Disenchantment revisited: Formations of the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ in the technological discourse of modernity

Abstract

This article problematizes sociologist Max Weber’s famed notion of ‘disenchantment’ in order to explore the ways in which ‘technology’ and ‘religion’ operate in the discourse of ‘secular modernity’. It suggests that disenchantment is not simply epistemological, that is, synonymous with rationalization and intellectualization, but also ontological, and a description of the overhauling of what Bruno Latour calls the ‘modernist settlement’. It proceeds in following manner: (1) it presents an ‘interpretive genealogy’ of technological rationality in discourses about modernity, demonstrating an internal conflict, especially in how ‘religion’, ‘the secular,’ and ‘technology’ are conceptualized. It posits that the lack of consistency in the invocation of these terms is a symptom of a deeper unresolved ontological (or, onto-cosmological) tension. (2) After establishing this ontological aporia, the article proceeds to offer a rereading of Weber’s original concept of disenchantment. (3) Finally, the author teases out some of the implications of reading disenchantment ontologically for the understanding of religion and technology.

‘One of the most damaging ideas that has swept the social sciences and humanities has been the idea of a disenchanting modernity.’ Nigel Thrift (2007)

Introduction

In the confines of contemporary academic discourse, but also in the greater landscape of public debate, a peculiar sense of wonderment is often produced when the basic tenets and assumptions of modernity – its ‘metaphysics,’ as Heidegger (1977) said – are challenged. It is a bizarre dance, an exercise in self-deception to a certain extent. This is because many people, not just scholars, understand ‘modernity’ – that troubling word which we have inherited – as what Anthony Giddens has called ‘living in a post-traditional world’ (Beck et al., 1994, emphasis added), that is, beyond tradition. But when they attain visibility, the remnants of so-called traditional life put the modern into sharp relief. A feigning of curiosity results, taking on a distinctly ethnographic flavor. It is as if after the onset of modernity (in the 16th century, according to many accounts), ‘the traditional’ (an even more elusive term) was wiped away completely.

This bewilderment is nowhere better exemplified than when the technological aspects of contemporary life are juxtaposed with leftover phenomena of our supposedly traditional past – in particular, in religion. Take, for instance, a photograph made popular by the writer and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. There stands an orthodox Jewish man pressing a mobile phone against the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The caption reads: ‘Shimon Biton places his cellular phone up to the Western Wall so a relative in France can say a prayer at the holy site.’ The book that made this photo popular, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, pits two overarching social forces against one another in the era of globalization. There is modernization, on the one hand, symbolized by the Lexus, and tradition, on the other, symbolized by the olive tree.

[H]alf the world seemed to be emerging from the Cold War intent on building a better Lexus, dedicated to modernizing, streamlining and privatizing their economies in order to thrive in the system of globalization. And half of the world – sometimes half of the same country, sometimes half the same person – was still caught up in the fight over who owns which olive tree. Olive trees … represent everything that roots us, anchors us, identifies us and locates us in this world – whether it be belonging to a family, a community, a tribe, a nation, a religion, or, most of all, a place called home. Olive trees are what give us the warmth of family, the joy of individuality, [and] the intimacy of personal rituals, the depth of private relationships, as well as the confidence and security to reach out and encounter others. (Friedman, 2000: 31)

The photo’s semiotic contradiction acts as visual leitmotif for the story that Friedman wishes to tell. The man holding the cell phone is not just Jewish, but Orthodox Jewish. He is clad in the traditional clothing of a particular strand of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, black hat and coat; he is adorned with thick, curled sideburns, called payots, and a beard. All of these details do the work of conveying to the viewer that this man is not simply a man of faith but devout. He is praying at one of the holiest sites of the Abrahamic religions while using a cellular phone. It is this juxtaposition of the ancient (even Biblical) and the modern that has given this particular photograph such poignancy. This type of response represents a ‘false norm’ (Habermas, 1985: 5), which in this instance is really a false dichotomy between ‘religion’ (the olive tree) and ‘technology’ the latter serving as a proxy for ‘modernity’ (the Lexus). The photograph becomes the perfect illustrative vehicle for Friedman’s argument in the book, which is that, at various times, ‘the Lexus and the olive tree’ turns into the Lexus versus the olive tree.

