The Reason We Try So Hard to Escape Modern Life

[00:00:12]As a child you lived in an enchanted world. You were sure superheroes were real. Maybe you waited for your letter from Hogwarts long after it was due. Or you wondered when you might wake up one day in a hobbit hole in the Shire.

[00:00:24]Somewhere that just felt a little more real than your actual world.

[00:00:28]Gradually education and ordinary life weaken that sense of wonder. Mechanism and probability gave us a tidier but somehow smaller picture of reality. The world became ordinary and everything got a reductive explanation. C.S. Lewis noticed something about that loss in his book The Discarded Image, a study on the medieval mind.

[00:00:47]When the modern man looks at the night sky, Lewis says, he feels like he's looking out into a void that has no interest in him.

[00:00:54]The medieval man felt the opposite. He was looking in towards something ordered and inhabited. He thought himself part of an ordered cosmos.

[00:01:03]The modern man sees himself adrift in a random universe.

[00:01:08]In 1917 Max Weber called this Entzauberung, disenchantment.

[00:01:13]He wrote, quote, "There are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play.

[00:01:18]One can in principle master all things by calculation.

[00:01:22]This means that the world is disenchanted."

[00:01:25]He was wrong about that being the end of the story, but the counter enchantment would come from some very unlikely places.

[00:01:32]Chesterton described the enchanted worldview better than anyone. In his book Orthodoxy he wrote, quote, "The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in the fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment.

[00:01:45]A tree grows fruit because it is magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched."

[00:01:55]Now that sounds like typical whimsical Chesterton and it is. But, behind the wit, there's always a real point. The fact that water runs downhill is not self-explanatory. We have gravity, of course, but gravity could have been a repulsive force instead of an attractive one at the formation of the universe.

[00:02:11]The rising sun every morning isn't inevitable. It depends on a very particular set of conditions that easily could have been otherwise.

[00:02:19]These ordinary wonders keep happening because causality exists at all.

[00:02:23]Because something keeps the universe in motion.

[00:02:26]The enchanted mind might fully understand probability and physics, but it doesn't see those things as the only decision-makers in the universe.

[00:02:34]It leaves room for creator, for some mystery, for a story. And that leaves room for wonder.

[00:02:40]When we experience the world as intentional and meaningful, we keep asking why. A purely mechanical world eventually has to ignore that question.

[00:02:48]If everything reduces to blind process, the why never really gets answered.

[00:02:53]In the medieval world, this enchanted sensibility showed up everywhere.

[00:02:57]In the church's teaching, in fables, and folklore, but also in less respectable places, village healers, superstitions, and those believed to be meddling in dark arts.

[00:03:07]The church wasn't the source of everything supernatural, but it was the institution that discerned between what was holy, what was harmless, and what was dangerous.

[00:03:16]However, when you look at the church's relationship with the miraculous, you find something most people don't expect.

[00:03:22]Despite common assumptions, the church has always been its most rigorous skeptic when it comes to miracles.

[00:03:28]It built an entire apparatus, canonical investigations, medical review boards, waiting periods that stretch for decades, specifically to separate genuine miracles from wishful thinking, coincidence, and fraud.

[00:03:40]The tradition of discerning spirits codified in the ritual Romanum was designed to distinguish authentic supernatural events from natural ones, and when necessary from demonic counterfeits.

[00:03:51]Sacramentals like holy water, blessed metals, and relics gave ordinary Catholics daily reminders that the world is more than mere matter.

[00:03:59]Catholic enchantment was disciplined, not a free-for-all for overactive imaginations.

[00:04:05]The evidence for one outstanding miracle is worth a brief look, even for the non-religious, so you know that there's more than a hallucinating priest or two involved in these miraculous events.

[00:04:16]In October 1917 at Fatima, Portugal, three peasant children had predicted that a public miracle would happen at a specific time and date. About 70,000 people gathered in heavy rain, including a senior correspondent for Portugal's largest secular newspaper, who had mocked the predictions beforehand in print.

