I admit that, as one among a loosely-affiliated group of scholars who, for some years, has been working at a wide variety of sites to introduce greater self-reflexivity to the academic study of religion, it came as a bit of a surprise to me to read an introductory claim that, “to my knowledge there has never been a serious previous attempt to work out a reflexive religious studies” (13). For despite thinking that his second book, Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment, is important—and to be clear, I think that it is—the rhetoric of novelty and thus disruption in a book focused in such detail on the role played by these very same rhetorics in the invention of the ill-defined entity called “modernity” (is it an attitude? an historical period? a set of relations or modes of production?), was, at least for this reader, rather ironic, prompting me to wonder just how far self-reflexivity can go. For this book, like his first (The Invention of Religion in Japan [2012]), strikes me as nicely exemplifying the work of the above-mentioned group,Footnote ¹ whose works are more or less interested in the way that classification systems, when implemented in concert with overt political and economic power, make certain sorts of social worlds possible. (Or, as elaborated on the page cited above: “The first insight of reflexive religious studies is that the social scientific study actually reverberates in the religious field, revitalizing and even producing religions”—though many who have written much on the topic might fine-tune this to suggest that the so-called religious field does not predate the classifier’s gaze, to be affected or “revitalized” by it, but, rather, is continually constituted by it.) That this applies to far more than just the category of religion should be obvious, of course, for we could say much the same about race, gender, citizenship, etc. Because the category of religion has, however, been traditionally and rather uniformly employed as if it names something ahistorical, unique, and thus politically privileged, the task of exploring this thesis in relation to some people’s penchant for naming things religious (or not) has become a particularly fertile research area for a growing number of writers. Far from being unique, this book extends this sort of critique not just to our common ideas of magic, superstition, and even science, but to the very idea that we are modern as well.

I therefore do not think it is much of a stretch to place The Myth of Disenchantment into this school of critical thought (though, curiously, I do not find the writing of others who work in this field frequently cited). As hinted just above, the book’s main concern—to historicize or provincialize what some take for granted as modernity’s disinterested stance with regard to its various subjects (in all senses of the term)—seems a direct and needed application of this critical method. After all, once we start to see such categories as religion, cult, or magic (not to mention myth) as rhetorical tropes, rather than as neutral descriptors, then any argument whose persuasiveness relies on the work carried out by such terms rightly catches our attention. This new book therefore joins this tradition by examining, by means of a re-reading of recent European intellectual history (more materialist, socio-political application would have been welcomed, by the way), a wide array of writers—from German philosophical precursors to the so-called modern, and from E. B. Tylor, James Frazer, and Aleister Crowley to members of the Frankfurt School and Logical Positivists—all of whose work is generally premised on the assumption that we moderns are privileged by being ironically distanced from the investments of the world around us, whether we call that distance objectivity or disenchantment.Think here of Keith Thomas’s well-known Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), whose Foreword’s opening lines (cited in an epigraph that opens Chapter 1 in the book under review) read as follows: “This book began as an attempt to make sense of some of the systems of belief which were current in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, but which no longer enjoy much recognition today.. . “ (22). In his close reading of the literature that frequently makes such claims, Josephson-Storm explores how the impression of the modern was in fact created by means of this repeated assertion of difference, mainly between what many now see as mutually-defining domains of religion and science, with their vague and shifting boundary often classified as superstition or magic—which, as with all cases of classificatory ambiguity, was seen as a threat to both primary domains. As it turns out, however, when we examine classificatory disputes a little closer, the seemingly significant gap between disallowed and allowed or between them and us, that is, those pre-moderns still in the grips of magical thinking and those moderns who have left such childish ways behind, is less of an empirical fact to be described and (as was argued in Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger back in 1966) more a rhetorical effect used to make possible a certain sort of social world, always to the benefit of some. For plenty of magic continues at the heart of the modern, despite the wide acceptance of the disenchantment thesis, from the continued popularity of astrology and numerous scholars’ private interests in esotericism and psychicalism, to the good luck charms and rituals by which we are all surrounded (“knock on wood”), not to mention the totems that help to regulate social life (from our national symbols to the identities linked to our sports teams and even corporations). In fact, calling the same things logos when it comes to our use of them is likely among the strategies to help persuade us that only so-called primitives have totems.

