https://www.bradeast.org/blog/my-latest-a-review-of-rod-dreher-in-ct
…
There are three major
elements to Living in Wonder: a metanarrative of decline; an
overarching diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription; and a set of practices for
the individual reader. I began above with the third, so now I will focus on the
first two.
Dreher argues that the
contemporary West is disenchanted. This term can mean
many things, but Dreher defines it as “the evaporation of a sense of the
supernatural within the world, and its replacement with a belief, sometimes
unacknowledged, that this world is all there is.” A disenchanted society is
materialistic, rationalistic, individualistic, and hedonistic. It is unspooky.
It is not open to the transcendent, the divine, the mysterious, the
inexplicable. It is closed off by design.
How did we get here? By
a lengthy series of social, cultural, economic, scientific, and intellectual
transitions, beginning in the late Middle Ages. We lost a sense of “the
givenness of things,” to use Marilynne
Robinson’s phrase. We began to think things are what we make of them
rather than gifts from God to be cherished and stewarded. We strapped nature to
a chair and tortured her for secrets. Alluding
to Yuval Noah Harari, Dreher writes that “the story of modernity is of
humankind exchanging meaning for power.”
We got power, all
right. But was the exchange worth it? Dreher suggests not. In fact, he says,
the tradeoffs are so drastic that, while we can’t go back, we can’t stay where
we are, either.
…
The rise of technocratic utilitarian reason wielded to
develop comprehensive mastery over nature and society, by chance? Where, oh where, have I heard that thesis
before? Maybe Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer had some book about kinda sorta suggested that since the age of
Enlightenment instrumental reason and technological application outstripped
other aspects of civilization in some book called Dialectic
of Enlightenment?
