Joseph Mallord William Turner, "The Golden Bough."
This is a painting I've always loved. I saw it first on the front cover of a philosophy book, and could never track it down (it the days before I was on the Internet, and therefore had to do proper research).
In time I discovered J.G. Frazer's anthropological study The Golden Bough. Frazer begins that book by asking:. "Who does not know Turner's picture of the Golden Bough?"
"The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland grove of Nemi - 'Diana's Mirror', as it was called by the ancients ... "
"If mankind had always been logical and wise," Frazer goes on to comment, then "history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime."
That sentence is key, writes Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. 'Frazer sees human thought as capable of leading itself, through the false logic of magic and religion, to devastating cruelties.'
And The Guardian, being secular liberal and humanist to the core, no doubt agrees with that. I think it simplistic and blinkered. I love Frazer's book, but it was of a time when many great thinkers thought the advance of science and scientific reason would be sufficient to put an end to religion, presuming as they did that reason and religion were antithetical (think, here, of Freud's Future of an Illusion.) We have by now, surely, learned of the simplistic nature of the view that increasing science, reason, and technology will dispel the illusion of religion and usher in a golden age of peace, freedom, and plenty. Science itself is as old as religion and both have proceeded hand-in-hand in history. Whatever illusion the one has is possessed also by the other; it is the social relations of science and religion in time and place that determine the balance of reality and illusion. Miss that mediation, and science can be every bit as delusional as religion can be and, allied to technological power, more dangerous and destructive, coming to rest cosmic power - and violence - in fallible human hands.
The idea that science would put an end to religion and usher in peace and freedom wasn't Max Weber's view. For Weber, 'disenchantment' had both positive and negative features, and it was well-nigh impossible to separate the one from the other.
Weber wrote:
"the fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world’. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values, have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations."
Weber SV in Gerth and Mills ed. 1961:155
In social science, 'disenchantment' (German: Entzauberung) refers to the cultural rationalization and devaluation of mysticism which characterises modern society. Weber adapted the term from Friedrich Schiller's original usage to describe the character of a modernized, bureaucratic, rationalized Western society in which scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief, and processes are oriented toward rational goals, as opposed to traditional society, whereby "the world remains a great enchanted garden." (Weber, Max. [1920] 1971. The Sociology of Religion. p. 270.)
The term 'disenchantment' refers specifically to a dis-godding or de-magification. Those adopting a simplistic rationalism here have tended to see peace and harmony resulting naturally from a life of logic and reason. That wasn't Weber's view. In fact, Weber didn't quite equate rationalization with secularisation, as many sometimes argue. Instead, Weber argued for something much more complicated and troubling, a "polytheism" as a war between both renascent old gods and new gods in the form of impersonal forces determining the lives of human beings with 'irresistible force.'
Welcome to the grave new world.
Following Nietzsche, Weber saw how human beings are capable of making new idols for themselves, demanding human sacrifices to the false promises of salvation. Many keep issuing those false promises, as premised on the liberatory potentials of science and technology and instrumental reason. Weber saw not liberation here but enslavement. In Politics as a Vocation, Weber gives a pessimistic prognosis:
'Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but the proletarian has lost his rights'
Weber 1970: 128
For Weber, we not only live in a morally divided world but, importantly, lack the overarching moral framework within which moral argument could claim authority. The world thus expresses a plurality of values, no one of which can claim priority over the others (Lassman and Velody1989: 22).
Weber understood that loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework to be irrevocable, and most follow him in taking that view. In time, with increasing frustration of the greatest liberatory hopes, liberal pluralism has reconciled itself to having to settle for an "ironic liberalism," liberals knowing and accepting that their most cherished values are groundless and that their normative commitments are as 'made-up' as those of their rivals, but pressing them as if their foundations were secure regardless. Existential choice in those conditions cannot but be empty and arbitrary, and the 'ironists' know this and admit it. The view is unsustainable, both for the individuals that hold it and for a society that attempts to make it central to its moral functioning; that view entails not a genuine ethical system, merely a moral market-place.
Weber poses the question, 'Which of the warring gods shall we serve?' (Weber 1970:155). The question does not go away with disenchantment but, on the contrary, assumes a new urgency. 'Our civilization destines us to realize more clearly these struggles again, after our eyes have been blinded for a thousand years' by 'the grandiose moral fervour of Christian ethics.' And today 'many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another'. What is so 'hard for modern man' is 'how to measure up to workaday existence' in this disenchanted world (Weber 1970: 149).
