocative as a theorist, wanted to study with Clogus, went out to try and study with him went to wanted to, you know, was for a little while sparring with other sites or whatever, and so, Clogus and Clogus also turns out to articulate a bunch of criticisms that will then come to animate critical theory, for instance, he's one of the first to criticize logo centrism long before Derrida did And so, there's a lot of criticism, Clogus is also a direct influence, Clogus also, the other weird thing about Clogus is that he was into neo pagan magic but he was also an interpreter of Nietzsche, so he's the missing link between a kind of pagan cultural theory and so there's also an influence of Clogus in French theory on Jean's Batais, and there's the local centers in which leaps from Clogus to Derrida, but Clogus had his own utopian version of the alternative critical theory has agreed with Clogus, a critique of the disenchanted world Clogus in particular had this idea that modern rationality freezes things and petrifies them and disenchants them by reifying them in ways that very much anticipate certain critical theory of things, but then Clogus had his own utopian alternative, which was a bunch of biocentrism, so you weren't supposed to be logo zentrish you're supposed to be bio centric, which and it was a new philosophy of life, which also involved orgies and it was explicitly queer and pagan and involved he called it the philosophy of magic. It was very much a bunch of proto hippie stuff. The downside was that he was also exceptionally anti semitic and became so later in his life and I think that's part of why, although he was a figure that more in many other ways fit much more close to the left of the post war period, that anti semitism and his active promotion of magic was kind of a deal breaker, even as he continued to be read and cited, that's the reason that he never quite had the reputation that he went on to to do, although one could argue that there's various historical and also like the magic stuff was probably a bridge too far, and so even a dorna and horchimer when even though they in a way are criticizing disenchantment, they are also blocking Clogus's reenchantment project and in their letters, they told a dorna told Benjamin not to get too close to Clogus, Benjamin knew all the bad shit about caucus but he also believed in recuperative philosophy. When Benjamin was invested in, unlike some contemporary critical theory folk, Benjamin was aware the people that he totally disagreed with, but that he also thought he could lift a piece up out of their project. Some people have mistakenly read this as a kind of, you know, will toward left fascism there's a critique of Benjamin there but I don't think that's true at all his politics are very strong and robust and they left it's actually a kind of generous horrific notion in built into Benjamin's notion of criticism what he called the chemistry of criticism, you burn away some elements of a thinker, even as you're enlivened by another set of elements. And so for that reason he could take Clogus, he could take the good from Clogus but not the bad, but Benjamin himself as a Jew was you know intimately aware of all these things and wasn't obviously picking up anti semitism from this, but for a dorna that was a step too far. The irony is that we often get from a dorna a critique of disenchantment and therefore people who want to say, you know, we should, we would the world would be so much better if we were enchanted, but him, a daughter himself blocked enchantment even as he critiqued disenchantment, and this is also clear in Adorno's thesis on occultism, which are also in certain ways, more or less critiques of various recovery projects. There's a lot more that we could say about this but we can see Clogus as a kind of spectral figure behind a lot of critical theory who was very intensely read and engaged with, particularly in the 30s, 40s and early 50s, but then who drops out of the canon. Yeah, anyway, that's, yeah, that was great, I wish we could unpack them more but like the ideas as I said earlier just to give a run then of what is in the book. I have only one more question I guess it has one final question which is a perfect round wrap up of everything we discussed. I think it would be remiss of us to talk about the myth of disenchantment not talk about the very final chapter Max Weber, and I guess what makes you your discussion of Weber, particularly interesting. And to a lot of people is that you do talk about the significance of some letters that have recently been made available and also how he used the this whole misunderstanding about the myth of disenchantment. He used it in a particular context he also leveraged the idea of mysticism in towards modernity let's say. So can you talk about the very brief of the arguments in that chapter. Sure. So Max Weber, I, you know, famous German sociologist, a very influential especially in the Anglophone world after the influence of a particular thinker, named Talcott Parsons. Talcott Parsons picked up Weber is kind of like supposed to be the antidote to Marx but still do sociology or something like that it was not Marxist