A Very Simple Introduction to Re-enchantment

With a joke.

Viola Savoy in 1915, filming the Alice in Wonderland silent film.

Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, was also a logician and mathematician. His Symbolic Logic book is full of bizarre puzzles with absurd assumptions that are somehow still internally consistent. Here’s one that Steve Martin made famous in a joke in the arrow-through-head early days:

• All babies are illogical.

• Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.

• Illogical persons are despised.

Therefore:

• Babies cannot manage crocodiles.

I told this to a couple of my friends while staying in Metairie. We had a sensible chuckle, then set out to figure if it was internally consistent. We broke each statement into clear components to carefully model the confusing negations. It turns out, it is internally consistent. Figuring that out had us shouting at each other.

Carroll intentionally disconnected his syllogisms from normal experience to make you better at seeing pure rationality without worrying about what is “true” in an everyday sense. I like this approach because it both helps you become more rigorous in your cold reasoning but also reminds you that detachment is fantastic nonsense without real-world intuitions to ground the premises. That’s why they’re funny, which was not lost on Carroll.

At the same time, I also noticed, we found a different kind of joy in the act of digging under the surface to find those clear mechanisms. Without us really noticing, the gestalt of why it was funny faded and the thrill of “figuring it out” came more to the fore. We had murdered to dissect, so to speak. That was fine, but then a thought came to me:

This is basically the motivating sensation behind the scientific method or rationalism as such. Cold rationalism isn’t enough to push someone to dedicate their entire lives to cosmic ray protons or devils hole pupfish, say. That must be motivated by the joy of understanding, which is achieved by a deconstruction of larger meanings into graspable bits.

A possible danger of that is if you go so far as to destroy the source, the gestalt, which is your raison d’être. That is to say, none of the clarity we extracted from the logic added up to the sum of the joke. Put another way, none of it could help us understand why we were interested in breaking down that particular thing among a billion others. Put yet another way, none of the clarity was as fun as the joke itself. The joke happens all at once: in the laughter which is something like simultaneously apprehending many living layers. Rationalism gives off little charged particles of meaning, one at a time.

Re-enchantment, as a cultural concept, has already been flogged to death. If you don’t already know John Vervaeke’s lectures and Charles Taylor’s book and so on, do check those out. I just want to see if I can come at this obliquely through a dumb joke. None of this is to say that rationalism is wrong. It is just my desire to bring back places where the gestalt is allowed to exist without having to deal with the constant barrage of well-actuallys.

I’ll give you another dumb example.

Henrik Karlsson wrote an essay about how to walk through walls. How to be a “hacker.” One of the examples he uses is speedrunners in The Legend of Zelda. When he was a kid, he played The Legend of Zelda for hours. He understood it at the level of narrative; the game as it was designed to be presented. The speedrunners, however, worked to not understand the game as a simulated fantasy world of the imagination, the battle of good versus darkness, and whatever else that game is supposed to evoke. They understand it on what you might say is the deeper level: code, bits, ones and zeros. They do things like overload the RAM so as to confuse the system about where the character is in time and space, making large jumps forward for very small amounts of time. By understanding that it is “actually” built on code, they transcend how the game is played, beating it in twenty minutes or some unfathomably short amount of time. If you were watching a speedrun without understanding the ins and outs of their hacks, it would be incomprehensible. You would just see jolting, half-understood flashing images. This is meant to be the insight: learn the ability to take a system, understand its underlying code, and then use that to walk through walls—do things so much faster that it appears magical to other people.

It’s a good piece. And what’s good about that mindset is that it attacks bureaucratic systems that have mutated beyond the narrative they were created to serve. Karlsson uses the film industry: Entrenched industry people want you to go through the studio hoops so you spend tremendous amounts of money to do things in the established way. A “hacker” might better understand the mechanisms of what “actually” needs to happen to get the shots to make a movie for as small a budget as possible. Here the hacker is taking down a corpse to serve a living thing, which is good. A good hacker is reverent to a good mythos and aggressive with dead ones. That I see.

The hacker mode is unambiguously bad when it senselessly breaks down what gives itself meaning. Notice, for example, that there is actually an even deeper level of understanding to The Legend of Zelda than the code. No one would be interested in hacking the underlying code if it weren’t for the salience of the narrative. If it were just a bunch of blind code, speedrunning it would make no sense. You would no longer be doing a feat that was meaningful to others, you would just be moving random digits around. At that point, why do anything at all? You might as well do the ultimate hacker speedrun and delete the code. A new record. What is bizarre is that the speedrunners have developed a new mythology and sprawling online community on top of the game like a cake with alternating layers of reverence and rationalism, but all of it ultimately depends on reverence for the game. If you fully server that nativity, everything else crumbles. The deepest layer, the layer even deeper than the hacker can easily see, is what attracts the hacker to video games in the first place. The story. It is both the most superficial layer and, at the far end of the bell curve, the deepest. The narrative arrived in the mind of the creator long before a line of code was written, and even now that code would cease to matter if that original spark died.

Rationality cannot replicate that relevance, it can only give you the thrill of explaining it away, which is not the same as making it. The rationalist hacker mindset of the last couple hundred years is a mythos, itself nested in a much larger mythos. The rebel, the college dropout, the hacker: these all exist as archetypes, too. They require a machine to rage against to generate their energy. If you become so much of a hacker culture that you even hack the hacker story itself, you kill what motivates you to get out of bed. For most people, it is better to play the proverbial Legend of Zelda on the narrative level than on the level of code. The code is not there to pull the wool over your eyes, but to give you an arena for your own unfolding. You do not have to be so paranoid. Often to “see through the matrix” defeats its own purposes, which is to give you the container against which you become more like yourself.

We are obsessed with breaking down as a way of gaining power; over government agencies, patriotism, religion, and even, ironically, the scientific method itself. Rationalism is a wonderful faculty of being human, but cannot be the primary faculty. If it is treated as if it is, it becomes impossible to make or maintain a country, a company, or any motivational identity that unites people. If we make it our mission to constantly break down, interrogate, and fragment everything, we will be left with nothing but rotten pieces. We may have gained total power over those hacked up bits, but the cumulative loss will be much higher. If you operate at a net mythos loss over a long enough time, you will eventually run out of fuel. That’s fine. From decomposition comes fertile soil, and out of soil blooms new narratives. We can also notice, during all of the decomposition, what survives among them. History knows it is not always going to be brand new things that rise from the ashes, but also what survives across apocalypses.

A lot of people’s first reaction to understanding re-enchantment is to start LARP’ing some instagram trad life or something. That reaches too hard for an unearned and probably long-dead mythos. There are good things all around us that happen to be actually alive: laughing about a logic joke with your friends in Meep’s house in Metairie. Being able to know when to be a hacker and when to be reverent Aristotle named phronesis. Wisdom. You can’t make a rule out of it. If you could, then the hackers could automate art, and well, good luck with that. But it’s a virtue, which means it’s trainable. That means you’ll have to risk some embarrassing sincerity.

It’s all right here and entirely consistent, get it? babies cannot manage crocodiles. Play lightly on the apparent level rather than the code level. You’ll know when the reverse is warranted. When in doubt, play inefficiently and for the sake of playing. One because that is much more normal and comfortable, and two because it’s paradoxically closer to reality.