If I have accurately captured the book in this description—both a standard (i.e., accuracy) and an act (description), premised as it is on a distinction between fact and value (which, though once taken for granted, is re-examined here)—then while The Myth of Disenchantment certainly strikes me as helpful in its choice of where to apply this critical approach (i.e., historicizing the human sciences themselves), the critical approach itself, as I have already noted, is not as novel as the book initially leads its readers to believe. This suggests to me that the tendency to authorize by means of rhetorics of rupture and distance is not so easily overcome (something briefly signaled at the end of the conclusion of the book, to which I will return). For without being too artful in this short essay, it is not clear how the book itself would fare, given its stated interest in reflexivity, if this critical method were turned inward, in far more detail than the occasional asides and several disclosures of the writer’s personal or familial details. For the work seems intent on what is described as undermining a false narrative of disengagement and rupture while that very narrative seems necessary to make the argument succeed, if only because of its need to establish a critical and, dare I say, enlightened distance from its own subject matter, so as to tell us what is actually going on when people make claims about those systems of magical belief that they claim we have left in our distant past. At times, this contradiction is addressed in the book, such as when it is touched on briefly at the end, but it strikes me as needing a far more sustained treatment for, should this argument be correct (and, as I have already noted, in this genealogical world, I am unsure what criteria we will ever develop for judging such things as truth and accuracy), then what are we to do with this writer’s own claims about the past and the meanings of other authors’ texts?

My point is that while the argument strikes me as having merit (i.e., that our idea of modernity is a rhetorical effect), its premise, when taken seriously, seems inevitably to lead to a situation in which that merit can be judged to exist only because the writer and I may happen to share some extra-professional affinities and have read some of the same books. And so, in bringing down the myth of modernity, the book seems to undermine itself—and, along with it, the attempt to demonstrate just how false the narrative of modernity actually is.

Now, concerning this false narrative,Footnote ² we should consider not just the private preoccupations with ghosts that some well-known social scientists might have had. We should also juxtapose the often deployed notion of “magical thinking” with, say, David Hume’s well-known critique of causality, for then we arrive at the curious position of realizing that, if Hume’s argument is persuasive on this point, then it is magical thinking all the way down.Footnote ³ For (should Hume persuade us) all attributions of causes and effects are based merely on the observation of sequence and coincidence, making causality itself a mere idea that we use to interpret the world, inasmuch as it is the result of subsequent inference and not, as we generally seem to assume, a cold, hard fact that can first be observed and then described. Now, the curious thing here is that, as noted above, Hume’s skeptical critique is well-known, and, for many, rather convincing, yet the vast majority of us continue to work with a commonsense notion of causality, doing so throughout the sciences, not to mention our daily lives. We press the button and we might say that this makes the computer boot up. Simple as that—but, or so Hume might add, not really.…. And so it would seem that, as Bruno Latour says (as cited in the volume under consideration here), we have never been modern.

