Escaping the Matrix of Disenchantment

When Morpheus attempts to explain to Neo “the truth” about the Matrix, Neo asks, very much in the spirit of Pilate, “What truth?” Morpheus tells him, “That you are a slave … born into … a prison for your mind.” Morpheus explains, “The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” The notion that perception of reality is actually the flat grid of zeroes and ones of a computer program resonates with a generation eager to take the red pill and to escape the banal reality of a flat modernism.  To refer to it as “secularism” may miss the fact that this pervasive notion of reality is promoted by a religiosity which has succumbed, whether conservative or liberal, to a mind-numbing matrix.  Max Weber, in tracing the rise of a capitalistic/secular mode of valuation described it as the “disenchantment” of our world.  He lays the blame for this disenchantment, and with it the rise of secularism, on Protestant theology.  Continue reading “Escaping the Matrix of Disenchantment”