Wow! So deep and thoughtful! Yes, we are leaving one season and already into another season. The old form of Christianity was founded on a superstition, possibly from Ur of the Chaldees where Abraham grew-up, that “without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin.” People no longer can relate to a God or Creator Who can withhold forgiveness until His anger somehow is released by the shedding of blood by His dear Son. Forgiveness isn’t even really necessary, since God has never taken offense at anything people have ever said or done. Living in pure, white-hot bliss leaves One, or Three, beyond being diminished by ants trying to attack an elephant, or even watching ants attack other ants.
WHY have millions simply accepted the foundation stone of “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin,” without examining the origin of the thought? Wouldn’t it be enough if Jesus’s mission was just to show us more clearly LOVE, and also to show us that dearth does not exist? Wouldn’t it be enough for a foundation if we learned we are not human beings, here trying to become more spiritual, but rather, eternal spirits, lovely and holy in every way, here to express our true selves in human forms, not as egos or persons, but as wonderful spirits? I say let’s go back and read the red letters in the New Testament, and filter-out the superstitions and cultural baggage that has been mixed-in with the good news that Jesus offered. Eat the chicken, spit-out the bones. By now, we should be able to discern the difference between good news and error in the Bible. Jesus learned how to do it, and so can we:). If you are sad and afraid and generally unhappy, stop thinking the thoughts you are thinking, and start thinking the thoughts God entertains about everything. It really is a lot more fun….and more enjoyable.
It could be argued that disenchantment as it is framed here, for the most part, arrived in the Americas with the Europeans, their diseases and church, an effect of colonisation and invasion - but, there is a hint of acknowledgement towards this in your last sentences - thank you for a thoughtful read.
I have a lot of feelings about this, and may have to come back to this again later, but let me mention for now a book I was recently reading, Eric Santner's "Untying things together". He name-checks Josephson-Storm, but tries to distinguish what he is doing from what Josephson-Storm is doing. Now, not having read Josephson-Storm, it's a little hard for me to tell how different the arguments really are, but let me just quote what he says. He writes, "Josephson-Storm argues for the persistence of enchantment *alongside* otherwise fully rationalized spheres of value while I am arguing for the paradoxical persistence of enchantment in those rationalized value spheres as well as in the work of disenchantment itself. The point is not that figures like Max Weber ostensibly cultivated some form of mysticism on the side, as Josephson-Storm relates, but rather that the work of disenchantment is in its own way captivating. Indeed, that is why one must understand the word 'spirit' in 'spirit of capitalism' also in its 'spiritualist' sense."
To get back to today, I want to distinguish the work of disenchantment from the lazy assumption that disenchantment has run its course. Maybe for the latter, rather than "disenchantment," which to my ear suggests a ongoing process, I want to propose "unenchantment." It's this latter that seems to me to represent the posture of Trump et al.
I’m not sure I have much bound up in the debates about enchantment and disenchantment other than to just to make the point that enchantment is less demonic and far more integrated into our fabric of every day life than some would like it to be. I haven’t read Santner for some time, but in my memory he’s a theorist who makes a lot out of small differences.
Parenthetically, regarding Santner, I really enjoyed his book on Schreber ("His own private Germany") when I was a postdoc. Later, I tried to read "The Royal Remains" but didn't get that much out of it. One of the threads of "Untying," is his own biography, which is both off-putting and interesting. (It presupposes that we even care, which is sort of embarrassing, but then it turns out I do care, which is also embarrassing...) The Schreber book was written just after he got tenure, and once I learned that, I somehow got the idea that I was picking up on some "yes academic success is possible" vibe somewhere deep inside it.
But anyway, in case I was sounding like someone else who makes a lot out of small differences, my point was to say that you might find interesting Santner's argument in "Untying" against a hegemony of disenchantment, as a slightly different version of Josephson-Storm's.
There is at least one other thing I want to come back to, to do with this post, as well, but I need to get a book out of a room someone is sleeping in...
I actually think that I’d find the biographical element interesting. I read his book on creaturely life a number of times when I was a grad student, working on a dissertation about creatureliness. I found the book frustrating for reasons that I couldn’t quite pinpoint at the time but which I suppose could boiled down to the narcissism of small differences. The reading experience felt a bit like looking into a funhouse mirror; off, but I a strangely shifting sort of way. I also think that some of it had to do with the forcefulness of his exposition. I felt sort obliged to react in a contrarian manner. But I will look into the newer book! And look forward to hearing what other thoughts you have, when you have them.
Its sort of interesting to note that the benighted Rod Dreher pretends to address this phenomenon in his book Living In Wonder.
Why do I say this?
Because he is a very enthusiastic supporter of the Orange Oaf and his efforts to supposedly re-Christianize America, eliminate the dreaded scourge of "wokeness", and dismantle much/most/all
the presumed liberal/progressive hegemony of US culture.
Dreher is of course a close friend of J D Vance who endorsed this worse-than-horrible book
I found the quotation I was looking for, but then I had to read a bunch of the rest of the book to remember the context. Paul Goodman, in Kafka's Prayer, describes Jesus as "Christ, the worker of natural miracles, the one who is incarnate (without spiritual delusions)." Elsewhere in the book, he writes "There is only a physical world and what we take to be its evil is our illusion of a spiritual world." What he means by this is not totally clear to me, though it seems clear that he is linking the figure of Jesus to a liberatory disenchantment.