So far, then, I should say that I am certainly in agreement with criticism of the disenchantment thesis. But, thinking back to this notion of self-reflexivity, the “we,” who have never really been as modern as we tend to think, necessarily includes the books and essays in which such conclusions are reached—what does recognizing this lack of distanced privilege do to these arguments? For if this thesis is persuasive, then I am unsure of what to make of The Myth of Disenchantment itself. For if the gap between so-called pre-moderns and moderns, premised as it is on our supposed disenchantment with their outmoded magical thinking, is not so wide as we might like to think, then, in fact, recognizing this undermines the presumed authority with which we make pronouncements, not just on causes but also on such things as facts, let alone the past and other people’s intentions (our own as well?). For example, what is a reader to make of the opening words of the introduction (that I chose not to write “opening scene” but, instead, “opening words” should signal the trouble we might now be in): “Paris, 1907. Marie Curie sat in the sumptuous chambers of an apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.. . “ (2). For this description (and what, in light of the thesis under consideration here, do we now make of descriptions?) of a séance from over one hundred years ago—attended by a Nobel prize-winning scientist and facilitated by a psychic medium—to help establish the ambiguous relationship between science and magic, is authorized by a whole series of conventions and devices that have already been discussed in detail across the work of the late Hayden White. And so, once we realize that we might not be as modern as we think, these tropes start to look more like psychic mind reading and fantastical time travel than so-called modernist inventions of historiography or close reading of texts. To rephrase: White’s criticism of the distinction between writing fiction and writing history—think here of the role played by the un-ironic, omniscient narrator in setting what we will now just call a scene in those above-quoted lines—is likely as well-known to many as is Hume’s critique of causality (both being examples of the sort of trouble-making that graduate students in either history, on the one hand, or philosophy, on the other, are required to consider), but we all seem to forget it rather easily; and so we just get on with talking about what happened in 1907, as if we are disinterestedly floating atop the events. All of this brings to mind the move that many in our field make once they are released from their graduate program’s required method and theory courses, having read (and then also forgotten?) those famous lines from the late Jonathan Z. Smith concerning there being no data for religion. For the ease of relying on commonsense—i.e., that the past is an actual place we can describe for better or worse, let alone that there are causes and not just correlations and that religions do indeed exist, have component parts, and are divisible into various species and types—is not just too great, but (and here I am speculating, of course) it might actually be required of us just to get on with doing things in our day-to-day lives, like starting computers, writing books, and defending the positions that we take.

To come at this from a different direction, what are we to make—again, if the main premise of the book is persuasive—of such a seemingly mundane claim as this from Chapter 5, “The Decline of Magic: J. G. Frazer”: “In his attempt to refute the idea of primordial religions, Frazer turned to a set of ethnographies that supposedly described the most ‘savage’ of all living peoples” (142). Or, again, what of the following from Chapter 6, “The Revival of Magick: Aleister Crowley”: “An inveterate showman, Aleister Crowley actively cultivated controversy and cloaked himself in consciously manufactured myths” (156). For it seems to me that the long taken-for-granted (but now questionable) conditions of this modern world are what allow us not only to talk about the past in a confident narrator’s voice but also to ascribe motivations (let alone intended effects) to those things we have come to call authors or possibly even individuals (whether in the past or present). Now, it could be that writers making these critiques would reply that by Frazer or Crowley they mean only to signify an authorial effect produced by subsequent readers, such as themselves, and that writing this out in full each and every time they mention a body of literature is far too cumbersome, hence the use of what we might just term the surname shorthand or device. However, I am not persuaded that the critique is often this thoroughgoing. (Readers may note that this review is of the text that was mailed to this writer and not of an author’s ideas, beliefs, or motives.) For if it were, then might we not expect to see such qualifications as “supposed,” “ostensible,” or, as favored by journalists today, “alleged” being used not just when writing about those people once considered by earlier generations of scholars to be savage (i.e., “the so-called savages”) but also when we write about any supposed past situation let alone some posited authorial intention? For, after all (again, taking the book’s critique seriously), are not those just as artfully conjured into existence by readers as is anything else—regardless of the citations to yet other conjuring texts (i.e., so-called biographies and autobiographies) when making our claims about other people’s motives, meanings, and states of mind?

Now, if the reader whom I imagine to be going over these printed words interprets me as mocking the thesis of the book, then that is certainly not my aim (should you allow me to claim some degree of authorial intention, that is—but do you?!). Instead, as signaled at the outset, the importance of the critique rendered by the volume, as I see it, makes me all the more curious about how thoroughly we might embrace it and thus how far we can take it (“riding hell-bent for leather on one’s presuppositions,” as J. Z. Smith once put it in his little essay, “The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines,” which I have used as an Afterword for a introductory book of my own). Or, to put it a little differently, I am curious as to what might account for how, sooner or later, we always seem to drive straight past such critical turns, at least when it comes to the ways in which they eventually affect our own work. (I think here of how quickly critiques of essentialism are bracketed when what is now known as strategic essentialism is used in support of our causes.) For if the book’s closing lines are correct in stating that its writer has also been a disenchanting demythologizer, then this admission probably requires more from us than merely granting, as we read just a little later, that it is an interesting fact. For, more than that, this claim (rather than fact) potentially pulls the rug out from under the entire 411 pages of the edifice. What, exactly, is the middle position between disenchantment and enchantment that the book apparently hopes to occupy, the one from which assessments of others’ distortions can apparently be judged? Whatever it is, it, too, strikes me as a disengaged position that only a modernist might occupy.

