Where does hope come from?
It’s probably hard-wired, the result of an evolutionary process. A creature with hope is less likely to give up and more likely to raise offspring, thus passing down an ability to find resilience in the face of change.
Disenchanted has come to mean something different from its original usage.
Today, we’re “disenchanted” when we’ve fallen out of love with a person, product or situation. Marketers seek to create customer delight, and when they fail, customers become disenchanted and fade away.
But that’s not what Max Weber meant when he wrote about Descartes.
Until just recently almost everything that happened was enchanted. Magical spirits kept us alive, kept the sun rising and falling and gave rise to the voice in our head.
When we didn’t understand, hope drove us to imagine enchantment all around us. And that hard to measure spirit force responded by giving us hope.
As neuroscientists and philosophers began to explore the idea of consciousness and that voice in our head, they helped us understand that the brain, like everything else in our knowable world, is mechanical.
The refrigerator isn’t magic. Electricity, pumps and gasses keep things cold. And our brain runs on neurons, not magic.
We’ve disenchanted just about everything that’s worth taking a hard look at.
For many people, this has stripped away much needed hope.
Perhaps disenchantment (and the desire for hope) is primarily responsible for the rise in make-believe ideas about how the world works, nonsensical medical interventions and the diminished role of facts in decision making.
When we allow others to manipulate us with their magical stories, though, we’re often setting ourselves up for a collision with reality.