[00:04:34]He filed an eyewitness account describing the sun spinning, changing color, and plunging toward the earth. It ran on the front page the next day.

[00:04:41]The editorial staff of an anti-clerical newspaper had no interest in confirming a Catholic miracle. They simply reported what their correspondent saw.

[00:04:50]There are many more such cases: the strange life of Padre Pio, the miraculous healings at holy sites and Marian apparitions, and Eucharistic miracles like that of Lanciano, where a host transformed into human cardiac tissue in the 8th century, and was confirmed by scientific examination in 1970 to be real flesh after 1,200 years.

[00:05:09]But the point here isn't to make an apologetic argument, though that's certainly worth thinking about. The point is simply that these things happened, were reviewed by professionals, and couldn't be explained by ordinary means.

[00:05:21]Perhaps you could chalk it up to a defective scientific understanding, but that will always be the case. We'll never understand everything.

[00:05:28]Science explains the ordinary, not the extraordinary. And that gap is exactly where this enchantment idea lives. The world keeps behaving as though it were enchanted. So maybe there really is still a story to humanity that we were too quick to set aside.

[00:05:44]But how did we get here? From an entire civilization that assumed enchantment to one that mocks it.

[00:05:51]Disenchantment didn't arrive overnight.

[00:05:53]It was torn out piece by piece over several centuries.

[00:05:56]The iconoclasm of the Reformation was its most visible starting point. The reformers removed statues, relics, and physical religious objects from churches and public spaces. Their theological stance was that objects carried no sacredness, and that images risk becoming idols.

[00:06:12]Now, whether or not you agree with that, the practical effect was the same. It stripped the physical world of its spiritual weight. It began a process of de-spiritualizing what had been sacred signs, and that was the first major step in disenchanting the Western world.

[00:06:26]Once the physical marks were gone, the philosophers stepped in. Descartes proposed throwing out all knowledge that couldn't be logically deduced, leaving him with just one fact: I think, therefore I am.

[00:06:39]The problem is that Descartes assumes deduction is the only path to knowledge, which entirely dismisses perception.

[00:06:46]But perception came first. Gravity was felt long before Newton described it mathematically. Descartes cast doubt on everything we perceive directly, and that was a major blow to any sense of a world charged with mystery.

[00:06:59]As the Enlightenment unfolded, the mechanistic picture kept gaining ground.

[00:07:03]Planetary motion was predicted with precision, chemistry emerged from alchemy, calculus transformed our ability to describe nature mathematically.

[00:07:11]It all pointed toward a universe governed by formulas, leaving little room for anything that couldn't be expressed that way.

[00:07:18]Max Weber watched this reach its conclusion at the turn of the 20th century and was troubled by it. His iron cage was a warning, the trap of a world fully rationalized and drained of meaning.

[00:07:29]And yet, just when rationalism seemed to have won, when Nietzsche declared God dead and communism was building its godless utopia, the enchanted world mounted a comeback.

[00:07:40]A wave of discoveries transformed Newtonian physics in just a few decades.

[00:07:44]Science was humbled by its own findings, and the door to an enchanted view of the universe cracked back open.

[00:07:51]Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, among many others, described the bizarre world of subatomic behavior with precision, while remaining unable to explain what an observation actually is, or why particles behave differently under seemingly identical conditions.

[00:08:06]Quantum physics, for most people, sounds a great deal more like magic than science. Its particles have names like quarks, leptons, and gluons.

[00:08:16]We understand many of its interactions only in terms of probabilities, not underlying causes.

[00:08:21]Why should the world at its smallest scale be governed by probability at all?

[00:08:25]It sounds like what a limited intellect might conclude about the actions of a limitless intellect.

[00:08:32]General relativity brought about its own surprises. It models gravity at the cosmic scale, but leaves entirely open what gravity actually is at its roots, and how it connects to the other forces of nature.

[00:08:43]Special relativity suggests time itself can be experienced differently depending on your frame of reference, much like how Christian philosophers have long claimed that God stands outside time entirely.

