A few responses:
There seems to be some areas where we're just misinterpreting or talking past each other, and some where we actually disagree.
1) Chief among the first is a confusion between 'unenchanted' worldviews and what I'll call "secular materialism" -- the idea that only material objects exist, obeying strict physical laws, and all phenomena in the universe can be mechanistically explained in terms of them. I agree that many/most people tend to find secular materialism cold, lacking meaning, and isolated. But that's a rather different thing that the 'unenchanted' wordlviews we're talking about -- after all, the European Protestant society of the 1800's that Weber was talking about was not a hotbed of Dawkins-esque materialism. They didn't need to invoke spirits to make sense of day-to-day life, but they did have supernatural beliefs.
2) A disagreement: People don't have a "natural" tendency to dislike mechanical explanations and only accept anthropomorphic ones, I don't think. What they do have is a natural
ability to understand anthropomorphic ("enchanted") explanations. Here's what I think happens: We know human brains, like the brains of our primate relatives, are wired for understanding quite complicated social structures. (Nearly everyone can easily & immediately grasp the complex web of drama in, say, a soap opera; understanding how a motor or gravity works is quite a bit harder.) And one thing that we can all agree people
don't like is
not having an explanation for something. It's extremely difficult to be able to maintain a position of uncertainty in the face of an asserted explanation; we tend to accept the first plausible-seeming explanation we're given. So it's natural to expect that primitive human cultures, faced with a vast unknown world around them, would deal with it by inventing explanations of the only kind they knew -- anthropomorphic ones.
But this doesn't mean the mechanistic explanations are unsatisfying. Indeed, if that were really the case, we would expect the "unenchanted" worldview to be a freak aberration, limited to a tiny fraction of mankind. Yet that's not the case at all -- instead we see it spreading across the world. "Unenchanted" religions, like Weber's Protestanism and its offshoots, are making rapid inroads all across the world. No doubt at the edges some of this is these religions adapting by becoming a little more 'enchanted', but I don't think anyone would argue with the basic trend of things -- that a lot more people across the world hold "unenchanted" views now than they did in the 1800's.
A few more specific responses:
What do you mean by 'real values' or 'actual values'? I'm going to take a stab and guess you mean rational cost-benefit analysis, but you tell me.
Not at all; I just mean being able to make judgments according to how you value the real world. Let's say you're debating whether to cut down some trees to build your family a bigger/different home. There's various values that come into play here -- how much your family values what the home can give them, how much you value the comfort of your family, how much you value preserving the natural environment, how much you value having this type of tree nearby, etc. Even if they all know the basic facts of the situation, different people will come to different decisions here, because of differing values. Those would be different choices according to their actual values & judgment. But there's another way people could come to different decisions -- they could e.g. believe that the trees are the home to demons, who sneak out and night and cause disease and deformity. (Or the home to spirits, who would wreak vengeance on the destroyer of their homes.)
I think you misunderstand how pre-modern cultures develop the values, beliefs, and practices they do. They're not crazy or ad hoc at all -- they were developed over centuries of trial and error in a people's interaction with their natural environment, and over time became tailored to that particular community and that particular environment, such that they allowed for excellent management of resources on the local level. If not, both the ecosystem and the human community suffered, and without a change of human ways, both perished.
This is sheer Panglossian fantasy. Neither we nor primitive pre-modern cultures live in the best in of all possible worlds, where all beliefs & practices are for the best. And
not yet having wiped yourselves out in no way guarantees your beliefs & practices are humane, sensible, or nondestructive, let alone correct or excellent! It just guarantees they're not going to lead to your immediate extinction -- that leaves room to be pretty horrendous...
We have, for example: hereditary slavery, or slavery based on some visible characteristic. People being considered 'untouchable'/'unclean', with all the brutality and discrimination that implies. Ritual murder of babies: twins, or deformed babies, or the fruits of forbidden mating, for example. Forced mutilation of certain groups, such as foot-binding or female genital mutilation. The pointless slaughter of animals, or people, due to ritual uncleanliness (either because they were themselves considered unclean or to expiate some other uncleanliness) -- this is incredibly common. Murder of people who behave unusually, or have a different religion, or suffer from certian disorders, for "withcraft" or "sorcery." The sacrifice of captives from other tribes (often in grisly ways). The list of horrendous things people do because their "enchanted" worldview tells them the spirits or gods demand it goes on and on. People can come up with quite enough real reasons for commiting murder and atrocities; they don't need fantastical ones added on top of it.
And let's also note that environmental destruction isn't something foreign to "enchanted" cultures either: Easter Island is empty. Most of the worlds' megafauna went extinct just shortly after humans expanded into its habitat. The classical Maya more or less wiped out their civilization thanks to environmental destruction & warfare. Pre-modern cultures mostly lacked the power to alter their environment much, but you can find examples where they did. Obviously once you wipe out part of your environment once you can't really wipe it out again; but I'm not sure how that's useful.
