VDare: John Derbyshire Detects The De-Sacralization (At Last!) Of Immigration Policy - "Immigration wasn’t just a policy: it was a sacrament. To ask questions about it was to pry into divine mysteries. That seems to be no longer the case."

John Derbyshire Detects The De-Sacralization (At Last!) Of Immigration Policy

I see that the good people of Iceland, or at any rate some of them, are returning to their old religion.

Icelanders will soon be able to publicly worship at a shrine to Thor, Odin and Frigg with construction starting this month on the island’s first major temple to the Norse gods since the Viking age.

[Iceland to build first temple to Norse gods since Viking age;The Guardian, February 2, 2015]

This is probably a sign of something or other, though I am not sure what. It brought to my mind an effort I made some years ago to understand the rationalization theories of pioneering sociologist Max Weber.

My effort wasn’t very successful. I really have no head for abstract philosophizing, and whatever points I may have grasped have slipped away with the passage of time.

I do recall, though, that Weber made much of the notion ofdisenchantment when describing the historical development of religious belief. The word is actually more expressive in the German original: Entzauberung.

Zauber is the German word for “magic”; ent- signifies a downgrading or abandonment; so Entzauberung is a de-magicking—or perhaps more accurately, de-sacralizing.

The colorful gods of ancient Europe had had their magic stripped away when monotheism came up, said Weber. More recently, the triumphs of science had sucked the magic out of monotheism, leaving us in a disenchanted world of secular rationalism.

(My dim and fragmentary recollections of Weber’s arguments should by no means be relied on as authoritative. If you want to have a go at Weber yourself, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a 10,000-word article on him. Enjoy!)

Perhaps those Icelanders are looking for some re-enchantment, if only in the rather watery, apologetic style of modern Western religiosity. The Guardian reports:

Iceland’s neo-pagans still celebrate the ancient sacrificial ritual of Blot with music, reading, eating and drinking, but nowadays leave out the slaughter of animals.

Whether or not they are seeking re-enchantment, dis-enchantment is sometimes to be welcomed. Words have power—magic—and sometimes they have so much of it that we can no longer discuss rationally the things they refer to. ...

http://www.vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-detects-the-de-sacralization-at-last-of-immigration-policy?stf=the%20time%20p