I think the obsession with AI is a bellwether of re-enchantment. Science fiction in the minds of many is now perceived as science fact, and many truly believe that Asimovian realities are inevitable. They’re either already enchanted or primed for it.
On the topic of the LARP - I’m pretty tolerant - the history of “looking to the past” to recapitulate is a foundational property of man’s sense of place, and doubly so in the heart of the Church (Resourcement and the call to “ad fontes”). The renaissance was a huge Greek LARP, and the resultant reformation was the ascetic judgement.
The major mistake here would be to “copy” in the long-term, which is too early to tell. Mimesis is often the first stage of generation. If we get stuck on pocket watches and mullets, it’s a failure.
This got me thinking about how the hacker mindset is rooted in Aristotelian logic and how rationality got transmitted through classical education. But in ages past, the logic part was included within a larger frame of meaning that also included theology, metaphysics and so on. When you take the logic out of a meaning-full worldview, it becomes “cold.” This also made me think about the role of LARPing in spiritual practice. LARPing is only a problem when we take ourselves too seriously, or not seriously enough. In Freemasonry, we LARP as Lawful Good stonemasons, but we don’t pretend to actually know how to build cathedrals. Instead, we build our own inner edifices. In Vajrayana, we visualize ourselves as yogic deities, but we don’t let our egos get inflated. At best, LARPing is “serious play”—both playful and meaningful at the same time.
I enjoyed this perspective. It reminded me that understanding a mechanism is never the same as understanding its meaning. Perhaps rationality explains how things work, while art reminds us why they matter. We probably need both.
Great piece. I actually feel slightly more knowledgeable about the world for having read this, which nowadays is about the highest praise I can give to anything.
This is a great piece- i’ve been thinking about breaking things down (and when not to) in the context of academia a lot, where the deeper you get into some disciplines, especially the humanities, the so-called “knowledge production” being done can feel unintelligible, arcane, and sometimes downright silly. Which is a shame because I think most people want to study these things because of a sense of “enchantment.” I’d be curious to hear if you had any thoughts on applying this concept to higher education in particular- if it’s your job to break things down, how do you know when to stop? How do you stay “connected to reality”?
I actually think we're well adapted to this, which as a fact is downplayed by rationalists. We have good intuitions for navigating natural ecologies and their various charges and resources - it's the same way we hunted and gathered. The abstraction up to universities and the internet and whatnot really, I think, hasn't done much to make us less well suited to do this. The problem people run into is they refuse to see themselves as a creature in an environment that they need to learn to adapt to. That their senses are keen and could be developed. I mean specifically that our bodily fears, disgust, interest, etc. are great tools to know how to approach highly abstract topics. Most of us will never need to go so deep on something - but maybe you do. Maybe it's your job to go into the dark, far from the campfire, and find whatever is hiding out there. But you can't forget that the reason you left, and your umbilical, is the people for whom the potential information serves.
What a wonderful piece. I’m going to meditate on this.
My interpretation of the whole is that meta cognition or “hacker mode” should be used only when needed, not as a way to constantly jump away from a system. If used to jump away from any system ultimately it takes away the very need to jump away and to get though the wall.
What a piece. Again. I wish I could say I understood everything.
But, I do want to add a thought to your thought of why cold rationalism cannot be enough to push someone to dedicate their lives to "dissecting a detached-from-reality, but internally consistent joke".
What a piece. Again. I wish I could say I understood everything.
But, I do want to add a thought to your thought of why cold rationalism cannot be enough to push someone to dedicate their lives to "dissecting an illogical but internally.
That joy of understanding might also be accompanied by the joy of communion. Maybe the joke wouldn't have enchanted anyone if they attempted to understand it alone. Maybe the act of laughing at the joke is what made it interesting in the first place. That opens two strands of thought:
1 that the object has some enchantment power. Why was the joke stuck in your head? And what made you bring it up out of all the things you could talk about?
2 that the communal attention (expressed through laughter in this case, but it could have been sorrow in other cases - i.e. a secret meeting of a rebellious group trying to escape an oppresive regime) given to an object enchants the object far beyond the level of the enchantment the object "radiated" in the first place.
Very good points and also worth noticing that you can't encapsulate these cascading layers of meaning in real time with rationality. You either allow them to happen or they don't. They won't be grasped.
Lewis Caroll is one of my favourite authors, I am currently rereading “Alice in Wonderland”, seeing a lot of strikingly deep remarks in it. Might consider reading something else of his as well
Great article. I think the challenge in any artistic endeavor is that you have to leave Gandalf's path of wisdom: You break the thing to see what it truly is. You reduce the wonder to technique. And then, somehow, miraculously, you find your way back to the path: You reintegrate the pieces into a whole that looks like it had never been broken. If what you create reignites your own wonder, chances are, it will ignite someone else's, too.
I love the video game/speed runner hacks analogy in all this. Another that comes to mind is theatre. In college I took a semester course in theatre where I was doing tech. So lighting (which I mostly worked with, sound, props, and how they’re all programmed or “queued” to the stage events. At first, I thought seeing how all the “behind the curtain” stuff would make the play seem less magical. But once you see it all come together, it made the sense of awe and “magic” in the actual performance - with the understanding and appreciation for all the technical intricacies I had a small part in building - more real and vivid, not less.
I don’t know that the “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” is necessarily/always true. But I do think it’s critical to recognize that the whole is a different thing than “just” the collection of its parts.
I think the obsession with AI is a bellwether of re-enchantment. Science fiction in the minds of many is now perceived as science fact, and many truly believe that Asimovian realities are inevitable. They’re either already enchanted or primed for it.
On the topic of the LARP - I’m pretty tolerant - the history of “looking to the past” to recapitulate is a foundational property of man’s sense of place, and doubly so in the heart of the Church (Resourcement and the call to “ad fontes”). The renaissance was a huge Greek LARP, and the resultant reformation was the ascetic judgement.