The thinking exhibited Friedman’s dichotomous thematization of globalization is none other than, I would argue, a popularized secularization theory for the global age, which, after Jeremy Stolow (2005: 122), I call the ‘myth of modernization’:

This is the myth which credits modern media – beginning with the printing press – with a key role in the world-historical disembedding of religion from public life, and its relocation within the private walls of bourgeois domesticity, or deeper still, the interior silent universe of individual readers and their infinitely replicable activities of decoding texts. For some, this is a tale about loss of meaning and moral crisis that comes with the dematerialization of palpable structures of religious authority. For others, it is a heroic story about the empowerment of social groups to challenge the repressive apparatuses of Church and Court … This metanarrative is structured around the assumption that the mere expansion of modern communication technologies is somehow commensurate with a dissolution of religious authority and a fragmentation of its markers of affiliations and identity.

Following Stolow, we can say that lodged in the concept of secular modernity is an implicit theory of media and technology, one that equates not only their logic with the ratio of formal rationality but also their proliferation and wide use as indicative of the decline of tradition, including religion.

Secularization theory, at least in its recent sociological articulation, maintains that secularization ‘has been a phenomenon concomitant with modernization,’ as Bryan Wilson (1998: 52), one of its chief proponents, puts it. Of the three areas that he argues are the core concerns of the secularization thesis – authority, knowledge and rationality, it is the ‘powerful imprint’ of the changing nature of the second – knowledge – that, he claims, ‘no aspect of social change has escaped’ (1998: 50). He points specifically to the role of science and technology in rendering

otiose supernaturalist dogmas and theological speculations about the nature of life and creation. Religionists have been entirely displaced in the interpretation of such matters[;] their earlier theories and prescriptions have not only lost their cogency but have been shown to be hollow, ignorant and false. (Wilson, 1998: 50)

As anthropologist Talal Asad (2003: 192) notes, ‘“the secular” [in the discourse of modernity] presents itself as the ground from which theological discourse was generated (as a form of false consciousness) and from which it gradually emancipated itself in its march to freedom.’ Thus, we can say that Friedman adopts this understanding of modernization as rationalization and sets it in opposition to non-rational, traditional thinking, which amounts to, in the Marxist parlance used sardonically by Asad, ‘false consciousness.’

But it must be said that Friedman is not alone when it comes to the glib adoption of secularization theory. It is not a simple case of a journalist wading into academic waters, hacking away complexity and nuance along the way. As sociologists John Evans and Michael Evans note, a similar logic exists in academic studies of religion and science, sociology among them. They identify an ‘epistemological conflict narrative’, which they write is ‘an assumption … built into the history of Western academic thought’ (Evans and Evans, 2008: 87). Put simply, this narrative views the conflict between religion and science as being ‘over competing truth claims about the world’ (Evans and Evans, 2008: 88). In their critical unearthing of it in a variety of scholarly literatures, they note the wide reach of the influence of Weber, especially his famed notion of ‘disenchantment.’ Specifically, in secularization theory, they diagnose a specific form of the epistemological conflict narrative, which they describe as ‘symbolic’.

The symbolic epistemological conflict narrative sees the growth of a modern technoscientific rationality as running parallel with that of secularity. ‘Mysterious forces and powers have been replaced by the calculation and technical means embodied in modern science,’ they write (Evans and Evans, 2008: 91), leaving ‘religion’ and religious thinking, more specifically, marginalized. Evans and Evans show that this conflict narrative places ‘religion’ and ‘science’ in deadlock. They rightly point out that it renders religion and technoscience as examples of merely ‘knowing about the world’ and nothing else. ¹ The conflict narrative makes religion only ‘symbolic,’ not material. It is rendered a category of thought and stripped of any other kind of influence or action. The conflict narrative maintains a view of religion, as well as of science and technology, as largely fighting over Truth, which in this instance is singular and uncomplicated. It follows that scholarly literature that assumes the logic of conflict in disenchantment understands ‘the secular’ to be simply a ‘mindset’. Thus, the story of disenchantment (and hence secularization and modernization), pace epistemological conflict, is one wherein a set of ideas (traditional/religious) replaces another (modern/rational).