How is it at all possible to measure up when we lack any common standard or measure to employ as a referent? We live at a time when activists in all manner of campaigns and causes claim that 'x' or 'y', such as acting on climate change, is a 'moral imperative.' Even the Pope uses the term 'moral imperative.' The problem is that, in the aftermath of Nietzsche's 'death of God' - the collapse of common objective and authoritative moral standards - we lack the moral referents that make such imperatives meaningful. Those imperatives are not imperatives at all, they have the form of imperatives but lack the content.
Hence the paradox of an environmental movement, which is overwhelmingly secular and scientistic - disenchanted in the sense of godless, purposeless, and meaningless - issuing moral imperatives on environmental crisis, without understanding the extent to which such imperatives require a revaluing and re-godding, a re-enchantment. Their disenchanting science has removed the ground from under the moral imperatives they issue. The Golden Bough has been dissolved in the universal acid of scientistic reason. They don't see this because they use 'Nature' in the place where God once was, but it doesn't work. That 'Nature' is a nature that has been disenchanted and hence rendered objectively valueless, meaningless, purposeless. I see this all over materialist thinking, just impersonal processes which are utterly indifferent to human beings. It doesn't work, at least not in any human sense. Nietzsche saw this clearly as did Foucault a century later - the death of God implies the death of the human subject. Ecologists write of the errors of anthropocentrism, and extirpate every sign of it as keenly as they do every sign of God. To leave what? A Nature that doesn't care one way or the other. And on this basis they issue the moral imperative that human beings ought to protect Nature. Human beings are thus called upon to care for a Nature that doesn't care for them. It falls on deaf ears, and not least because an economic system has been erected in the image of that impersonalism, the capital system as a global heat machine pursuing exchange values at the expense of use values.
Turner is one of my most favourite painters, but expressed himself entirely without hope. I'll need to examine more closely what he means here. I can see immediately that he sought to expose the fallacies of 'progress,' which which is meant an inevitable advance as a result of commerce, science, technology, and industry. In which case, he was one with William Blake and Rabbie Burns
"We cam na here to view your warks,
In hopes to be mair wise,
But only, lest we gang to hell,
It may be nae surprise.
But when we tirl'd at your door
Your porter dought na hear us;
Sae may, shou'd we to Hell's yetts come,
Your billy Satan sair us!"
- Burns, Impromptu On Carron Iron Works
William Blake saw it all coming, too, calling disenchanting science the 'tree of death,' the mechanisation of the mind in preparation for the mechanisation of the world. The poets got here first. Whilst many were blinded by enlightenment and the promises of heaven on Earth via commerce, technology, and industry (and consider that if they been proven wrong, then it is not in material terms), the poets saw further and deeper.
Weber took the term 'disenchantment' from Schiller. Weber saw no possibilities for re-enchantment - the dream was dead, and human beings put out the flame. Weber instead put his faith in the ethic of responsibility. We are one hundred years on from Weber, and the stresses of that ethic are showing.
Blake opposed the 'tree of art' to the 'tree of science,' the tree of life to the tree of death. It's always ways to check the idiosyncratic ways in which Blake employs his terms. He criticised Dante as an 'atheist.' Blake, I have found, usually makes sense, if you are prepared to look for it.
Frazer begins with art because he is an artist. The Golden Bough may be disguised as a sombre work of science but in reality it is a vast prose poem, whose images were to shape 20th-century culture. Frazer's images - of trees, fire, mannequins and slaughtered gods - hang above his pages. He begins with Turner in order to paint a landscape of his own: in deliberate contrast to the golden glowing Italian scene he remembers in Turner's painting The Golden Bough, he paints a grove of darkness.
'Frazer is an astonishing figure who connects our own culture with that of late-Victorian England. Transcribing his words I can hear The Doors' deceptively gentle guitar in the soundtrack to Apocalypse Now. The lesson of his debt to Turner is a fundamental one about the "soft" sciences, as physicists and biologists dismiss the human sciences - anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis - invented in the late-19th century. The lesson, and this is what gives Frazer's book its enduring value, is that they really are soft. Frazer doesn't pretend to be a scientist delivering data; he makes it explicit from his first sentence that he is a human being who lives inside, not outside, culture. This is why, before leading us into the forest where culture begins, he reminds us that somehow humanity's path leads to the divine Turner.'
Nice painting, though.
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