I expect this kind of "it's necessarily perfect!" thinking applied to, say,
laissez-faire economics by free-market fanatics, but not applied to pre-modern cultures in general. The free-market nuts at least have a mechanism which they claim makes everything turn out for the best in their system. You don't even have that. People form beliefs and traditions for a wide variety of reasons; it's just absurd to think that they will magically turn out to be ideal or even good. Sure, you can assume most cultures you see still alive have beliefs
that won't immediately lead to their extinction -- but not ideal, good, decent, sane, excellent, or moral.
But as I just explained, many of them are correct, in that many of them have arrived at a set of rules for dealing with the natural world that do indeed get favorable results for both the natural ecosystem and the humans involved.
One other thing -- even if we lived in an alternate reality where this were true, that still wouldn't make those beliefs
correct, i.e.
true. This seems like a pretty basic point so I don't want to belabor it -- maybe you're using some weird definition of 'correct'? If I don't cut down the forest by my village because I believe it would cause the Forest Spirit to kill me, when in fact I wouldn't die but if everyone cut down the forest it would lead to eventual desertification and cause the village to be abandoned -- then my belief is not a true or correct one. It might be an adaptive belief, it might lead me to do the right thing from the POV of the village, but it's not a true one.
Taking it seriously, in this example, can allow someone to assess the place and value of a drug in their lives using the same mental machinations with which they assess the value of another person in their lives, without having to master the finer points of a whole new paradigm. This is very helpful, for example, to someone who has a keen eye for reading people, but knows nothing about chemistry or neuroscience.
How do people normally assess the value of anything in their life -- job, position, drug, relationship? Seems to me they go over how it's changed their life, how it makes them feel, what it does for them, what consequences it might present down the road for them, and so on. (What knowing chemistry & neuroscience could possibly have to do with this, I don't know.) That's what you're going to do regardless of whether you've got "enchanted" views, without thinking that drugs "are" in some sense conscious entities.
Now, what good does it do you to take this drug=person view seriously? You can't actually use skills to "read the other person," since of course
there is no other person there to read. You could go by how the drug makes you feel, and use your knowledge of people. Maybe it make you feel really good; you think, "wow, he/she really completes me, when we're together I feel like a million bucks... and then when we part I really miss him/her, I just keep thinking about the next time we'll be together." In the case of a person, this'd be a good sign, a sign you should try and catch the person and make something lasting of it. Needless to say, with a drug, things are rather different; it's a sign you need to stop using and get help.
The fact is that drugs (obviously!) aren't people. Making the mistake that they are is unlikely to help you, and likely to lead you down the wrong path. Now of course there's no problem with using metaphors from other areas to talk about them, but this is totally different from thinking they're something they're not.
But the things a drug does to me ARE similar to things other people have done to me. Framing something weird and unfamiliar in the terms of something familiar (myself and other humans), is just how we make sense of the world and our place in it.
I don't have any objection at all to framing unfamiliar things in terms of familiar things. That's perfectly normal and reasonable, and as long as we keep the limitations of the metaphor in mind, no problem at all. The problem comes when you go another step and take the metaphor too seriously (as more than a metaphor).
An example may help: sometimes we say crime is like a cancer in our cities. That's a fine metaphor, it illustrates some of the aspects of crime. But like any metaphor, it's just a metaphor: it normally only works for the aspects you picked it to work for. If you take it too seriously, and use it to get
new information about crime -- to tell you about aspects of crime you didn't already know (and choose the metaphor to fit) -- it's very likely to lead you astray. If I say, well, the important thing in fighting a cancer is to cut it all out before it kills us, and I apply that to crime, then my anti-crime strategy will be something like "ID and kill all the criminals before they kill us." Obviously this is a bad idea. And it's such a bad idea b/c crime is not in fact a cancer in your body: it's not just self-perpetuating but has outside causes, it doesn't spread until it kills everyone in society, etc. You can't use metaphors as a substitute for understanding & thinking.
ebola said:
A hypothetical individual acting and perceiving as a member of his 'culture' is an "ideal type". An ideal type functions as an analytical tool. It's what we'd expect someone to do given that they hold identified cultural schemata, approaching according ends purposively rationally except when culture dictates irrationality.
You're going to have to de-jargonify this if you want me to understand what you're trying to say. But it sounds like Weber is basically doing what I suspected -- he realized it was BS, but he really liked talking about cultural stereotypes, so he invented an imaginary 'ideal type' in order to fantasize about them in a fact-free zone.