it was, you know, Weber was a good sort of a Weber was politically center left and they were and you know Parsons wanted to recover him. But Parsons wanted to recover him in a way that often led toward a reading of Weber as a kind of progressivism in which Weber describes the disenchantment of the world, that that disenchantment is read as by some personites as a kind of like celebration of triumphal reason. Everything is going to be, you know, reasoned, and also, and even that that interpretation has been pushed back by subsequent of Weber scholars, even then the idea Weber had famously said that he was so unmusical in regard to religion. This is a phrase of his that was quoted in the biography of him written after his death by his wife Marianne, but it's a quote from one of Weber's letters but if you look at the actual letter, Weber says he's unmusical but he wants to have a connection. In fact, as the letter goes on to say Weber wants to have a mystical experience, and this was written early enough before Weber had a kind of famous nervous or right after you had a famous service breakdown, and when he starts questing spiritually and indeed, another set of letters which are actually diary entries that from from Weber I mean in the Weber Archive, we know that he came to the word and zalborong disenchantment, which is probably also, I want to translate differently but I'll get that in a second. Well vacationing in a neo pagan commune in a Skona Switzerland, and reading the writings of people who were reading a particular biography of cloggis and some of his friends who were part of a movement called the Munich cosmic circle. It was a fictionalized account but but Weber knew that they were actual people so he knew that his contemporaries believed in magic and he actually hung out with some of them he spent some time hanging out with a person named Stefan Georga who was part of the circle around that came to his notion of charisma when talking to Georga even though Weber was not persuaded by Georga Gager was a little too intense for him and you know he was like yeah this guy's interesting but doesn't got it but anyway but Weber anyway interact with cloggis so these two figures that might seem to be like from totally different worlds were part of the same world and often we're talking together around and zalborong so disenchantment but the other thing is and zalborong is often translated in English as disenchantment and that connects up to a whole English vocabulary about emotional loss so enchantment is like you know something a poem that we're enthralled with and disenchantment sounds like an already completed thing but the etymology in German D and zalborong means more closely the D magic king of the world, which I take as a point of emphasis that Weber knew all these people around him believed in magic and there are a lot of other clues that he that he but knew this and also in other pieces of his writing that are a little less canonically referenced. What he thought of was happening was that magic was embattled not gone and that makes a big difference in your reading of any any wasn't happy with that necessarily there's a kind of melancholy and Weber at least for the mystical if not for even though he thought of some of the magic people were charlatans because their particular versions of their projects were were bogus and one way or another but Weber also then turns out to have had a much more a different relationship to those of the most difficult currents that I think other people have known I also published a subsequent follow up to that in a book chapter called Max Weber and the rationalization of magic I think that's the title. You can find it on my webpage or links to it I'm happy to email PDFs but I then spell out in a little even more tighter detail the implications that this has for Weber sociology, which I didn't go into in quite as much detail in the chapter where I was more trying to establish the intellectual history of the development. But yeah, yeah anyway so so back so so it's a very different Weber it's a melancholy Weber and it's a Weber which in which he at least wants to believe even if he if he doesn't yet think he has quite the ear for it. And it's a vapor yeah so I read him in a different way than than a bunch of folks and also more reading closely Weber also believed that magic was instrumentally rational in its at least early insensations. And even otherwise sophisticated Weber scholars I was at this Weber centenary in Munich in 2019. Some of these dudes didn't know that and actually have good textual evidence in other public sources, because Weber's reading Frasier and not only is he citing it but but Weber is more or less is actually explicit about it. The magic is instrumentally rational and that magic can itself be rationalized further and he describes that having happened in China in one of his texts works on China which is otherwise for some reason people who are all Weber scholars don't read all of Weber and I get that he wrote also some totally boring stuff about you know agricultural economies and stuff like that but but even but he's fairly clear about what rationalized magic looks