A Great Review Of 'Living In Wonder'

Academic Journal Calls It 'Essential Reading' In This Cultural Moment

I’ve just seen a great review of Living In Wonder by a scholar named Paul O’Connor, writing in an academic journal, International Political Anthropology. Here it is below. Boy, does this professor really and truly get the book! Read on:

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that the most fundamental question we can ask ourselves is whether the universe we live in is a friendly or a hostile one. Do we inhabit a meaningful cosmos in whose intrinsic order humans can participate? Or a random flux of sub-atomic particles flitting through a void? The latter is the default position of modernity; in this bold and stimulating book Rod Dreher asserts the former, arguing that alienation and nihilism are cultural pathologies of modernity rather than rational responses to reality.

Dreher’s book is important in itself: it is also significant for what it says about this cultural moment. Our lives may be more dominated than ever by technology and a narrowly instrumental rationality, but this only underscores the inability of either to satisfy our hunger for a sense of mystery, meaning, and purpose. By making reality seem plastic and rendering the self more porous to outside influence, the digital realm stimulates a generalised irrationalism seemingly at odds with the mindset embodied in its technological foundations. The overt apocalypticism of large parts of the climate movement; the quasireligious symbolism that accompanied the demonstrations following the death of George Floyd; the elevation of Donald Trump to (delete as appropriate) folk devil/God-appointed saviour of America – the emotional tenor of the present often resembles that of the fourteenth century, with its contagious ecstasies and terrors, more than the sober bourgeois rationalism of the industrial age. Occult and Satanic symbolism has become mainstream in pop culture, while the US Congress is holding hearings on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (the polite term for UFOs). People are seeking meaning and enchantment and sometimes finding it in unexpected places, and Dreher is one among a number of contemporary writers who can be viewed as resuscitating traditional spiritual, symbolic and mythological paths to meaning and making them accessible to contemporary readers, while avoiding the pitfalls of New Age self-indulgence and pic-n-mix spirituality.

Living in Wonder is an extremely rich book, which covers a lot of ground and draws on a wide variety of thinkers in the fields of sociology, anthropology, comparative religion, philosophy, theology, psychology, and architecture among other disciplines. Ideas from all of these are combined with the author’s own reflections and compelling individual stories of spiritual seeking and enchantment. It is impossible to do it all justice in a single review. Here I will organise my discussion around what seem to me the three major arguments of the book: respectively a sociological claim, a metaphysical claim, and an epistemological claim.

First, the sociological claim. Dreher accepts the familiar Weberian characterisation of modernity as disenchanted, but with a novel twist: he argues that we are now entering an age of re-enchantment, when the stale dogmas of Enlightenment rationalism are increasingly unconvincing, and people are not only asserting ‘mystical’ beliefs, but seeking out enchanted experiences. He acknowledges that conventional religion, especially Christianity, is declining in the West – religious allegiance and practice are falling steeply even in the U.S., where for long they remained more robust than in Europe. However, those leaving the churches are typically not becoming atheistic rationalists, but seeking other, more personalised forms of enchantment.

But what does Dreher mean by enchantment? He argues that the world of the past was enchanted, not just or even primarily because people believed in angels, demons, fairies and magic spells, but because for the people who lived then, everything participated in the life of the Creator, and so was pregnant with ultimate meaning. Both pagans, and Christians in the first 1,300 years of the faith, possessed a sacramental vision of the material world as saturated with spiritual meaning and power. This sacred reality was one which humans could not hope to fully comprehend, but in which they could participate.

Dreher draws on thinkers including Max Weber, Charles Taylor, and Jacques Ellul to offer an account of modernity as a journey away from this vision of a world full of meaning. It is a familiar tale, running through the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, and headlining Cartesian dualism, Newtonian physics, consumer capitalism, and the metaphysics of technology. The end result is one with which we are familiar: ‘a rigid framework within which numinous phenomena are to be evaluated. If they cannot be verified according to the scientific method, they cannot be counted as real.’

However, Dreher offers a couple of interesting twists. One is his extension of the story back to the High Middle Ages, as he argues that the intellectualism of the scholastics, which tended to separate ‘nature’ from ‘supernature’, and the subsequent replacement of metaphysical realism with nominalism (which separated God metaphysically from his creation, emphasising divine transcendence at the expense of immanence), prepared the way of the disenchantment of the world and the scientific revolution.

Likewise intriguing is Dreher’s discussion of the internet as a ‘disenchantment machine’ which is re-forming our neurological architecture to make it difficult to perceive reality. Here he draws on McLuhan’s idea that ‘The medium is the message’, framing a discussion of how the internet changes our brains, diminishing concentration, weakening memory and reflection, and encouraging us to conceive of the self as fluid and fragmented. The end result is an erosion of our ability to focus attention and so perceive enchantment. As Dreher puts it ‘The ways of the web design the culture in which we live and our very selves…We have stumbled into a tech-driven form of the ancient Gnostic heresy’.