But, in raising these criticisms, I have no interest to see it all crumble. For though always trying to be careful not to suggest to readers the correct way to understand the past, the actual or correct meanings of texts and actors’ intentions, or the proper way to unmask falsehoods (something I recall grappling with in my own first book, in which I already saw a need to, for example, retool the classic notion of ideology as a form of false consciousness—if, that is, my argument was to be consistent and convincing), my own interest in self-reflexivity has made these topics more than apparent for some time. In fact, it is on just these issues that recent work in our field turns to what is known as critical realism—which strikes me as an effort to recognize the importance of critique but guard against it going a little too far. And here we return to the issue: how far can—or better put, should—it go? Do I hold an unreasonable standard by identifying the magic of an omniscient narrator in the book’s opening lines, or does that apparently untroubled stance signal an inconsistency that undermines the argument being made—a shortcoming as self-defeating as the modernist realism seemingly needed to create the impression of a position from which one might go about unmasking the falsehoods of modernity (presumably to reveal the true nature beneath)? Or do we (as the closing lines seem to suggest) follow that other modern writer, Karl Marx, and conclude that it is simply indicative of the forever unresolved contradictions that reside at the heart of any system—modern or not?

I therefore close with a question or two that, I hope, elicit an answer or, better put, a meditation on the part of those who also recognize this book as making an important contribution to our efforts to rethink the rhetorical effects of classification systems. I offer them in the spirit of one who has contributed in some way to this larger project, and thus one who has frequently rebuffed the so-called positivist critics (and as one who works to demonstrate the problems of the critical realist approach).Footnote ⁴ For if we, as inevitably situated writers and speakers, seek to historicize our own conditions then how can we write or talk in any way other than those enabled by those self-same conditions? Keeping in mind the effort to theorize the certainty that has become the modern, must we relinquish it all to contestable rhetoric (“we merely exchange one tale for another,” as the last paragraph tells us [316]) or shift to an entirely different genre (and thus the banished poets re-enter the academy?), thereby making historicization as well as efforts to identify false narratives something rather different from what we often take them to be? And if such things as actors, causes, and pasts are no less the product of a magical thinking that yet (or perhaps inevitably) pervades our times—whether in our personal interest (as with many of the scholars examined in the book) or our professional careers—then how is such a position not an open invitation, as some have previously replied to recent postmodernist critiques of the field, for such a relativizing of the study of religion as also to (re)admit unbridled magical thinking into the academy (aka theology)?

After all, it is not difficult to find those who claim that since all modes of thought have assumptions and first principles then all should be equally welcomed; of course their “all” is usually limited to a specific set, to the exclusion of positions with which they disagree. Proponents of Creation Science try to use much the same argument to gain admission to high school science classrooms in the United States and are continually rebuffed by the Courts (relying, as they do, on such a modernist document as the U.S. Constitution). For if it is indeed narratives all the way down, then unless just some spells are authorized over others—a move that likely helped to constitute the modern as set apart in the first place—I am unsure why scholars need to continue to cite sources in footnotes, why we still aim to describe things accurately, why we should rely on peer review, why we ought to avoid fallacies in constructing our arguments, why we try to debate colleagues at conferences, or even why we should make arguments instead of just offering assertions. In other words, if we take the myth of disenchantment thesis seriously, then much is up for grabs.

So, yes, The Myth of Disenchantment is an important book, because the critique it exemplifies has now been honed well enough, and turned inward enough, to allow us to pose some very big questions about the intellectual and social conditions and effects of doing what we, as scholars, have long taken to be pretty ordinary things—like writing, reading, and reviewing books.