like and so that is also something from most of the reception of Weber. Where was I going with all this yes so that's yeah that's that project yeah and as I said as you mentioned a lot of people unfortunately just have this very very characteristic understanding of that means of this enchantment based on Weber's writing. That's why I particularly like this but I do strongly recommend to everyone to read it it's completely different story. So I think Said had another follow-up question which is going to be the final question. Sure, very very quick. So talking about rationalized magic. So there is this idea of post materialistic science people like Donald Hoffman if you follow their voice. So he is a cognitive scientist University of California Airwind he literally starts the last chapter of his book by a saying of brumi. And so it's including a lot of a lot of mystical ideas to come up with the cognitive science theory of consciousness. And so this type of work is called post materialistic science how do you see that to feed with the holistic picture of what you are explaining here. Yeah I don't know that body that thinker or that body material at all I mean I know Rumi obviously and love his poems which are you know I currently read in translation so I obviously can't read them in the original but but they're but in translation at least they're beautiful. But what I would say is that consciousness is very not very well understood. In philosophy nobody agrees that we don't agree about it like it's just one of those things that you get neither in the sciences nor in philosophical accounts of consciousness do we have a very good idea of what we're even talking about. And then I would say one of the biggest unsolved problems in philosophy is what is consciousness what do we even mean by consciousness. And I don't know how that connects up to because I haven't read this book to to just dematerialize science. I mentioned that from the history of psychology forward so to take it back to my book from from even before Freud, but we can see this in Freud. There's a notion of the unconscious as a source of the magical or of the, of the trend not only trans rational but as a place where there are otherwise inaccessible kinds of forces and powers. I wouldn't necessarily wouldn't necessarily endorse that but I know that that's a place that people often go to, and I will happily admit to everyone. I have no idea what about consciousness it's, it's, it's baffling and it's so fundamental importance like on the one hand the most obvious thing the most direct thing that we're all experiencing if you're listening to this podcast but one of the least well understood and with the implications of that lack of understanding are huge. So, you know, yeah, I'll have to, yeah, that doesn't answer your question directly because I don't know the thinker. Yeah. Thank you very much Jason for your time to speak with us about the book, the book we just discussed was the myth of this enchantment, beautiful cover, just the same as the other book. It's a modernism. The book was published by Chicago University Press in 2017 Professor Jason storm thank you very much for being with us and thank you very much site for helping me with this podcast. Yeah, it's a pleasure and and I'll add, can I add to things to look out for for so one of the things that I'm doing that I have a short piece coming out which addresses one of the gaps in the book which is the question of how capitalism fits into this enchantment. And that's going to hopefully going to come out in in article form in one way or another but one of the surprising things is that psychic services in the United States are a huge business in fact fortune telling on the books is about as big as internet dating. And so, at the very least our contemporary moment while it might have commodified quote unquote enchantment it clearly hasn't dispensed with it anyway so that's something that I talk about more and something that's forthcoming. And right now finishing a book called the genealogy of genealogy, which takes the this weird metaphor genealogy often in the humanities we're saying we're doing genealogies of things. And we think that this is a kind of counter hegemonic form of history writing that might go back to either Foucault or Nietzsche, this traces the history of that and shows it in unexpected places and sort of traps it in its own. It's recursive and shows what breaks and where it doesn't so that one I hope you'll folks will look forward to, it's due to my editor and then if the editorial board gives me the thumbs up it might come out next year, or if not I'll have to find a different press so but it's being it's being it's under contract from Chicago, but it needs the final approval from the editorial board so it could still fall through and if it falls through, I have a couple other presses interested so please do stay tuned for that. Great and I guess we can secure the promise to talk to you about that book here on new books network soon in a few months once it's out. Yeah, hopefully next year sometime. Yeah, great. Thank you very much Jason and say. Thank you both. Thank you. (Music) (gentle music)
