From Léonce:
Over time, we have done away with waiting, boredom, and much of uncertainty. We have learned to plan our routes, order food before we are hungry, know whether a restaurant is worth going to before we step inside, check the weather before we look at the sky. We can fill almost every empty minute, find an immediate answer to almost any question, see a place before we have ever set foot there. All of this is, of course, very convenient.
But I sometimes wonder whether, in removing so many small frictions and in-between moments from our lives, we have also removed, almost by accident, some of the conditions that allowed the world to surprise us. Perhaps enchantment depends on some of the very things we have spent years trying to eliminate: waiting, uselessness, mystery, slowness, surprise, imagination, attention.
There is a concept that has stayed with me since my student days: Max Weber’s idea of the “disenchantment of the world.” Very roughly put, it describes the way modernity made the world more rational, more explainable, more calculable. I would be hard-pressed now to reproduce everything I learned about it then, but the phrase itself has never quite left me.
The disenchantment of the world. (Read more.)
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