This is clear not only in secularization theory and studies of religion but also in modernity theory, where the correlation of modernity with technology (Thompson, 2013) has gone almost unquestioned. Technology has not only ‘made modernity possible,’ as Philip Brey writes, but it is also ‘a creation of modernity’ (Brey, 2004: 33). The institutions and culture of modernity are not merely ‘shaped or influenced by technology’; they are also ‘constituted by it’ (Brey, 2004: 54). But as the critical theorist of technology Andrew Feenberg notes, modernity theory depends on a specific definition of rationalization as a ‘spontaneous consequence of the pursuit of efficiency once customary and ideological obstructions are removed’ (Feenberg, 2010: 134–135). This definition of rationalization, Feenberg contends, reflects the influence of Weber – specifically, the concept of ‘bureaucratic rationality,’ which sees rationalization as becoming efficient through the parsing out, or ‘disaggregation’ of various spheres. For instance, at the level of social structures, ‘the state, the market, religion, law, art, science, [and] technology’ become ‘distinct social domains with their own logic and institutional identity’ (Feenberg, 2010: 136). Hence, modernization-qua-rationalization-qua-differentiation relies upon a view of technological rationality as streamlining through the eradication of customs and ideologies in order to create discrete, rule-following ‘bureaus’ or offices. Scientific-technological rationality, in Weber’s thinking, purifies all that it encounters from ‘religious … elements’ (Feenberg, 2010: 136, emphasis added). But these ‘religious elements’ are clearly meant to refer to superstition and what Asad calls ‘theological discourse.’ Scientific-technological rationality does not necessarily remove ritual per se but replaces its source, its reason. Hence, as Feenberg notes, in modernity theory one also finds an emphasis on the rationality of technology (viz. efficiency), not necessarily the dynamics of technology itself. Therefore, analysis of the modernizing effect of technology remains intellectualist. Technology loses its material weight.

In this article, I aim to analyze disenchantment beyond the epistemological conflict narrative by exploring its ontological aspects. I argue that disenchantment is not merely another term for rationalization and intellectualization, but a descriptor for a revolution in the traditional layout of the relations between humans, nature and God, or what I call ‘onto-cosmology.’ Unlike its traditional antecedent, the modern world has come to view ‘the human’ as its fulcrum, its operative keywords being progress and history. ² Disenchantment, in the reading that I am offering here, is not simply intellectual but environmental.

I proceed in three steps: first, I present an ‘interpretive genealogy’ of technological rationality in discourses about modernity, and suggest that even while they contain a Weberian substrate, they nevertheless display an internal conflict, especially in how they formulate ‘religion,’ ‘the secular,’ and ‘technology.’ More strongly, I argue that the lack of conceptual consistency in the invocation of these terms is a symptom of a deeper unresolved ontological (or onto-cosmological) tension in modern thought. This tension revolves around the relational status of the figures of ‘the human,’ ‘nature,’ and ‘God.’ I use these terms not as definitions of extant, transhistorical realities but as concepts that are forged and maintained continuously. Following Bruno Latour, I use these terms as markers of an ontological shift specific to modernity that allows us to home in on the notion of disenchantment. Second, having established this ontological aporia, I offer a rereading of Weber’s original concept of disenchantment, drawing from media scholar Jeremy Stolow and political scientist Gilbert Germain, and suggest that when looked at more closely, religion and technology occupy similar ‘onto-cosmological’ positions vis-à-vis nature, as they are both attempts to effect control over it. Finally, I tease out some of the implications of this argument for the understanding of religion and technology in contemporary times.

The permutations of ‘technological rationality’ in the discourse of modernity

In this section, I demonstrate a brief ‘interpretive genealogy’ of ‘technical rationality’ in modernity discourses. Due to constraints of space, I cannot claim to offer an exhaustive critical assessment of technology-informed works on modernity but, following Aronowitz (1993), I instead provide a ‘reading’ of certain influential thinkers and present conceptual clarifications while highlighting a cluster of relevant aspects of their work.

