The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

Nature was no longer a source of wonder but a force to be mastered, a system to be figured out. At its root, disenchantment describes the fact that everything in modern life, from our minds to the rotation of the planets, can be reduced to the causal mechanism of physical laws.

For the most part, these cosmologies recognized powers and goals higher than those of mortal humans and the physical world. The disenchantment of the world may have led to a more scientific view of reality, but it also promoted the hubris of a human-centric – mediated by a nation-centric – view of the world

Science and philosophy have replaced religion as mainstream ‘belief systems’ of modernity; religion, based on an outdated and untranslated mythology, cannot hope to compete with modern systems of knowing; Christian religion has been based on the authority of tradition, and modern people do not care for tradition. Religion can only mean something ag

In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world

Before science and philosophy could convince us that demons were only in our minds, magic itself needed to be devalued. Though theologians had been uneasy with magic for centuries, it wasn’t until the Reformation took the bold step of blurring the line between the sacred and profane that magic and superstition would begin its slow fade.

Critics of the disenchantment narrative often argue that technical mastery of the world does not necessarily strip it of all magic, mystery, and awe; only an impoverished imagination will fail to find beauty in the revelations of science or ignore our capacity to discover, or invent, new sites of wonder.