We have made remarkable progress in measuring what we still don’t understand.
Immense powers of calculation, prediction, communication, and control shape daily life through systems few can explain and none fully command. Data passes for knowledge. Efficiency grows, information multiplies, manipulation becomes easier.
We count steps, rank schools, rate drivers, track sleep, measure productivity, sort people into profiles, and let algorithms decide what we want next. Pricing algorithms respond to market conditions and sometimes personal data. Usefulness becomes a lens for seeing. What has no apparent use is harder to notice.
Celebrities can even hire book stylists to select books for public appearances. The book need never be opened to serve its purpose.
In their 1947 classic Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno examined how reason’s promise of freedom turns into domination.
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment promised emancipation through reason. Yet intellectual and technological achievements repeatedly enabled new forms of domination. For Horkheimer and Adorno, modern barbarism arose not just when reason failed but from tendencies within reason itself. The impulse to classify, calculate, and use everything risks making control an end in itself.
A worker becomes a performance score, a patient a chart, a student a test result. A customer becomes a data point, a friend a contact. Each description captures something, but the trouble begins when the description becomes the person.
Reason, narrowed to a tool, asks how to achieve our ends more readily than whether they deserve pursuing. The problem is not thought, knowledge, or science but reason that sees reality mainly in terms of usefulness, prediction, and control.
The fear of the unknown hardens into what Horkheimer and Adorno call a “universal taboo” against whatever escapes calculation. “Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized”: the drive to eliminate mystery would leave nothing outside rational control.
We want the diagnosis before tests are complete, the political verdict before facts are known, the relationship defined before it has room to grow. Mystery begins to look like a defect to correct.
Hegel’s “cunning of reason” describes how people pursuing their own ends unwittingly serve a larger rational purpose in history. Our efforts to calculate and control can produce consequences no one intended or fully controls.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, myth already contains enlightenment, while enlightenment can return to myth. Nor did modernity abandon older enchantments. Some thinkers who helped establish modern science and the human sciences retained beliefs in magic, spirits, or occult forces. Disenchantment could become a convention of serious speech. Sounding disenchanted was not the same as being so.
We inhabited competing enchanted worlds, and still do.
We still hunger for meaning, belonging, deliverance, and something larger than ourselves. Technology does not erase these desires. They can attach to promises of technological salvation or perpetual self-improvement.
Japanese researchers are studying maemuki, a forward-looking mindset, using brain and bodily measurements alongside AI analysis. They are developing game-based approaches and investigating how bodily states relate to mental wellbeing.
Such research can be useful. But the hope invested in improvement can become something else. Technology can promise salvation. Even personal optimization can resemble devotion. One more app, metric, or improvement, and perhaps life will finally submit.
The desire for mastery does not eliminate enchantment. It gives enchantment new gods.
But there is a more intimate cost. Mastery does not simply change what we see. It changes us.
Approach the world chiefly through calculation, and fewer things can claim us except by being useful. Nature becomes inventory. Other people become assets or obstacles. Doing nothing is acceptable, provided it improves performance.
Anyone who has sat beside a dying person knows what escapes that account. So does anyone who has loved when love made no sense, forgiven when nothing could be gained, kept a promise after advantage disappeared, or stood before beauty without asking what it was good for.
Some things become visible only when mastery stops.
Material things, too, can carry meanings that possession alone cannot give them. A meal can display wealth or offer hospitality. Bread has uses we can calculate. Breaking it with someone can create a bond neither person controls.
We can be technologically sophisticated, scientifically accomplished, and still governed by myths we scarcely recognize as myths. The belief that we have outgrown myth may be one of them.
Enchantment has not simply vanished, nor is whatever exists ours to master. Horkheimer and Adorno’s warning still holds. Treat the world as mere raw material, and we begin to treat one another the same way.
We prefer puzzles. The world keeps offering mysteries.
Rilke urged patience with what remains unresolved: love the questions themselves, and perhaps, in living them, grow into an answer.
We can receive more from the world than we can demand of it—and see more than we’re looking for.
Notes and reading
Dialectic of Enlightenment—Horkheimer and Adorno’s foundational work on instrumental reason, mass culture, and modern domination profoundly shaped philosophy, sociology, political theory, and cultural criticism.
Progress—Modernity has brought longer lives, medical advances, expanded rights, greater security, and extraordinary scientific knowledge. The question is not whether progress is real, but whether greater power, efficiency, or control necessarily counts as progress.
The Myth of Disenchantment—Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm (2017) challenges the story that modernity displaced myth, magic, and spirits. He argues that modern culture and the human sciences remained deeply entangled with enchantment. (See also Peter Leithart, “We’ve Never Been Disenchanted,” Notes from Beth-Elim, February 19, 2026.)
Maemuki—Japan’s Moonshot research program studies the measurement and support of a constructive, forward-looking mindset. Its work includes AI-assisted analysis, physiological and behavioral indicators, and game-based support. It also investigates “negative capability”: the capacity to remain engaged with uncertainty and ambiguity.
Material things, too, can carry meanings that possession alone cannot give them—Rowan Williams describes material things as a “medium of gift, not instruments of control or objects for accumulation,” expressing a sacramental understanding of giving and receiving. Quoted in Eugene McCarraher, “We Have Never Been Disenchanted,” The Hedgehog Review 17, no. 3 (2015).
“Seeing the Hidden Dolphin”—Hannah Sachs, UCC Daily Devotional (November 11, 2016). “Have you ever tried to see a Magic Eye picture?”
G. K. Chesterton — “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” Tremendous Trifles, title essay (1909).
Editorial note: I sometimes use AI-assisted tools for proofreading, clarification, and revision. The ideas, judgments, and final wording remain my own.
