Recovering enchantment: addiction, spirituality, and Charles Taylor’s malaise of modernity

ABSTRACT

This article illuminates the nature of ‘spirituality’ as it relates to addiction in modernity. It does so by using philosopher Charles Taylor’s conception of the malaise of modernity and the meta-narrative he presents in A Secular Age as theoretical starting points. It then draws from qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Canadian millennials who self-identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’. The young people’s experiences of addiction provide insight into the trappings of free-market capitalist modernity and its inability to provide an overarching source of meaning to their lives. Addiction becomes the means by which these individuals experience the malaise of modernity, which in turn leads them to seek an alternative understanding of the good life—a process they equate with ‘spirituality’. Therefore, an interest in ‘spirituality’ ought to be understood as a personalized attempt to re-enchant what is experienced as a disenchanted world.

KEYWORDS:

• Spirituality
• addiction
• Charles Taylor
• disenchantment
• modernity

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank James Miller and Fraser Watts (no relation) for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am also indebted to the two anonymous referees of the Journal of Contemporary Religion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In Diagnostic and Statistical of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—the authoritative volume of the American Psychiatric Association which classifies mental disorders—what are colloquially called ‘addictions’ are now classified as ‘Substance related and Addictive disorders’. However, I use ‘addiction’ in this article because it is the term most often used by the participants of my study.

2. It remains true that there exist individuals who are recovering from addiction that do not identify as ‘spiritual’. Nevertheless, my focus in this article is to make sense of why the notion that addiction is ‘spiritual’ continues to resonate with modern individuals.

3. I recruited participants in the following ways: I created an online recruitment notice, which I disseminated by e-mail and across various social media platforms. From Queen’s University I received two random student e-mail address samples, each consisting of 1,200 e-mail addresses in total, comprising both undergraduate and graduate students belonging to a wide range of departments. I posted the recruitment notice to various groups on Facebook and Meetup.com and spread the details via the multiple e-mail list-servs of a number of humanities and social science departments at Queen’s University. I created an online questionnaire, a link to which was included in the online recruitment notice. This questionnaire became the primary means by which I found interview participants as, once the questionnaire was completed, individuals were asked if they were willing to participate in a face-to-face interview. I placed hard-copy recruitment posters across the campus of both Queen’s University and University of Toronto. I conducted, recorded, and transcribed all the interviews. Lastly, I engaged a snowballing method, asking research participants to recruit friends and acquaintances they thought would be interested in taking part in the research.

4. This should not be surprising, as Robert Fuller argues that Alcoholics Anonymous, the original Twelve-Step program, “is largely responsible for the widespread popularity of the phrase, ‘spiritual but not religious’” (2001, 112)

5. This is not to suggest that they are identical. Nor do I mean to imply that all AA members speak about ‘spirituality’ in the same way. However, my focus in this article is to identify the discursive similarities both within and beyond AA.

6. Whether disenchantment has its origins in the early modern period, as Weber suggested, or in the late modern period remains open to debate. For the purpose of this article it makes little difference when precisely the process began, so long as it is acknowledged that it did in fact occur.

7. This is not to say that the buffered self necessarily entails free-market ideology, only that the latter relies on the former for legitimacy.

8. What Alexander calls ‘psychosocial integration’ is, although similar, in some way distinct from Taylor’s understanding of enchantment. For instance, I take Alexander to describe a purely psychological state rather than an ostensibly ontological or metaphysical one.

9. All names referring to participants in this study are pseudonyms.

10. Roy Baumeister interestingly suggests that masochism is, rather than a pathology in modernity, a quite natural and normal response to it. His theory, although certainly related to my own, is nevertheless distinct (see Baumeister 1988).

11. I am not endorsing a crisis-driven account of spiritual conversion. I remain agnostic as to whether this life change was the result of a sudden crisis or rather a gradual process. For more on this debate, see Marina (2016).

12. This is a finding that is arguably made less remarkable in the light of the fact that both accounts have their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

13. For this reason, whether these discourses are socially constructed or not is basically irrelevant.

14. Indeed, the Romantic movement represented one attempt to recover enchantment while being wedded to a materialist ontology.

Additional information

Funding

The research on which this article is based was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Galen Watts

Galen Watts is a PhD Candidate in the Cultural Studies Graduate Program at Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada, studying the social and political implications of spirituality.