We cannot understand our relations with each other and with nature— and thus the current ecological and social double crisis of capitalism— without considering the “progress” of science and technology. According to the founding father of sociology, Max Weber, Western modernity is designed for world mastery. Weber ([1905] 1930) saw this as closely related to religion, and he fruitfully compared Judaism and Protestantism to Eastern belief systems; in the latter he diagnosed a tendency towards adjustment to the world instead. For our context, his juxtaposition of the more ascetically oriented varieties of Protestantism (for example Calvinism, Puritanism, Pietism, Baptism, Methodism) with Chinese Confucianism is particularly instructive (Weber, [1920] 1963).

Since it lacked any tension between religion and mundane life, Weber contends, Confucianism historically knew only an ethics of the law, but no ethics of conviction. In ancient China, there was an established hierarchy of religious, magical, and worldly powers that demanded no “rational transformation of the world” (Weber, [1915] 1951: 240). While the Puritans were committed to a conduct of life they hoped their strict God would approve of, Confucians strove for self-improvement and harmony, cultivated literature and philosophy, and regarded this mortal world as the best one possible. Weber therefore distinguishes a rationalism of world mastery (Puritanism) from a rationalism of adjustment to the world (Confucianism) ([1915] 1951: 235). And he derives from this a stage model of rationalization describing to what degree magical thinking has been cast off in a certain society. How “disenchanted” is its world? And to what extent do people conceive of their relations with God and the world in a methodical and consistent way? For Weber, Confucianism is grounded in magic and does not devaluate the world, whereas among all religions, Protestantism displays the greatest potential for disenchantment. At the same time, through systematically distancing themselves from the world (by devoting themselves to a transcendent God), Protestants were best able to shape and master it. For Weber this is the hallmark of the Western way of approaching the world, even if in our secular times, the historical connection to Protestantism may be mostly obscured.