Wow! So deep and thoughtful! Yes, we are leaving one season and already into another season. The old form of Christianity was founded on a superstition, possibly from Ur of the Chaldees where Abraham grew-up, that “without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin.” People no longer can relate to a God or Creator Who can withhold forgiveness until His anger somehow is released by the shedding of blood by His dear Son. Forgiveness isn’t even really necessary, since God has never taken offense at anything people have ever said or done. Living in pure, white-hot bliss leaves One, or Three, beyond being diminished by ants trying to attack an elephant, or even watching ants attack other ants.
WHY have millions simply accepted the foundation stone of “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin,” without examining the origin of the thought? Wouldn’t it be enough if Jesus’s mission was just to show us more clearly LOVE, and also to show us that dearth does not exist? Wouldn’t it be enough for a foundation if we learned we are not human beings, here trying to become more spiritual, but rather, eternal spirits, lovely and holy in every way, here to express our true selves in human forms, not as egos or persons, but as wonderful spirits? I say let’s go back and read the red letters in the New Testament, and filter-out the superstitions and cultural baggage that has been mixed-in with the good news that Jesus offered. Eat the chicken, spit-out the bones. By now, we should be able to discern the difference between good news and error in the Bible. Jesus learned how to do it, and so can we:). If you are sad and afraid and generally unhappy, stop thinking the thoughts you are thinking, and start thinking the thoughts God entertains about everything. It really is a lot more fun….and more enjoyable.
It could be argued that disenchantment as it is framed here, for the most part, arrived in the Americas with the Europeans, their diseases and church, an effect of colonisation and invasion - but, there is a hint of acknowledgement towards this in your last sentences - thank you for a thoughtful read.
I have a lot of feelings about this, and may have to come back to this again later, but let me mention for now a book I was recently reading, Eric Santner's "Untying things together". He name-checks Josephson-Storm, but tries to distinguish what he is doing from what Josephson-Storm is doing. Now, not having read Josephson-Storm, it's a little hard for me to tell how different the arguments really are, but let me just quote what he says. He writes, "Josephson-Storm argues for the persistence of enchantment *alongside* otherwise fully rationalized spheres of value while I am arguing for the paradoxical persistence of enchantment in those rationalized value spheres as well as in the work of disenchantment itself. The point is not that figures like Max Weber ostensibly cultivated some form of mysticism on the side, as Josephson-Storm relates, but rather that the work of disenchantment is in its own way captivating. Indeed, that is why one must understand the word 'spirit' in 'spirit of capitalism' also in its 'spiritualist' sense."
To get back to today, I want to distinguish the work of disenchantment from the lazy assumption that disenchantment has run its course. Maybe for the latter, rather than "disenchantment," which to my ear suggests a ongoing process, I want to propose "unenchantment." It's this latter that seems to me to represent the posture of Trump et al.
I’m not sure I have much bound up in the debates about enchantment and disenchantment other than to just to make the point that enchantment is less demonic and far more integrated into our fabric of every day life than some would like it to be. I haven’t read Santner for some time, but in my memory he’s a theorist who makes a lot out of small differences.
Parenthetically, regarding Santner, I really enjoyed his book on Schreber ("His own private Germany") when I was a postdoc. Later, I tried to read "The Royal Remains" but didn't get that much out of it. One of the threads of "Untying," is his own biography, which is both off-putting and interesting. (It presupposes that we even care, which is sort of embarrassing, but then it turns out I do care, which is also embarrassing...) The Schreber book was written just after he got tenure, and once I learned that, I somehow got the idea that I was picking up on some "yes academic success is possible" vibe somewhere deep inside it.
But anyway, in case I was sounding like someone else who makes a lot out of small differences, my point was to say that you might find interesting Santner's argument in "Untying" against a hegemony of disenchantment, as a slightly different version of Josephson-Storm's.
There is at least one other thing I want to come back to, to do with this post, as well, but I need to get a book out of a room someone is sleeping in...
I actually think that I’d find the biographical element interesting. I read his book on creaturely life a number of times when I was a grad student, working on a dissertation about creatureliness. I found the book frustrating for reasons that I couldn’t quite pinpoint at the time but which I suppose could boiled down to the narcissism of small differences. The reading experience felt a bit like looking into a funhouse mirror; off, but I a strangely shifting sort of way. I also think that some of it had to do with the forcefulness of his exposition. I felt sort obliged to react in a contrarian manner. But I will look into the newer book! And look forward to hearing what other thoughts you have, when you have them.
Its sort of interesting to note that the benighted Rod Dreher pretends to address this phenomenon in his book Living In Wonder.
Why do I say this?
Because he is a very enthusiastic supporter of the Orange Oaf and his efforts to supposedly re-Christianize America, eliminate the dreaded scourge of "wokeness", and dismantle much/most/all
the presumed liberal/progressive hegemony of US culture.
Dreher is of course a close friend of J D Vance who endorsed this worse-than-horrible book
http://www.thenerdreich.com/unhumans-jd-vance-and-the-language-of-genocide.
Vance is also an Opus Dei true believer, the applied politics of which is described in these two books
STENCH by David Brock
OPUS by Gareth Gore
I found the quotation I was looking for, but then I had to read a bunch of the rest of the book to remember the context. Paul Goodman, in Kafka's Prayer, describes Jesus as "Christ, the worker of natural miracles, the one who is incarnate (without spiritual delusions)." Elsewhere in the book, he writes "There is only a physical world and what we take to be its evil is our illusion of a spiritual world." What he means by this is not totally clear to me, though it seems clear that he is linking the figure of Jesus to a liberatory disenchantment.