However, while the internet separates us from the real and stimulates a gnostic revulsion against the restrictions of embodiment and materiality, it simultaneously corrodes specifically modern forms of self-contained, inner-driven rationality. As Charles Taylor has argued, we moderns take for granted a ‘buffered self’ – a strong sense of separation between the world inside our heads and the outer world beyond our heads. It is hard for us to wrap our minds around the idea that for people in the past, and some people in non-Western cultures even today, the self was perceived as porous, open to the influence of spirits, curses and the like. Digital culture however erodes the buffered self, re-creating a porous self which is open to forces more or less beyond our ability to control. Online, we are given the illusion of being able to create our own reality, one where we have limitless choice and need enter no permanent commitments – yet in reality we are the slave of algorithms which know our tastes and preferences better than ourselves, and use this knowledge to continually prod and entice us, steering us like lab rats through a digital maze. As Dreher writes, ‘The person of digital culture is one who has externalized his mind to a degree unprecedented in human history’.

Technology, then, is both a principal driver of disenchantment and the source of a kind of alternative, ersatz or negative enchantment. It is both the apotheosis of modern rationalisation and its solvent. If we are entering a new age of enchantment, our digital addiction is one major driver of this. Dreher is clear that many of the results are negative and even sinister: he writes extensively about what he calls ‘dark enchantment’. As formal, congregational religion declines in the West, it is being replaced by bric-a-brac personal spiritualities drawing on the occult, psychedelics, UFOs, A.I., and fringe internet phenomena such as tulpamancy (in which individuals attempt to generate a separate, sentient consciousness within themselves through focus and attention). Dreher fears we are seeing the beginnings of a new technological religion in which people will look to UFOs for enlightenment and treat A.I.s like gods or spirit guides. Given the quasi-religious terms in which prominent Silicon Valley figures proclaim their goal of merging human and machine, and recent developments in both artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces, this does not seem either far-fetched or alarmist. Rather than abandoning religion, contemporary society seems on the cusp of substituting the Singularity for the Rapture.

At the same time, the corrosion of the self-contained, inwardly-driven modern self opens up a space for positive re-enchantment – made all the more urgent by the existential wasteland of globalised, digitalised hyper-modernity which works to systematically sever every connection to nature and tradition. Into this space enter secular academics like Jordan Peterson, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, whose work aims at addressing the crisis of meaning; and those Dreher terms contemporary Christian ‘prophets’, such as mythologist Martin Shaw, novelist and essayist Paul Kingsnorth, and symbolist Jonathan Pageau – all of them pioneering paths to re-enchantment.

The second fundamental claim made by Living in Wonder is metaphysical. It is that our ancestors were right: meaning exists in the world independently of our perceptions. Contrary to the dominant, post-Kantian viewpoint of modernity, order is not something imposed on the world by human consciousness – it is already there, waiting to be discovered. As Dreher himself puts it, ‘The received narrative of the modern world – that mind and body are separated, that the spirit has nothing to do with materiality, and that there is no intrinsic meaning to matter – is a lie… We live not in an impersonal universe but in a divinely ordered cosmos permeated by Logos.’ Such an argument is controversial, to say the least. But it should not be lightly dismissed – and Dreher draws on an eclectic range of thinkers, including philosopher of consciousness Thomas Nagle, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, and architect Christopher Alexander, all of whom suggest that order is embedded in creation rather than being imposed on it by the human mind. Such contemporary writers open the way to revitalising the perception of an inherently ordered universe, which goes back even beyond Christianity, being at the heart of Greek philosophy. Dreher does not quote Plato, but a phrase from the Theaetetus – ‘Wonder [thaumazein] is the only beginning of philosophy’ – might serve as a motto for his book.

Following closely from this, the third claim made by Living in Wonder is epistemological. Modernity systematically blocks our ability to see reality, by undermining trust in tradition and denying any transcendence or structures of truth outside of the choosing self. ‘The world has never been truly disenchanted. We modern people have simply lost the ability to perceive the world with the eyes of wonder. We no longer see what is really real’. But if our culture shuts us out from perceiving the most important aspects of reality, we have the ability to alter this cultural conditioning and reopen ourselves to perception of the meaning that already exists in the world. This is, fundamentally, what Dreher means by re-enchantment.

