"Max Weber's Polytheism If you bought this book--as opposed to begging, borrowing, or stealing it--there is a good chance that you bought it from Amazon, which has made the purchase of nearly anything fantastically easy. You simply make a few clicks in avirtual environment, and the product appears on your doorstep, like magic, within a day or two. If you have the money, almost anything from anywhere in the world can be summoned out of thin air to materialize at your home. The material world can be experienced thus as magical, but this experience is hard to square with even a cursory examination of the ruthlessly efficient international network necessary to make such deliveries work. When Max Weber wrote about the rationalization of modern Western society over a hundred years ago, he could not have foreseen the lengths to which such rationalization has been taken in an Amazon warehouse, or "fulfillment center." There poorly paid "associates," who are often temporary workers with few benefits, scurry among the bins retrieving and packing just about anything that can be imagined. A handheld device keeps track of their movements. It directs them to the next item to pick, and a timer starts: 14 seconds to scan in the next item four aisles over, for example. The device warns them if they are falling behind, and keeps track of their pick rate. Falling behind, calling in sick, and other offenses can cost a worker their job, so some "associates" have resorted to urinating in bottles to avoid taking bathroom breaks. In January 2018 Amazon received patents on a wristband that can track a warehouse worker's arm movements. Responding to the negative reaction, an Amazon spokesperson presented the wristband as a liberating boon for workers: "The speculation about thispatent is misguided... This idea, if implemented in the future, would improve the process for our fulfillment associates. By moving equipment to associates' wrists, we could free up their hands from scanners and their eyes from computer screens." In the Amazon warehouse, Weber's melancholy description of the "iron cage"--a heartlessly efficient mechanized modernity--seems fully vindicated"--
In The Uses of Idolatry, William T. Cavanaugh offers a sustained and interdisciplinary argument that worship has not waned in our supposedly “secular” world. Rather, the target of worship has changed, migrating from the explicit worship of God to the implicit worship of things. Cavanaugh examines modern idolatries and the ways in which humans become dominated by our own creations.
While Cavanaugh is critical of modern idolatries, his argument is also sympathetic, seeing in idolatry a deep longing in the human heart for the transformation of our lives. We all believe in something, he argues: we are worshipping creatures whose devotion alights on all sorts of things, in part because we are material creatures, and the material world is beautiful. Following an invisible God is hard for material creatures, so we-those who profess belief in God and those who don't-fixate on things that are closer to hand.
Ranging widely across the fields of history, philosophy, political science, sociology, and cultural studies, Cavanaugh develops an account of modernity as not the condition of being disenchanted but the condition of having learned to describe the world as disenchanted. For a better description of the world, Cavanaugh turns to scriptural, theological, and phenomenological accounts of idolatry as inordinate devotion to created things. Through deep explorations of nationalism and consumer culture, The Uses of Idolatry presents a sympathetic but critical account of how and why we sacrifice ourselves and others to gods of our own design.
Through deep explorations of nationalism and consumer culture, The Uses of Idolatry presents a sympathetic but critical account of how and why we sacrifice ourselves and others to gods of our own design.
