Modernity’s Enchantments: Science and Religion in Japan and Western Europe

While many of the old master narratives have been unraveling, it is still widely assumed that the defining feature of modernity is the departure of the supernatural. Modernization is often equated with the rise of instrumental reason, the gradual alienation of humanity from nature, and the production of a bureaucratic and technological life-world that has lost its magic and mystery.

As a first challenge to this narrative, I will offer a tour of the contemporary Japanese cultural landscape, showing that in one of today’s most technologically and scientifically advanced nations, one finds magical charms that double as flash-drives, Buddhist funerals for discarded electronics, companies that provide both demonic exorcisms and anti-virus software, and stupas dedicated to the “Divine Patriarch of Electricity.” To speak in general terms, neither religion and technology nor religion and science are in public confrontation in contemporary Japan. But this détente is not the product of an ahistorical cultural essence; rather, it resulted from an architected compromise crafted in the temples, schools, and law courts of the late nineteenth century. Modernization in Japan meant changes in the locus of enchantment, but in ways unanticipated by classical theorists of modernity.

Shifting to roughly the same period in European history, I will examine the genesis of the disenchantment narrative itself and explore how the idea that magic was a necessary casualty of modernity was ironically staked out in the very period in which Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult revivals. I demonstrate that Max Weber came to theorize “the disenchantment of the world” (die Entzauberung der Welt) not out of frustration with Prussian bureaucracy but rather following an encounter with Neo-pagans. Finally, I show how narratives of secularization and disenchantment engendered the contemporary human sciences.