How To Be An Agnostic
Marx believed that that time would come with commu-
nism. That clearly hasn’t worked out. Also, while the notion
that there’s a link between material improvement and spiritual
decline is an idea that still has currency, you increasingly strug-
gle to fi nd sociologists who believe it. In fact, if Jung is right,
the opposite is the case. As the material benefi ts of modernity
become more widespread, they delude us into thinking they can
satisfy the spiritual side of us too. But they can’t. Which leaves
us increasingly in search of heart in a heartless world, and soul
in a soulless condition, not less.
A different account of secularisation is found in the pro-
cesses described by the sociologist Max Weber. He talked of
disenchantment. The key idea here is that as scientifi c and
rational explanations for things become more available to
human beings, so spiritual, mythical and supernatural expla-
nations become redundant: theology and religion go the way
of the supernatural and irrational. Weber argued that this
process of disenchantment had come about in the Western
world.
Think of our ancestors on the savannah, watching a thunder-
storm approaching across the plain. As the dark sky splits with
light, and the turbulent atmosphere howls with thunder, they
feel fear. And in an enchanted world it makes sense to connect
such natural events with matters human and divine. Hence
in Shakespeare’s King Lear the ‘deep, dread-bolted thunder’
signals Lear’s own demise. In the scientifi c age, though, such
meaningfulness is lost. We no longer interpret the thunder; we
understand it – as massive discharges of electricity.
And yet, it is still spectacular and, in a different sense,
enchanting too. It’s what we’ve questioned as cosmic religion.
A physicist does not look at the lightning and see a portent-
ous sign, but he or she may well wonder at the extraordinary
nature of electrical discharge. For modern individuals nature
is still a mirror for meaning. It is the meaning articulated by
the Romantic poets who wrote of the sublime – the awesome
mountains and terrible waves that refl ect the mix of fright and