A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

modernity, Weber stressed over and over again, has been deserted by the gods.” 11
The rise of
governmental bureaucracy, the systematization of banking, law, medicine, and science and the
industrialization of the production process are all clear trajectories in nineteenth century America
and all spoke to an increasing dominance of rational systems. 12
But running alongside and, in
some ways, counter to this tendency was an effort to insert the sacred into this increasingly
dominant rationalist worldview.
The notion of “reenchantment” is common coin amongst postmodernists. It constitutes a
recurring element in the checklist used to delineate the postmodern condition. Weariness with
and increasing skepticism with rational systems of control lend themselves to the reemergence of
magical thinking and the relaxation of evidentiary standards, giving renewed play to faith,
dream, intuition, and other non-rational faculties. So the story goes. However, it is debatable
whether such a worldview ever fully quit the scene. The linked narratives that comprise this
dissertation tell part of the story of how the “irrational” survived the process of rationalization.
In the context of US culture in the latter half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
countervailing force to rationalization and the rising hegemony of the positivist worldview is not
so much reenchantment as it is a kind of neo-enchantment—a notion that requires some
explanation. The implied argument of the term neo-enchantment is that rather than a story in
which the sacred and/or irrational disappears or goes into hiding and then comes back
(reenchantment), it would be more appropriate to tell a story in which the sacred and/or irrational
undergoes a change in state or kind, in order to adapt to current conditions—a new enchantment,
re-tooled for the needs of the day. I should note here that both notions—the reemergence of the
11 Lewis Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Social and Historical Context (New York: Harcourt,
1977) 23.
12 For a classic overview of the professionalization of law and medicine in the U.S., see Perry Miller, Life of the
Mind in America (New York: Harcourt, 1965).
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