Do We Need to Re-Enchant the World?

On science, nature, and spirituality

The Grand Canyon from the Tanner Trail (photo by the author)

My first glimpse of the Grand Canyon: I was waiting for the Hermit Point shuttle bus near the top of the Bright Angel Trail. A few steps brought me to a low rock wall beyond which the trail plunged into Garden Creek, a tributary of the main canyon. Across that chasm, ten miles away, the North Rim rose higher than the spot where I stood, the striations of different layers of sedimentary rock looking like the proverbial layer cake, the early morning sun catching the buttresses of Buddha Temple and Zoroaster Temple in stark relief.

So far, so familiar, from countless postcards, magazine spreads, documentaries, and Colin Fletcher’s The Man Who Walked Through Time, which I’d read years before. I was well-primed to see exactly what I thought I was seeing — the colors, the bands of alternating reds and creams, the distance, the depth, the light. It might as well have been one of those picture postcards, except maybe for the very bottom of the canyon, where the river carved, out of sight, through the narrow blackness of billion-year-old schists in the Inner Gorge.

Then I caught my first glimpse of the river. Not at that overlook, because the river is hidden from that vantage. Probably from the bus out to Hermit Point where I planned to hike.

Now, the Colorado is by no means a large river, especially with its flow controlled by the reviled Glen Canyon Dam upstream. But from this perspective it looked tiny, little more than a creek. How could this puny flow have created everything around me? The answer, of course, one which I knew intellectually but had never truly felt, was time.

Suddenly the depth and the breadth of the place, in both space and time, hit me. It was like stepping through a portal in the space-time continuum to a place on an entirely different scale. The world opened up, and maybe even tilted a bit. I felt dizzy and was glad I was sitting down.

And there was something else: the canyon wasn’t just a dead thing laid out like a postcard, but a living, ongoing creation. The river and its tributaries that had created this place were still creating it, though in an altered fashion, thanks to that dam. I was witnessing creation at work.

That’s when the tears came. Which was a big surprise. It was probably the closest thing I’ve had to a religious experience. I’ll always remain sure of one thing: something in the canyon spoke to me that day.

It continued speaking to me as I hiked down the Hermit and then the Boucher Trail, every pinyon pine and cliffrose, every rock and every lizard, bearing their own messages. The canyon pulled me farther into it than was probably wise. (A welcome reminder of Herman Melville’s caveat: Romantic oneness with nature can get you killed.) I’d read about the foolish tourists — and even knew one of them! — who decided on a whim to hike to the bottom and back in one day, finding that their legs couldn’t carry them back out. After this experience I could hardly blame them. They were probably just answering a similar call.

Was this sense of communication something that came from the canyon? Or from inside my own head? Does it matter? What does seem to matter is the sense of reverence for the place, and for the ongoing creation of the universe, that became so palpable that day.

A Dead World?

This experience in the Grand Canyon depended on what I already knew about the place, much of it based in a scientific worldview. Which is why I am so often mystified by my friends and other writers who feel a scientific worldview leaves us in a dead, meaningless universe.

This lies at the heart of the mild debate discussion I’ve been having with

R. G. Miga

, a writer with whom I find much to agree (for instance: maybe I experienced the Grand Canyon as what he calls a hyperobject). My old grad school pal,

Janisse Ray

, gets at something similar when she talks about the empiricism and reductionism of science, although she admits that science itself is coming around to the view that forests are interacting, interwoven, cooperative systems, not just assemblages of competing species. Another new friend here on Substack,

Julie Gabrielli

, points to the same problems with Enlightenment rationality in this lovely essay about grieving for the ravages of our home and making space for other-than-human voices. And just last week, I read this piece from

Maximilian P Siddell

, making similar points. Like Janisse, he also sees value in particular branches of science.

I think all of these writers and I would pretty much arrive at a similar place, valuing both science and other varieties of knowledge and experience. None of them prompted this essay, but rather “The Re-Enchantment” by Peter Yates, who writes the

Towards Eudaemonia

newsletter. Again, I find much with which to agree in Peter’s essay. Yet his critique seems more aimed at technology than science itself, and at colonialism. Maybe those three things are inextricably bound together, but that’s a Gordian knot I can’t untangle here. I could say that it was a scientist — and a woman at that — who discovered the heat-trapping effects of CO2, while it took capitalist technologists and ongoing imperialism to induce that heat-trapping effect on a global scale. Peter does find some things in science worth saving, bringing up quantum physics as a clue that the universe might, in a sense, have its own consciousness. (So, yay for science!)

I’m sure that in the end, Peter and I would roughly agree on what’s worthwhile about science. But here’s my own take: I find that scientific inquiry actually increases the wonder and mystery of the universe, and I think many scientists would tell you the same. Every question answered produces ten more questions. The wonders never cease!

