Reconsidering Weberian Secularization: Seeing the Sacred in Medicine, Again
Ashley Moyse, PhD., Research Associate, Vancouver School of Theology, University of British Columbia
Max Weber's centennial claim concerning disenchantment leads modern cultures to treat nature, including human nature, as substance to be manipulated and controlled by an exercise of reason, will, and technique.
By ‘leads’ I take that to mean the secularization thesis proposed does have a pedagogical influence, training us to see the world in particular ways. We come to learn, for example, that modern culture has appreciably benefitted from such modes of knowing and doing. As one might experience in medicine, the precedence of science and concomitant pledge to technological resolutions to human problems are bolstered by our well being. And such well being—to emphasise a feedforward mechanism—is further safeguarded by the advance of technology and the scientific form of knowing. All this influence and well being is the welcomed benefit of the Enlightenment project and serves to explain, as Weberian secularization directs, the waning influence of religions.
So, for some, Weber’s allusion to the disenchanted world is a gift of progress and buffered life. For others, the allusion is presented with hazard and woeful concern. I am committed to a middle way; I want to challenge both the uncritical acceptance and the pure protest of the corresponding Weberian secularization thesis. In so challenging, I want to revisit Weber’s 'die Entzauberung der Welt' and interrupt the forms of uncritical modern secularism that labour to narrate the sacred as waves retreating from shore but are otherwise unable to see their own religiosity. Yet I want also to interrupt unhelpful suspicions of scientific and technological progress that present premodern ideals as normative and natural. I want to argue, while adopting the language of coinherence (see British theologian/poet Charles Williams) and the corresponding theory of secularization introduced by Bronislaw Szerszynski (authored 'Nature, Technology, and the Sacred'), that modern science and technology have not so much desacralized the world, but have become the instruments for sacralizing the world in new ways—science determining the order and technology establishing the means for how we ought to live. I want to use the art and science, the institution, of medicine as the principal loci from which to introduce an alternative narrative, demonstrating how nature continues to be enchanted and how technology serves a ceremonial function.
By pursuing this line of thought, we might circumvent the trappings that perceive, in modern science and technology, the soteriological promise of overcoming contingency and finitude by means of rational enquiry and technological powers. We might also circumvent an increasingly common response to the promotion of science and technology, which, and this might ring familiar, calls for the withdrawal of their pre-eminence such that nature, or the good, might be regained (consider, as an example, the rise of complementary and alternative medicines). By engaging in this exercise, I will point towards a content-full/ thick analysis and repositioning of the Weberian secularization thesis such that we might learn to ‘see the sacred’, if you will, in its maligned forms and in its right footing.
Max Weber's centennial claim concerning disenchantment leads modern cultures to treat nature, including human nature, as substance to be manipulated and controlled by an exercise of reason, will, and technique.
By ‘leads’ I take that to mean the secularization thesis proposed does have a pedagogical influence, training us to see the world in particular ways. We come to learn, for example, that modern culture has appreciably benefitted from such modes of knowing and doing. As one might experience in medicine, the precedence of science and concomitant pledge to technological resolutions to human problems are bolstered by our well being. And such well being—to emphasise a feedforward mechanism—is further safeguarded by the advance of technology and the scientific form of knowing. All this influence and well being is the welcomed benefit of the Enlightenment project and serves to explain, as Weberian secularization directs, the waning influence of religions.
So, for some, Weber’s allusion to the disenchanted world is a gift of progress and buffered life. For others, the allusion is presented with hazard and woeful concern. I am committed to a middle way; I want to challenge both the uncritical acceptance and the pure protest of the corresponding Weberian secularization thesis. In so challenging, I want to revisit Weber’s 'die Entzauberung der Welt' and interrupt the forms of uncritical modern secularism that labour to narrate the sacred as waves retreating from shore but are otherwise unable to see their own religiosity. Yet I want also to interrupt unhelpful suspicions of scientific and technological progress that present premodern ideals as normative and natural. I want to argue, while adopting the language of coinherence (see British theologian/poet Charles Williams) and the corresponding theory of secularization introduced by Bronislaw Szerszynski (authored 'Nature, Technology, and the Sacred'), that modern science and technology have not so much desacralized the world, but have become the instruments for sacralizing the world in new ways—science determining the order and technology establishing the means for how we ought to live. I want to use the art and science, the institution, of medicine as the principal loci from which to introduce an alternative narrative, demonstrating how nature continues to be enchanted and how technology serves a ceremonial function.
By pursuing this line of thought, we might circumvent the trappings that perceive, in modern science and technology, the soteriological promise of overcoming contingency and finitude by means of rational enquiry and technological powers. We might also circumvent an increasingly common response to the promotion of science and technology, which, and this might ring familiar, calls for the withdrawal of their pre-eminence such that nature, or the good, might be regained (consider, as an example, the rise of complementary and alternative medicines). By engaging in this exercise, I will point towards a content-full/ thick analysis and repositioning of the Weberian secularization thesis such that we might learn to ‘see the sacred’, if you will, in its maligned forms and in its right footing.