The major mistake here would be to “copy” in the long-term, which is too early to tell. Mimesis is often the first stage of generation. If we get stuck on pocket watches and mullets, it’s a failure.
Great wrinkle here, I didn't think about how we all copy before we learn how to be like ourselves. LARPing is good in the near-term.
This got me thinking about how the hacker mindset is rooted in Aristotelian logic and how rationality got transmitted through classical education. But in ages past, the logic part was included within a larger frame of meaning that also included theology, metaphysics and so on. When you take the logic out of a meaning-full worldview, it becomes “cold.” This also made me think about the role of LARPing in spiritual practice. LARPing is only a problem when we take ourselves too seriously, or not seriously enough. In Freemasonry, we LARP as Lawful Good stonemasons, but we don’t pretend to actually know how to build cathedrals. Instead, we build our own inner edifices. In Vajrayana, we visualize ourselves as yogic deities, but we don’t let our egos get inflated. At best, LARPing is “serious play”—both playful and meaningful at the same time.
Totally agree and you're the second I've seen point this out. Shouldn't be totally down on LARPing as a means of getting across the gap.
I enjoyed this perspective. It reminded me that understanding a mechanism is never the same as understanding its meaning. Perhaps rationality explains how things work, while art reminds us why they matter. We probably need both.
Great piece. I actually feel slightly more knowledgeable about the world for having read this, which nowadays is about the highest praise I can give to anything.
Let’s go
This is a great piece- i’ve been thinking about breaking things down (and when not to) in the context of academia a lot, where the deeper you get into some disciplines, especially the humanities, the so-called “knowledge production” being done can feel unintelligible, arcane, and sometimes downright silly. Which is a shame because I think most people want to study these things because of a sense of “enchantment.” I’d be curious to hear if you had any thoughts on applying this concept to higher education in particular- if it’s your job to break things down, how do you know when to stop? How do you stay “connected to reality”?
I actually think we're well adapted to this, which as a fact is downplayed by rationalists. We have good intuitions for navigating natural ecologies and their various charges and resources - it's the same way we hunted and gathered. The abstraction up to universities and the internet and whatnot really, I think, hasn't done much to make us less well suited to do this. The problem people run into is they refuse to see themselves as a creature in an environment that they need to learn to adapt to. That their senses are keen and could be developed. I mean specifically that our bodily fears, disgust, interest, etc. are great tools to know how to approach highly abstract topics. Most of us will never need to go so deep on something - but maybe you do. Maybe it's your job to go into the dark, far from the campfire, and find whatever is hiding out there. But you can't forget that the reason you left, and your umbilical, is the people for whom the potential information serves.
No time to edit that, but I hope that made sense.
A lot of wisdom and sense in here, love it.
Also, you may find this lengthy essay extremely interesting as I did, if you haven't already read it:
https://www.panoptica.com/the-neuro-metaphysics-of-ruin/
What a wonderful piece. I’m going to meditate on this.
My interpretation of the whole is that meta cognition or “hacker mode” should be used only when needed, not as a way to constantly jump away from a system. If used to jump away from any system ultimately it takes away the very need to jump away and to get though the wall.
What a piece. Again. I wish I could say I understood everything.
But, I do want to add a thought to your thought of why cold rationalism cannot be enough to push someone to dedicate their lives to "dissecting a detached-from-reality, but internally consistent joke".
What a piece. Again. I wish I could say I understood everything.
But, I do want to add a thought to your thought of why cold rationalism cannot be enough to push someone to dedicate their lives to "dissecting an illogical but internally.
That joy of understanding might also be accompanied by the joy of communion. Maybe the joke wouldn't have enchanted anyone if they attempted to understand it alone. Maybe the act of laughing at the joke is what made it interesting in the first place. That opens two strands of thought:
1 that the object has some enchantment power. Why was the joke stuck in your head? And what made you bring it up out of all the things you could talk about?
2 that the communal attention (expressed through laughter in this case, but it could have been sorrow in other cases - i.e. a secret meeting of a rebellious group trying to escape an oppresive regime) given to an object enchants the object far beyond the level of the enchantment the object "radiated" in the first place.
Very good points and also worth noticing that you can't encapsulate these cascading layers of meaning in real time with rationality. You either allow them to happen or they don't. They won't be grasped.
Lewis Caroll is one of my favourite authors, I am currently rereading “Alice in Wonderland”, seeing a lot of strikingly deep remarks in it. Might consider reading something else of his as well
It's true, but I hate that more embarrassing sincerity is always required.
This was really great but tbh I am a bit dense and got a bit lost with some of the points lol, I think I need the one for morons that you mentioned
Great article. I think the challenge in any artistic endeavor is that you have to leave Gandalf's path of wisdom: You break the thing to see what it truly is. You reduce the wonder to technique. And then, somehow, miraculously, you find your way back to the path: You reintegrate the pieces into a whole that looks like it had never been broken. If what you create reignites your own wonder, chances are, it will ignite someone else's, too.
Wish I knew how the miracle part works.
I love the video game/speed runner hacks analogy in all this. Another that comes to mind is theatre. In college I took a semester course in theatre where I was doing tech. So lighting (which I mostly worked with, sound, props, and how they’re all programmed or “queued” to the stage events. At first, I thought seeing how all the “behind the curtain” stuff would make the play seem less magical. But once you see it all come together, it made the sense of awe and “magic” in the actual performance - with the understanding and appreciation for all the technical intricacies I had a small part in building - more real and vivid, not less.
I don’t know that the “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” is necessarily/always true. But I do think it’s critical to recognize that the whole is a different thing than “just” the collection of its parts.