[00:08:55]And it gets stranger. String theory and multiverse cosmology, among the leading proposals for a unified theory of the universe, posit entire dimensions and parallel universes that cannot be observed simply because the math of a single tangible universe keeps coming up short.

[00:09:10]They're fine with the idea of infinite universes, but not with the idea of heaven.

[00:09:15]The scientists who insist that we abandon the invisible has ended up posing more invisible things than the medieval theologians ever did.

[00:09:24]The world that was supposed to become fully calculable turned out to contain at its foundations things that defy classical explanation.

[00:09:31]Weber's iron cage, it turns out, has no ceiling.

[00:09:35]But it wasn't just science that pushed back against the disenchanted world. The most serious literary response came from two Oxford professors who felt the flatness of modern life and refused to accept that life has no story.

[00:09:47]That's J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

[00:09:51]Many of us know that Middle-earth somehow feels more real than our world sometimes. And Tolkien understood something of why that is. In his essay on fairy stories, he proposed that the human artist participates in God's creative act by making secondary worlds that reflect the primary one.

[00:10:08]But, truly great stories like The Lord of the Rings go further in that they distill those true aspects of the real world into a cohesive story.

[00:10:16]The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were Tolkien's means of re-enchantment, written in the aftermath of the 20th century's peak of mechanistic thinking.

[00:10:24]It gave back to us a world full of story, clearly divided by good and evil.

[00:10:29]Middle-earth feels more real than our world because it makes plain the unseen forces we already sense to be real. The weight of history, the reality of evil, the existence of things worth dying for.

[00:10:41]Lewis worked the same project from a different angle.

[00:10:43]Through his space trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Discarded Image.

[00:10:48]He mourned the loss of the medieval worldview because it was that confidence in a meaningful world that allowed humans to flourish, not just physically, but inwardly, too.

[00:10:57]The mechanistic world can sustain the body, but it can't sustain the soul.

[00:11:02]Together, Tolkien and Lewis put the flag of enchantment back on solid ground for millions of people wondering what had happened to the mystery of the world they experienced as children.

[00:11:12]Chesterton, a major influence on both Tolkien and Lewis, was less shy about connecting the dots to religious belief.

[00:11:18]He wrote in Orthodoxy, quote, "I had always believed that the world involved magic. Now, I thought that perhaps it involved a magician."

[00:11:27]The question was never really whether the world contains wonder. It clearly does, in the unexplained corners of science, in documented miraculous healings, in religious experience across centuries and cultures.

[00:11:39]So, why did the world feel more enchanted when you were young? Really two reasons.

[00:11:44]First, you didn't limit yourself to only what you could explain. Children live comfortably in a world that they don't fully understand. And that's really the right frame of mind, even going into adulthood.

[00:11:54]As adults, we can recover some of that by simply being honest in that we don't know everything and we can't know it all.

[00:12:00]And in that space is where the enchantment lives.

[00:12:04]And secondly, we believed ourselves to be part of a story as children. But somewhere along the way, through disappointment of the blandness of ordinary life, many of us stopped believing that.

[00:12:14]The most important step toward recovering that enchantment is finding your story again. Finding the mission, the cause, the noble pursuit worthy of your life, and going after it.

[00:12:24]Now, I believe the desire for enchantment is answered best in the church, founded on the very myth that became fact.

[00:12:30]I think the enchantment we felt as children was a prelude to pointing us toward that ultimate story that all are invited to live out.

[00:12:37]Middle-earth felt real because Tolkien built it on the idea that the world is a storied and purposeful place.

[00:12:43]And that is open to the unexplainable.

[00:12:45]And our world genuinely is unexplainable. We have miracles across centuries, documented well into the scientific age.

[00:12:53]We have forces in the universe our best instruments can detect but not explain.

[00:12:57]The world is still enchanted. And like Middle-earth, our world is full of things that ought to make us pause and wonder.

[00:13:05]Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, give it a like and subscribe to follow our content. And if you'd like to support us in a deeper way or simply enjoy reading, check out our Substack where we write about history, religion, and culture.

[00:13:17]I'm Christian from Thinking West. Until next time.

[00:13:27]>> [music] >> Hey.