(2022-03-24) Pooley Who Believes In Belief

William Pooley: Who Believes in Belief? The "disenchantment of the world" remains a guiding metanarrative for many histories of the last four hundred years in Europe. There are those who continue to argue for what Keith Thomas called a general "decline in magic," even if they disagree about chronologies and causes.1 Yet there is enduring evidence that magic never went away. (magick)

I want to propose a more fundamental critique. Disenchantment itself depends on an under-conceptualized term: belief. Do historians today know what we mean when we argue that our ancestors "believed" in witchcraft, or when we claim that we do not? Is "belief" even the correct term for what we are talking about? Who among us believes in belief? And what are the consequences if we abandon belief in belief?

But it is hard enough to truly understand what a living interlocutor "believes," let alone the beliefs of the long dead. And if there is danger in not believing in belief, there is just as much risk in reifying complex and often contradictory attitudes into coherent dogmas

More properly, anthropologists and philosophers might call many of the "beliefs" historians have studied "doubts," "aporias," or "aliefs"—terms which I explain below.