As Aronowitz notes, an ‘interpretive genealogy’ is unique because ‘the object’ is not taken as given, with a ‘definite history, cast of characters and well-defined mode of intellectual interventions within a fairly well established field of academic knowledge’ (Aronowitz, 1993: 7). It allows for the study of tendencies, ‘to tease out what is left unsaid’ (Aronowitz, 1993: 8). I take this approach here to point out not only the inconsistency in the way that ‘technology’ is deployed but also how ‘rationalization’ is understood. I argue that these inconsistencies are symptomatic of a deeper, unresolved ontological (or, onto-cosmological) conflict. More to the point, in the genealogy I sketch below, the effects of technology and certain aspects of technological rationality are defined in a contrasting manner in spite of the clear influence of Weber. In what I label ‘modernity as massification,’ technology becomes a disindividualizing force, effectively ‘mechanizing’ humans. The language used by these authors suggests that technology is not only a modernizing force but also one that reduces or takes away some vague human spiritual essence. In contrast, ‘modernity as technological atomization’ formulates technology as an isolating force, separating humans from one another, leaving them with a communality deficit. Thus, on the one hand, technology and modernity come together to produce mass conformity, while on the other, they result in anomie.

The theme of ‘massification’ is particularly evident in a strain of existential philosophy deriving from the work of Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. What is significant about their work is not only their use of theological language, but their similar diagnosis of modernity: the technological mechanization of individual personality. Whereas traditional times allowed for ‘man’ [sic] to have a stable knowledge of himself in relation to the world, modernity has ripped the rug from underneath him, throwing him into a seemingly never-ending Heraclitean flux of movement, a consequence of ‘despiritualization.’ In other words, as Marcel puts it, ‘Man is in his death-throes’ (Marcel, 1962: 13–14).

Technological modernity, in this line of thinking, is always degrading to the human spirit. But for these thinkers, the ‘spirit’ they speak of is always an individual one. In terms that prefigure the Frankfurt School, especially Marcuse (2009), Marcel argues that ‘the more man becomes dependent on gadgets whose smooth functioning assures him a tolerable life at the material level, the more estranged he becomes from an awareness of his inner reality’ (Marcel, 1962: 55). He calls this being ‘technical man’ (Marcel, 1962: 75). But this ‘new man’, as he alternatively puts it, suffers from a spiritual – a word favored by both him and Jaspers – defect: ‘he loses touch with himself’ (Marcel, 1962:18). Hence, the ‘uprooting of man’ by ‘advanced technique’ (Jaspers, 1957: 21) is a metaphor not only of detachment but also, most critically, of man’s ‘[absorption] into the social’, leading to a ‘danger to man’s selfhood’ (Jaspers, 1957: 47). In sum, the individual is no longer a self but rather a ‘function.’ Jacques Ellul describes the unstoppable, amoeba-like integrative function of technology in a similar manner when he writes, ‘Technique attacks man, impairs the sources of his vitality, and takes away his mystery’ (Ellul, 1964: 413).

The idea that modernity – with its complex of techniques, characterized by their impersonal bureaucratic nature – has chipped away at the metaphysics of human beings through the process of rationalization is clearly reminiscent of Weber. Technology’s cold and calculating character undermines the enchanted mystery of humanity’s being, its individuality.

A nearly opposite tactic comes from the philosopher Albert Borgmann (2003). For him, technology does not provide enough communality, leaving the individual atomized in an anomic state. The information technologies of today are the exemplars of what have been the worst tendencies of technological rationality since the end of World War II; they intensify the ‘drift away from public and civic engagement’ thanks to an overdevelopment of convenience, after which ‘all the world is at one’s call and beckon, and hence to venture out into the world begins to feel like a waste and a pain’ (Borgmann, 2003: 77). This is most clear, he suggests, in the rewriting of the public/private distinctions in advanced industrial societies. The public sphere, in his words, ‘has become both hypertrophied and atrophied,’ while the private sphere has become utterly closed off. ‘As public space has been taken over by instrumentality (i.e., production and administration),’ he writes, ‘finality (i.e., consumption) has passed into the private realm’ (Borgmann, 2003: 40).

What we have then is a culture wherein legitimate forms of ‘communal celebration’ are extremely rare. Borgmann bemoans the televising of sporting events such as the Olympics, for instance, because he believes that their mediation creates social distance and commodifies the collective experience people would have if they were present in person. Technology – in this case television – ‘makes genuine public celebration impossible because the public realm is production, not celebration, and though the private realm is for leisure, leisure is now commodious consumption, not festive engagement’ (Borgmann, 2003: 46). Thus, technology has left us with a ‘semblance of the public’ rooted in ‘indifference and disengagement’ (Borgmann, 2003: 50).