Let me put this another way: Have you ever looked up at the stars and thought, “the universe is a dead machine and even life here on Earth is meaningless”? No, neither have I. But apparently some people do, and I feel sorry for them. What I do feel when I look up at the moon and the stars: that sense of wonder, awe, and mystery that words like “wonder,” “awe,” and “mystery” can in no way capture. (Sublimity comes closer, but it’s a fusty, academic term.) And, as in the Grand Canyon, a feeling that something out there is speaking to me, even welcoming me. Is it God? I certainly wouldn’t put it that way. Something much more subtle and intangible.

Or here’s another way of putting it, in the words of Penelope “Moonglow” Himmelstein¹, from my novel, Ship of Fools. Penny and several other characters are in the Grand Canyon, marveling at an Anasazi granary high on the canyon wall, when the topic of Creationism comes up:

“I believe in something. I’m more of a Judeo-Buddhist-Eco-Pagan, to tell you the truth. I mean, when you look at all this” — she gestured out across the river far below to the cliffs of the Desert Facade opposite, and downstream to the temples and buttes of the inner canyon, the unbuttoned sleeve of her shirt falling back to reveal a yin-yang tattoo on her forearm — “and you think about all the different stories about how it came to be, the Anasazi here, and the Hopi just downstream, where their creation story says they emerged into this world, or the one that says it’s billions of years old and we all came from stardust… it’s all just a wonder and a mystery, isn’t it? I don’t stress out about who made it or how or when, but it just fills me with awe and respect, and it’s amazing to be part of it, you know?”

It's tempting here to go on a long defense of science and the scientific method. I’d probably wax elegiac about Johannes Kepler and how his discovery of the mathematical principles behind orbital motion doesn’t decrease the wonder of gazing at the heavens, but actually increases it. (My character Liz Dare says something similar in this Friday’s chapter of Ship of Fools.) Or I might ask, what do Darwin and two centuries of evolutionary science teach us, other than that animals are our brothers and sisters?²

But such a defense would be a mistake because: a) it’s too big an issue to unpack in one essay; and b) I’m in no way qualified to do it, since I’m just a novelist picking up random bits of philosophy and science here and there, like a magpie with a nest full of shiny objects (although, as it turns out, that’s another myth busted by science).

What’s more interesting: why do I have such an allergy to these critiques of science, even when they come from writers with whom I so often agree (and some whom I consider my friends)? And especially when some of their critiques seem so accurate? (If you want to see a “parts-is-parts,” reductionist approach to a forest, just look at treatment protocols in forestry, even plans meant to “improve biodiversity.” It’s a far cry from the kind of subjective feelings I have when I experience a true, functioning forest rather than a tree farm, which I wrote about here.)

The answer, of course, is that I’ve spent the last several years in the world of the flat-earthers, the moon-landing deniers, and (less so) the anti-vaxxers, as I’ve worked on my satirical novel. Actually, with the latter group, we might all end up in the world they want to push us into, one of increased polio, measles, and maybe a new bird flu. At a time when even the germ theory of disease is being discarded in some quarters, is it wise to bring up any foundational critiques of science?³

Maybe science is like the US Constitution. Sure, it could use some improvements, but do we really want to open that door, considering all the competing forces at work in this country, and the world, right now?

In the end, all I want to say is, let’s not throw the science out with the bathwater.

The Re-Enchantment of Me

I have to admit that experiences like the one I had years ago in the Grand Canyon have been few and far between this past decade or so. The obvious culprit is my family’s move to Michigan in 2011. The landscape here, while bucolic and sometimes even dramatic, is less inspiring than those “out west.” That (plus mosquitoes and summer humidity!) means we camp less, which means less stargazing. It’s a negative feedback loop. I shouldn’t blame it on Michigan, though. I really should be more in tune with nature in all its variety and subtlety, not just the sublime and the dramatic. I vow to do better!

Author and son at the Grand Canyon in 2005 (Hogue family photo)

This is the reason I needed R. G.’s reminders about the numinous side of existence — or as he’d say, metaphysics. It’s also the reason that, despite my goals when I began Ship of Fools — to defend science and lampoon anti-science quackery — something else kept creeping in. It’s why Penny kept occupying more and more space as a character. And it’s why Liz Dare’s journey, if you’ve been following along, is going to get very, very strange.

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Thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed this essay, please give it a like, a share, a restack, or a comment. And if you really enjoyed it, I hope you’ll buy me a coffee or upgrade to a paid subscription.

Come back on Friday for Chapter 15 of Ship of Fools, “Over the Line,” in which Liz finally runs out of patience for Sarge’s know-nothingism (and explains why Kepler’s three mathematical laws of orbital motion make the universe a more wondrous place).

1. If you’re reading along with the novel, you haven’t met Penny yet. But here’s a little something about me: next to the main character, Liz Dare, Penny is the character I most closely identify with. I hope you like her as much as I do. (And if she seems to be named after a character from either Greek mythology or a recentish TV show with a scientific angle, I promise she’s not.)

2. Sure, Darwin may have projected his society’s celebration of unfettered competition onto the natural world, while we’re now learning that there’s as much cooperation as competition. But I would put all of that under the heading of science, or of an old knowledge now confirmed by science.

3. Legitimate critiques of politicized science or of the failings of the peer review system are necessary and productive.