To the editors:

The degree to which disenchantment is the characteristic that sets modernity apart from a magical worldview of earlier centuries in the West, and of much of the rest of the globe today, is a complex problem that resists easy answers. On the one hand, Max Weber clearly has identified an important dimension to what we call modernity. Disenchantment and the rationalization of the public sphere might be linked to industrialization, the growth of global capitalism, and the advancement of instant, global communicative technologies. On the other hand, many are still in thrall to enchanted ways of living, becoming possessed by the Holy Spirit in a Pentecostal church in Oxford or by the gods of the underworld in a Daoist temple in Singapore, while pursuing regular work, engaging with modern technologies, and fulfilling family and state commitments. Of course, these pursuits may be those of a minority, but that they persist in contemporary, industrialized, and economically advanced societies is intriguing.

Egil Asprem’s insightful review of Jason Josephson-Storm’s book draws our attention to problems in the critique of the disenchantment thesis and points to relevant statistical evidence. For example, only 0.1% of the United Kingdom’s population identify as pagan. But perhaps the issue is less about enchantment or disenchantment and more to do with conceptions of the structure of the universe, about cosmology. Charles Taylor’s spin on disenchantment is that there has been a “great disembedding,” a new understanding of person in relation to universe in which those of us from industrialized, advanced global economies no longer perceive ourselves to be integrated into a universe.¹ If the meaning of life was once tied to our location within the cosmos, our perception of where we stood and where we were going, then this has now been replaced by meaning being located within the bounds of my own life and intentions, within the circle of acquaintance I happen to inhabit. This contraction of meaning to my own world and those worlds of my acquaintances on Facebook is also, perhaps, accompanied by an alienation from the body politic. Taylor calls this the buffered self of modernity, in contrast to the porous self of premodernity in which the boundaries of self allowed in forces from outside and in which powers within the self could influence others. I would not wish to overestimate Taylor’s distinction. The Chinese businessman who becomes possessed by the gods of the underworld on the weekends demonstrates that the boundaries can sometimes be blurred. Taylor has a point insofar as modern people in industrial societies, the majority of the urban populations of the world, live disembedded lives compared to our ancestors.

This is a distinction between a view of the universe as mechanized and amenable to measurement by science—that we might call the Galilean Mathematical Model (GMM)—and a view of the universe as a chain of being with divinity at the top and a range of invisible, supernatural beings below down to the human world. Arthur Lovejoy called the latter the great chain of being; we can call it the Religious Cosmological Model (RCM).² The RCM was pervasive in premodernity. So, rather than speaking about enchantment being replaced by disenchantment, about magic (bad technology) being replaced by science (good technology), we might speak of a shift in cosmological attitude that entails a shift in the locus of meaning from world to self. Thus, to confirm Asprem’s point that the fairies had always disappeared, does not take away the force of the shift from the RCM to the GMM. It is this shift that Taylor refers to as the great disembedding and that Weber hints at in his concept of disenchantment. But both authors miss the hierarchical, cosmological dimension of this worldview. The location of meaning within a cosmos might well entail a magical worldview, a verticality, in which the microcosm that is my own life reflects or recapitulates the macrocosm of the cosmos. This is distinct from locating meaning within a purely horizontal world.

I suppose I am supporting Asprem’s point, but reconfiguring it in terms of cosmological models. We cannot go back to the RCM tout court, but as we are faced with personal and global challenges, we would do well to reimagine meaning beyond the GMM, beyond the immediate screen of the mobile phone, and in a wider cosmos. This would be to reimagine verticality, the vertical attraction of a higher cosmology, and to reengage with the body politic in a way that broadens conceptions of global citizenship beyond superficial relations and even beyond the nation state. If re-enchantment means having a wider understanding of cosmos and connecting ecologies, then perhaps it is conducive to the broader understanding of the human good and developing new modes of human flourishing that are neither nostalgic reversion to old cosmologies nor modernist rejection of cosmological meaning in the name of science.