“Modernity is a deal” writes Yuval Noah Hurari: “The entire contract can be summed up in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power”.

McCarraher strongly disagrees. Modernity is the replacement of one meaning system with another. And one that is destroying us.

“McCarraher contends that this whole story [of disenchantment] is disastrously misguided,” writes Chappel: “it keeps us from seeing how capitalism functions, and why it continues to exert so much appeal. Disenchantment, he argues, never happened.”

Our world is still soaked with meaning, just as it was in the Middle Ages. We are not abandoned to a universe of moral relativism and nihilism, because capitalism and its prophets have offered an astonishingly stable set of alternatives. “Capitalism,” McCarraher insists, “is a love story.” What he means is that the market translates the poetry of our desire into the prose of institutions and exchange.”

This reminds me a little of that astonishing address given by David Foster Wallace in 2005 called “This is Water” in which he claims: “… in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

Capitalism doesn’t rid the world of magic. Instead it replaces good magic with bad magic.

The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity is published in a few weeks time. Sounds like a must-read to me.

---

Giles Fraser is a journalist, broadcaster and Vicar of St Anne’s, Kew.

giles_fraser

---