The book draws on a wide range of thinkers to give an account of how the modern mind shuts down our access to reality, and how this can be overcome. Particularly central is the work of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, who argues that in the modern world our relationship to reality has been distorted by overreliance on the representation of the world provided by the brain’s left hemisphere. In a healthy individual, or a healthy culture, both sides of the brain work together: the left brain picks apart and analyses experience, while the right brain integrates it into a holistic view of the world. However, over the past five hundred years people in the West have come to systematically privilege the left-brain (analytical, abstract, external) way of knowing – what in political anthropology might be termed ‘trickster knowledge’. The left brain seeks mastery and control over the world, causing it to reject anything it cannot understand or bring under dominion, reducing the world to a mass of disconnected things – meaning-free matter waiting for us to impress our thoughts and desires upon it. But as German sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues in his work on ‘resonance’, the desire to render the world controllable leads inexorably to the diminishment of the reciprocal relationship between us and the world beyond ourselves – rendering impossible those experiences that provide meaning, joy, and enchantment.

Dreher also draws on the work of anthropologist Joseph Henrich who argues that culture can and does rewire our brains, with physical effects; the educated inhabitants of industrial societies are more individualistic, analytic, impersonal and less connected to the natural world than others. In summation, ‘the Western way of knowing achieved results by blinding itself to aspects of reality that could not be perceived using the scientific method’. We end up with a culture defined by its refusal of participation in the world beyond the self, and of any experience not subordinated to technocratic control. However, there are ways out of the trap of left-brain thinking in which we moderns have entangled ourselves. What we pay attention to and how we attend to it is the most important part of the mindset needed for re-enchantment. Dreher quotes Iain McGilchrist: ‘Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what you find there’. Training ourselves to focus our attention and overcome the distractions of digitalised hyper-reality opens us to the possibility of enchantment. Dreher also cites philosopher Matthew Crawford’s recommendation that we drop anchor in the real world, using bodily experience and working with our hands to pull us out of ourselves, and discusses Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow as a means of escaping the tyranny of the left brain, gathering and focusing consciousness and restoring our relationship to the world beyond our heads.

For me, however, perhaps the richest and most stimulating chapter in the book is that on beauty, entitled ‘Learning How to See’. We are not going to argue ourselves back to enchantment, Dreher writes: we need beauty – just as in The Divine Comedy it is Dante’s beloved Beatrice who guides him to the summit of paradise. ‘The beauty shining through great art – painting, poetry, sculpture, dance, music, architecture and so forth – calls us out of the depths of our spiritual slumber and up toward the pure light’. Dreher draws on the seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor, who argued that humans participate in the life of God through the logoi – reasons for being – embedded within ourselves and all created things. Contemplating beauty reveals the logoi more clearly, elevates us to a deeper participation in the Logos, and draws us out of ourselves and toward God.

There are two aspects of Dreher’s discussion of beauty which are particularly significant. While beauty is conventionally viewed as ‘in the eye of the beholder’ – a subjective perception which varies between individuals and cultures - Dreher argues that it is a quality inherent in reality. He quotes Patrick Curry’s book Art and Enchantment: How Wonder Works (part of the Contemporary Liminality series with which readers of IPA will be familiar), to argue that to think of enchantment as an injection of wonder into dead matter is only to reinforce the false split between matter and spirit which is responsible for disenchantment in the first place. Crucially, ‘enchantment is not something you add to the material world, like putting a ball gown on a chambermaid, but is rather a quality that inheres in the thing itself’. In support of this argument, he draws on the work of architect Christopher Alexander, who found that architecture and design are made up of discrete patterns that recur across time and place and can be combined in various ways to make spaces which people find attractive.

Secondly, Dreher conceives beauty not as something to be merely admired in an aesthetic sense, like package tourists getting off their bus to photograph a scenic panorama, but as a profound experience in which we participate. Beauty fills us with wonder, and incites us to love. It jerks us out of our heads, at least momentarily, and restores us to a participatory relationship to reality.

Living in Wonder is a rich book which works on a number of levels. Rod Dreher writes unapologetically as a believing Christian (he is a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, whose greater openness to mysticism clearly leaves its stamp on the book’s perspective), and both religious believers and unaffiliated seekers will undoubtedly find philosophical inspiration and practical guidance for engaging in journeys of re-enchantment. From a sociological perspective, the book offers an interesting contribution to debates about disenchantment, secularisation and post-secularity, as well as the impacts of digital technology on selfhood and consciousness. Anthropologically, it touches on deep questions of what it means to be human, the nature of meaning, and the peculiarities of Western selfhood and forms of knowledge. In particularly, it underlines the reductionist character and pathological effects of much ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ thinking, while hinting at how we might recover a conceptual language to describe those experiences – at once deeply personal and humanly universal – which may be denominated ‘spiritual’. For political anthropologists, it touches on many central interests and concerns from a different intellectual perspective, drawing on a range of authors, some of whom will be familiar and some new.

For anyone concerned with how we can hold on to our humanity in an epoch when the very nature of that humanity is being recoded by technology, and find meaning in a culture which seems ever more atomised, uprooted and unreal, it is essential reading.

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If you haven’t read it yet, order Living In Wonder here. UK readers, order it here.