American mass culture has rapidly been replaced by giant buzzing colonies of internet influencers.
American mass culture has rapidly been replaced by giant buzzing colonies of internet influencers.
T here’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:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
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.
But what would it mean to reverse this process? We’re going to begin to perceive spiritual meanings in events and objects again. Somebody will sneeze, and you’ll say, “God bless you,” but soon, in the re-enchanted world, you’ll really mean it.
I kid. It’s not that silly. I almost am one of these types of people, hence my ability to bang out the first three paragraphs of this column under duress. I have often felt the hand of something supernatural in events. I try to make a discipline of seeing the world through the categories, archetypes, and patterns given to me by the liturgy and Scripture of my church. I’ve gotten pretty good at digging true, transporting joy — the kind of thing that you feed on for weeks — out of a little bit of good weather and a few words and smiles exchanged with my children.
But I don’t think the world is being re-enchanted. I think you’re all losing your damn minds. Joe Rogan was right when he said, “We lost a lot of people during Covid, and most of them are still alive.”
We didn’t realize it at the time, but there’s nothing worse than launching a whole-of-society effort that most people would come to regret.
It’s not enough to say that institutions like public health lost their good reputation, and that leadership failures and promiscuous attempts at censorship helped fuel a populist mood that’s been stalking politics ever since the dawn of social media.
Clearly, it has unloosed the screws and discredited sturdy taboos that we built for a reason. American mass culture has rapidly been replaced by giant buzzing colonies of internet influencers. Now, people will do and say anything. There’s someone billed as a historian saying that Churchill was the principal baddie of World War II? I know someone who shuts off his home’s power at night from the fuse box to save the kids from “dirty electricity.” I’ve come across preteen antisemites in deep-blue America; they’re addicted to Nick Fuentes clips on TikTok.
My friend at church told me about a guy he knew in college who has lately become infamous for moving his family to Russia to escape LGBT propaganda in the USA. In fact, he’s just the most extreme example of a type that is proliferating everywhere now, the person who is investing the latest foreign conflicts with a dualist moral absolutism that would frighten a paranoid exorcist.
And it’s not just you all going crazy. It’s me, too. As a teen, I once quit working for a quack chiropractor because I couldn’t morally endure participating in her snake-oil “cures” and therapies. Fast-forward 25 years, and I’ve been drawn into a network of families who, one by one, came to trust a young barefoot woo-woo doctor with the common but stubborn behaviors of their children. Somehow his three-minute sessions, with essential oils, vision tests, colored glasses, and positive affirmations, end bed-wetting, separation anxiety, excessive pickiness about food — just about anything. This has involved a slightly humiliating change in my view of what kind of person I am. But sleep-deprived parents don’t argue with success.
Is this the re-enchantment of the world? No, it’s the continued decomposition of the old one. We lost our religion centuries ago. The enterprises of self-understanding we used as replacements for religion — psychology, pharmacology — are falling apart even faster. Now the last inherited habits of civilization are giving way to the onset of paranoia, distrust, and desperation for answers. Most things you thought were solid in our civilization have been vaporized and evacuated. The second you lean on these structures, they fall apart.
If we’re going to conserve anything through this period, it’s going to require heroic work and institution-building. Which will require trust, and trust implies some agreement on the deep values. But how can that be achieved when most thoughts are flattened into 15-second video shorts on TikTok and Instagram Stories? God help us.