Although both versions of ‘the myth of social modernization’ bear the Weberian substrate of increasing technological disenchantment of the human being, a technological modernity that chips away at a certain metaphysics of the human, there is a clear difference in the understanding of the nature of this dynamic. In the discourse of technological rationality as massification, technologies dis-individualize, and thus de-spiritualize, the human. For Jaspers, technique is ‘despiritualizing.’ For Marcel, more dramatically, the effect of technology on humanity is ‘degrading.’ While no overt theological themes are addressed by these authors, it is clear that there is an extant metaphysics of the human in their discussions. The human takes on a privileged status to the point where the object of the disenchanting force of technological modernity is not God but the human. The principal cause for alarm is not that God is in ‘death throes’ but that the human is. What we have, in effect, is an apotheosis effect.

On the other hand, in the discourse-of-technological-rationality-as-atomization camp, technologies intensify individualization. The view of technology as atomization is quite simply that technologies are by nature divisive, allowing for individuals to be sprawled out, distant from one another and without opportunities to forge communal bonds, which occur mostly through collective ritual. The worry is not that individuals will be overrun by technological conformity, but that there is a deficit of such, as a result of which they will become isolated.

The former narrative bears traces of the Frankfurt School and Reich, while the latter echoes communitarian thinkers such as Rawls (1985; 1987) and Taylor (2003).

So, while we can say, following Evans and Evans as well as Feenberg, that the influence of Weber looms large in the propagation of the ‘myth of social modernization’ in studies of secularization, modernity, and technology, it seems that there is, within theoretical discourses that take Weber as their base, a fundamental disagreement in the effect of modernizing technologies on the human being. To investigate this incongruity, we must investigate Weber’s idea of ‘disenchantment’ itself.

Disenchantment beyond rationalization

Weber’s essay ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1958 [1918]) contains the most sustained discussion of the concept of disenchantment, though his argument, as it relates to what he calls the ‘cultural sciences’, is essentially methodological and epistemological. Although they are not a stated focus, the themes of religion, science, modernity, and rationalization – present in the entirety of Weber’s oeuvre – can be found, and serve as the argumentative ‘background’ or context for his insistence on the importance of viewing science as ‘the calling’ of modern humanity. However, it might be that because Weber’s most prolonged engagement with ‘disenchantment’ comes in an essay about method, many who cite ‘Science as a Vocation’ simply reproduce the commonplace interpretation of Entzauberung as epistemological modernization.

If we look closer, however, ‘disenchantment’ in Weber falls under larger metaprocesses of modernity, namely rationalization and intellectualization. But rationalization and intellectualization do not guarantee the dispersal of scientific knowledge throughout all strata of society. There are no longer ‘mysterious incalculable forces that come into play’, he writes. ‘One can, in principle, master all things by calculation’ (Weber, 1958: 117). In other words, the world is ‘disenchanted’ because there is no longer anything therein that is not available for inquiry. If one wished to look into the mechanics of streetcars, he conjectured, one, conceivably, could. It was not taken to be the work of magic.

Homing in on this specific part of Weber’s argument, scholars such as Jeremy Stolow (2013) and Gilbert Germain (1993) put forth ‘demagification’ as a more apt translation of Entzauberung than ‘disenchantment.’ Foregrounding ‘magic’ shifts the issue of science, religion, and modernity towards ontological considerations. Magic, Stolow notes, ‘is the family of tools, techniques, and understandings of the world’ that is ‘is supposedly located within the province of the “primitive mind”: as a parapractical mode of action and a prerational effort to explain causal forces in the universe’ (Stolow, 2013: 9). Malinowski (1954: 19–20) most famously makes the distinction between magic and science in this manner:

Science is born of experience, magic made by tradition. Science is guided by reason and corrected by observation[;] magic, impervious to both, lives in an atmosphere of mysticism. Science is open to all, a common good of the whole community[;] magic is occult, taught through mysterious initiations, handed on in a hereditary or at least in a very exclusive filiation. While science is based on the conception of natural forces, magic springs from the idea of a certain mystic, impersonal power, which is believed in by most primitive peoples.

Magic is, however, akin to science in the sense that they both arise from ‘man’s confidence that he can dominate nature directly’ (Malinowski, 1954: 19). Thus, Stolow (2013: 9) concludes:

Magic is the ancestor (illegitimate cousin) of what we moderns call technology. In the larger historical scheme of things, magic is something that was (or ought to have been) superseded by a more sober reliance upon techniques and instruments that ‘actually do their jobs’ and by the advancement of scientific reasoning that ‘properly’ frames knowledge about such work.

