Everyone’s Just Going Crazy

There’s a certain type of person who has been longing for “the re-enchantment of the world.” Usually a religious person, often one who can quote Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry at you:

Re-enchantment is the idea that we are going to reverse the process of disenchantment that began more or less at the Enlightenment. That is, after the Enlightenment we began to look at the world as if it had no meaning beyond its physics. This of course threatens our own self-understanding. First your soul gets sucked out of you. But, if you take it far enough, everything else goes, too. If our brains are just atoms in motion, set on their course by the meaningless universe, then our thinking, our syllogisms, are just delusions. Our thoughts are worth as much as soda fizzing out of a shaken bottle.

About the Author

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

There’s a certain type of person who has been longing for “the re-enchantment of the world.” Usually a religious person, often one who can quote Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry at you:

Re-enchantment is the idea that we are going to reverse the process of disenchantment that began more or less at the Enlightenment. That is, after the Enlightenment we began to look at the world as if it had no meaning beyond its physics. This of course threatens our own self-understanding. First your soul gets sucked out of you. But, if you take it far enough, everything else goes, too. If our brains are just atoms in motion, set on their course by the meaningless universe, then our thinking, our syllogisms, are just delusions. Our thoughts are worth as much as soda fizzing out of a shaken bottle.