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For all the problems that science and technology present to a world in need of soul, they are not the cause of our disenchantment. They are both full of magic, and I'm certain that magicians of the past would have readily appropriated many of the methods and discoveries of science along with the accompanying technologies. The tendency of reason and science to take up too much room in modern life is just another symptom of disenchantment. The root problem is not science. It is religion.
"Religion" means many things to different people. When I say that religion is the main issue in enchantment, I'm thinking not to eighteenth-century Deism and the reasonable religion of the American founders, but of an appreciation of the sacred and the holy in every aspect of life: nature, work, home, business, and public affairs. I call this "natural religion," taking the wording from many authors of the past -- Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century said that religion is as natural to a human being as barking is to a dog -- because I want to distinguish it from religion as an intellectual commitment buttressed by strong emotion and sheltered in an institution like a church or tradition.
Many people define their religion as a belief, and they pin their hopes and understanding on a provisional understanding of life. But there isn't much room for faith in a religion that is reduced to belief, and there isn't any place for an open-minded appreciation for the world's sacredness. In a disenchanted world, for all its concern for morals and social action, religion separates itself from everyday life and becomes obsessed with its own brand of belief and moral purity. In this kind of setting, the people who pollute our rivers and oceans and exploit workers and families may go to church and profess strong moral values, and yet they don't have any conscience about the water, the earth, or the human community.
There is something dreadfully wrong with this kind of religion, which creates a kind of psychotic dissociation. A person feels morally pure because he is blissfully adhering to ideas of morality that have little to do with the world in which he lives, and at the same time he is committing heinous sins that are not catalogued in his disenchanted morality. The source of our modern discontent is the loss of natural religion, a base for any other kind of religious sensibility.
If we define magic without its usual connotations of duplicity or self-aggrandizement, and if we define religion in basic terms, prior to traditions, institutions and beliefs, then at this level magic and religion are barely distinguishable, and one serves the other. The re-enchantment of our everyday lives then becomes a matter of seriously shifting our priorities, developing a sense of the sacredness in the particulars of ordinary life, and making them part of our personal lives more by imagination than by brute force.
-- Thomas Moore
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