In an enchanted age, Germain summarizes, ‘the means of control is conditioned by the belief that the natural environment is governed by spiritual forces residing in or beyond the immanent order of nature itself.’ Therefore, in an enchanted world, ‘magical means’ are used to affect the natural realm – ‘various rites of appeasement, such as sacrifices, ceremonial dances, and so on’ (Germain, 1993: 29). In other words, magic and technology are similar in their ontological positions; they are both attempts ‘to effect real control over natural processes’ (Germain, 1993: 29).

What distinguishes a disenchanted world from an enchanted world is not merely the epistemological ‘opening-up’ of a world through scientific knowledge but ‘one in which all domains within society are restructured in accordance with the demands of technical rationality’ (Germain, 1993: 37). Therefore, we can gather that Weber, when he placed the process of ‘disenchantment’ under the larger umbrella heading of ‘rationalization,’ did not mean that science, as it is translated into praxis, was purely theoretical knowledge, delinked from its application to nature (to frame it in Heideggerian terms). Thus, he pronounced: ‘today the routines of everyday life challenge religion’ (Weber, 1958: 127). This presents us with an alternative to the easy conclusion that relies upon the false dichotomy of religion and science, characterizing their relationship as an epistemological end game. It is also an ontological shift. Stolow again:

Technology thus plays a leading role in some of the most prevalent accounts of modernity as the outcome of the disenchantment of nature and society: a historical process that has turned the world into an inert cosmos, subject to human powers of detached observation and calculated manipulation. (Stolow, 2013: 12)

Following Germain and Stolow, I am suggesting that disenchantment is not simply an extension of the metaprocesses of rationalization and intellectualization. Disenchantment describes a reconfiguration in the traditional layout of the relations between humans, nature and God, or what I call ‘onto-cosmology’. In the modern world, ‘the human’ has become the fulcrum. The world, and history itself, has come to be measured in human terms. Or, as Marcel Gauchet (1999: 59) puts it, ‘human actors now [gain] access to the mastery of their collective destiny through the realization of the divine infinite’. Instead of a magical-mythical world, we have a human-technological world, magic being replaced by technoscience and myth by humanism.

Re-enchanting nature, re-enchanting technology

Consequently, we must now reckon with the repercussions of this onto-cosmological understanding of disenchantment. If technology replaces magic as the tool with which we can control and master the cosmos, the relationship between nature, God and the human changes. This, in turn, creates new meanings for each. Nature is ‘desacralized,’ as ‘standing-reserve,’ opened up to technological mastery (Heidegger, 1977). ‘[T]he modern definition of technology thus posits a fundamental divide between human and nonhuman agents,’ Stolow notes. It is this split that fuels the ‘threat for [sic] authentic human experience,’ including religion (Stolow, 2013: 13).

I have been using the terms ‘nature,’ ‘human,’ and ‘God’ following Bruno Latour, who, for some time, has treated the separation of the human and the nonhuman as his primary theoretical problematic. Under the heading of ‘the modernist settlement’ or ‘modern constitution,’ Latour has suggested that the Enlightenment’s understanding of ‘modernity,’ as ‘the invention of humanism,’ ‘the emergence of the sciences,’ ‘the secularization of society,’ and ‘the mechanization of the world,’ is wrong. Modernity arises out of an ontological settlement wherein subjects and objects are divided. The former are housed in ‘society’ and the latter in ‘nature’ (Latour, 1999: 193). The former are humans and the latter are nonhumans. The former have agentive properties while the latter are incapable of action. In terms more in line with social thought:

Modernity is often defined in terms of humanism, either as a way of saluting the birth of ‘man’ or as a way of announcing his death. But this habit itself is modern, because it remains asymmetrical. It overlooks the simultaneous birth of ‘nonhumanity’ – things, or objects, or beasts – and the equally strange beginning of a crossed-out God, relegated to the sidelines. (Latour, 1993: 13)

In this originary stage-setting, humans, nonhumans, and God share a ‘conjoined birth’ but are separated immediately. ‘Nature’ is then that which houses ‘nonhumans’ and ‘society’ is that which houses humans. God is relegated to the beyond, the transcendent. Each of these is not a static given. But why?

