The Post-Partisan Emporium

The Nature of Enchantment John Michael Greer Back in the autumn of 2020, as the Covid virus and the US presidential election monopolized headlines across the corporate media,  I made a post  here talking about Max Weber’s famous claim that “the disenchantment of the world” was among the core features of modernity, and the then-recent challenge leveled against that claim by Jason Josephson-Storm in his book  The Myth of Disenchantment . That post and the theme it began to explore opened quite a rabbit hole into the deep places of culture and the human psyche, and I didn’t pretend to be able to wrap things up in a single essay of modest length.  I finished up the post, in fact, by noting that my work on the theme was still in its early stages, and promised to post more when I’d gone further. Two years later—why, here we are. For the benefit of those readers who weren’t following this blog two years ago, and who don’t have the spare time right now to go back and read the earlier post, the

Once upon a time in a prosperous land, a rumor swept across the kingdom that there was an invisible vapor floating through the air. Many vapors had come before, but this one was so extraordinary, it called for an extraordinary response. This vapor, the town criers cried, could kill you at any time, anywhere. You could get it by talking, breathing, or singing. You could get it by standing or walking too closely to someone. You could even get it by playing. And the scariest thing of all—you could get it and not even know you had it. The only way to escape was to hide indoors, keep away from people, and rub your hands with a clear jelly every time you touched something. Merchants stopped trading, apprentices stopped learning, and people stopped seeing people. Every day, the town criers yelled out the number of people who had caught the vapor, although most didn’t know it since they felt the same as usual—just a lot more scared. They only learned they had it because of a ce