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Rationalization and the Disenchantment of the World
The intellectual history of totemism includes: charges of irrationality and erroneous thinking hurled at the primitive, the acknowledge incomprehensibility of totemism to academicians, unresolved debates, and ambiguous scholarly theories.
The muddle-headedness occurred because the scholars failed to comprehend the inherent limitations of Western rationality.
All this needs to be seen in light of rationalization (in Max Weber’s sense), which has been a dominant process in the development of Western civilization. Totemism must be understood in opposition to rationalization. Totemism incorporates magical interconnections. Rationalization entails the elimination of magic and severs magical interconnections (in reality, only the conscious aware of them).
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Just because totemism is “irrational” does not mean that it was maladaptive. On the contrary,
it survived for thousands of years. Most cultures did not rely upon our science and logic. Their success should make us examine our prejudices regarding the rational. Western logic
requires entities to be discrete, separate, distinct, differentiated. We assume a
clear distinction between subject and object. The primitives did not; they understood themselves as
mystically connected to the cosmos. They participated in it. (The issue of participation also arises in conjunction with reflexivity, a source of paradox for Western logic.)
For social life, there must be shared assumptions, symbols, and meanings. Rationalists assume an objective reality exists and that it provides the required foundation. It is assumed that the objective world is independent of our representations of it - that
representations (e.g., thoughts) do not affect it directly. The scientific enterprise accepts and upholds these ideas. Admittedly they usually produce a good, first-order approximation of reality.
But they don’t always apply. The practice of magic and the data of parapsychology demonstrate that fact.
The agenda of rationalization faces an almost insurmountable problem - the serious study of magic has a magical influence.
Thus the disenchantment process must eliminate not only magic, but also serious consideration of it. A number of techniques have been developed to assure that it remains marginalized and outside the awareness of academe.
Freud linked magic to the infantile and the neurotic, and his followers aggressively promoted that view. In our society, “magical thinking” is disparaged, and it is now used as an epithet by debunkers to discredit those who show an interest in the paranormal.
Such belittling discourages use of magic by status-conscious persons.
Anthropologists writing about early cultures face a problematic situation. Without a doubt, totemism can justifiably be called irrational. But to make that explicit leaves one open to charges of ethnocentrism or even racism.
Today the designation “irrational” is considered derogatory, and those who wish to instil a neutral or positive attitude toward primitive societies find it is easier to ignore the problems posed by totemism and magic. Those are seen as remnants from a superstitious past, embarrassments, and best forgotten in the effort to increase the respect for earlier peoples. However, scholars who ignore the issue
come to believe that they hold an unbiased view of the primitives, but they are blinded by their own beliefs. At least the ethnocentrism of Frazer was overt.
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A vast number of academics who write on magic today are not only unable to grasp it, but unlike the earlier commentators, they do not realize their failure.
They almost universally ignore or deny the intrinsic efficacy of magic (i.e., psi). It is problematic, and merely thinking about it
raises their anxieties. Making this explicit is, of course, not welcomed by those who have devoted their careers to fostering rationality. As such, it is unreasonable to expect academe to explore totemism much further. Nevertheless, some progress can be made with structuralist methods.
I do not wish to make academic science a scapegoat for the sins of rationalization, and it would be wrong to attribute the problems solely to that quarter. As I explained earlier, similar trends are seen in much of religion. Mainline liberal Protestant Christians may profess
a belief in miracles, but ones that happened long ago and far away. The miraculous is placed at a distance. Even Rudolf Otto’s writings show some leeriness toward supernatural phenomena. Both establishment science and orthodox exoteric religion display the same trend.
One can only conclude that the roots of rationalization, the downplaying of miracles and mysticism, must be far deeper than just ideology and belief. They are inherent in the structure of our society.
The primitives’ taboos against contact with
supernatural forces are with us still, though in veiled form.
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