ABSTRACT
Undoubtedly the major long-term trend underlying the emergence of the new religions, as indeed of many features of the world as we know it in the industrial West, is, as Max Weber recognised, that of rationalisation. Rationalisation is the process whereby life has increasingly become organised in terms of instrumental and causal considerations; a concern with technical efficiency, the maximising of calculability and predictability; and the subordination of nature to human purposes. Rationalisation thus tends to bring secularisation in its wake, since transcendental values and absolute moral principles find it hard to survive this increasing preoccupation with causal efficacy and utilitarianism (Wilson, 1982: 148–79). Rationalisation thus tends to produce what Max Weber has called the ‘disenchantment of the world’, a loss of our sense of magic, mystery, prophecy, and the sacred (Wilson, 1975).
