Linked are a meme and post articulating this concept https://imgur.com/gallery/rjm8j6v
My background is actually in the history of industrialization and history of consumption but I had not read about his concept before.
I tend not to think of the enlightenment movement as being “anti magic” and more as a revival of certain farmings and modes of philosophical thought attempting to recenter intellectual though away from the church.
It seems as though the church was anti “magic” long before the enlightenment movement and well before the establishment of capitalism.
Also interesting that these posts do not distinguish between indigenous religious practice and European religious practice.
Am I off here? This concept seems very anachronistic but I wanted to get the opinion of a medieval historian or perhaps somebody with a background in the history of religious movements.
Glancing at this, it seems to me that this could be a referring to the idea of rationalization, which I can start describing in the early 1900s with Max Weber. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Weber argues that supernatural belief has been replaced by the rational belief in the concrete improvement of one's condition in the world through the acquisition of capital. This "Protestant work ethic" is rooted in the belief that those who toil humbly have the blessing of God and that this blessing is expressed through economic success. In other words, it connects holiness with material diligence. Work and capital became the defining marks of morality, and our relationship with the means of production becomes the fundamental relationship in our daily lives.
Weber argues that the "spirit of capitalism" strips us of our belief in the world as an enchanted place. He describes a move from literal naturalist belief (such as pre-industrial people have when they consume flesh to gain power) to a symbolic belief (such as we find in myths) to the rise of rationalist belief. He calls this "disenchantment." (It's worth noting that Weber's ideas have been questioned by Jason Josephson Storm, who points out in his book The Myth of Disenchantment the tremendous popularity of the occult and magic in the exact time Weber was writing.)
If you're curious, I would point you to another landmark book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. They identify the European Enlightenment as the key time that this shift took place. Adorno and Horkheimer, writing during the Second World War, used as a starting point the Marxist hope that enlightened reason would lead to the universal emancipation of the proletariate. Instead, they write, it has led to the loss of myth and the rise of fascism. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, we have created mass culture whose purpose it is to ensure mass society remains in place, yoked to a capitalistic system. In their reading, this becomes a circular process: we recreate a system of blind belief very similar to the one that we supposedly just left.
I don't know how much more detail to go into, since I don't know if your post is even referring to these theories, but I'd be happy to if there is interest.
I have a question:
The first text cites the Inquisition as an agent of eradicating magic thought, but the catholic church holds an equal amount of scientifically unfounded beliefs. Why would one unfounded belief system be obstructive to capitalism when the next one isn't?