There are two interrelated net effects of this ontological layout. On the one hand, there is the achievement of progress. By identifying, and differentiating between, ‘what objects really are in themselves and what the subjectivity of humans believes them to be, projecting onto them passions, biases and prejudices’ (Latour, 1999: 199), modernity is able to congratulate itself for no longer being mired in the confusion of the past. Part and parcel of that process of clarification is a guarantee: that God does not meddle. ‘God becomes the crossed-out God of metaphysics,’ writes Latour. God is kept ‘from interfering with Natural Law as well as with laws of the Republic’ (Latour, 1993: 33). Thus, both the realm of nature and that of humans are kept God-free in the modernist settlement. Having an ontological scene with an extant but non-intervening God occasions what Latour refers to caustically as ‘invincibility of the moderns’ (Latour, 1993: 37).

Solidly grounded in the certainty that humans make their own destiny, the modern man or woman can criticize, unveil, express indignation at, and denounce irrational beliefs, the biases of ideologies, and the unjustified domination of the experts who claim to have staked out the limits of action and freedom (Latour, 1993: 36).

Zooming out a little bit, we can say that Latour provides us with the ontological significance of the environmental reading of disenchantment that Germain set forth. As one would expect, for Latour, the proper reading of disenchantment is precisely its jettisoning. This is because, according to him, we have never truly been modern. The separation of the human and nonhuman was never truly accomplished. The ethos of purification that left nature and society as distinct entities (and relegated God to the sidelines) never reflected what Latour views as the truth of the contemporary situation. As he writes, ‘the adjective modern does not describe an increased distance between society and technology or their alienation, but a deepened intimacy, a more intricate mesh, between the two’ (Latour, 1999: 196; emphasis in original). This is the case not only in ‘traditional cultures,’ where, for instance, ‘the intricate pattern of myths and rites necessary to produce the simplest adze or the simplest pot [reveal] that a variety of social graces and religious mores were necessary for humans to interact with nonhumans’ but also in contemporary ‘biotechnology, artificial intelligence, microchips, steelmaking, and so on’ (Latour, 1999: 196). Even Bryan Wilson, the authority on secularization, cedes this point:

Think only of the significance of techniques in the most intimate areas of human experience and relationship, of birth control, of invitrio [sic] fertilization, of genetic engineering. Or consider the transformed patterns of human intercourse progressively from railways [to] telephones, aeroplanes, radio, television, computers and the Internet. Recall that men now travel in space, walk on the moon, and, at long-distance, explore other planets. (Wilson, 1998: 50)

This leads us to wonder what Weber would think of Latour’s argument. If indeed technology has granted ontology to nonhumans to the same degree as to humans, then we have a situation that forces a rethinking of the very basis of modernist settlement. Technology, being capable of action, also reflects a ‘practical metaphysics’ (Latour, 1999: 287). This means that not only religion, as authentic human experience (in the words of Stolow), but also technology, enchants. Or, as Germain concludes, ‘we could say that our technological environment has acquired “magical” qualities.’

What Weber could have chosen to comment on, but did not, are the potential consequences of living in a world that is both technologically powerful and enigmatic. If he had, he might have come to the conclusion that our disenchanted world is in danger of becoming re-enchanted. Only this time the ‘gods’ would appear not in the form of the supernatural but in the immanent guise of technology itself (Germain, 1993: 42).

Conclusion

In this article, I have problematized the reading of the Weberian concept of disenchantment as ‘rationalization’ and revealed the ‘inoperativity’ (Nancy, 1991) of certain categories upon which the idea of ‘disenchanting modernity’ is rooted. I suggested that the proliferation of this reading of Weber has resulted in the overlooking of the ontological effects of secular modernity. By offering an alternative rereading of Weber, I demonstrated that religion and technology take on conceptual definitions that require us to rethink ‘secularization’ and its bases but also the assumptions around the meaning of modernity that lies within it. Moreover, as we are reminded more and more of religion’s ‘technicity’ (Campbell, 2010), it becomes ever more crucial to consider the ‘technological’ alongside ‘the religious.’ Given this, it may be that the ultimate import of Weber’s concept of ‘disenchantment’ is not as an explicatory, sociological grand narrative of modernity and secularization but rather as a prompt to reconsider the ‘givenness’ of ‘the modernist settlement,’ providing insight into the constitutive place of ‘the religious’ and ‘the technological’ in the constitution of modernity’s secular metaphysics.