MDMD a Satire of Max Weber's Rejecting/Fleeing the World

[Terrance]

Weber: 

http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/index.htm


http://hirr.hartsem.edu/Bellah/articles_2.htm


A close reading of the "Zwischenbetrachtung," which is what I want to
undertake in this talk, leads to the central  problem of Weber’s
sociology of religion. The opening paragraph notes that the essay
precedes the treatment of the
 Indian case, which is, "in strongest contrast to the case of China, the
cradle of those religious ethics which have  abnegated the world" and
then goes on to wonder whether perhaps it was from India that this idea
"set out on its  historical way throughout the world at large." After a
brief excursus on the value of ideal types, Weber then
 develops in swift overview his typology of world-rejection, namely
asceticism and mysticism, each in an  other-worldly (ausserweltlich) and
inner-worldly (innerweltlich) form. I will assume familiarity with this
basic  Weberian typology and only note that there is an ambiguity about
whether all four types involve rejection of the
 world. The inner-worldly types are not "world-fleeing" (weltfluchtig, a
synonym for ausserweltlich) since they  require that believers stay in
and work with the world. They are in another sense, however,
world-rejecting, in that  they do not take the world for granted, but
either work in the world to change the world (inner-worldly asceticism)
or
 act in the world without attachment to the results of action
(inner-worldly mysticism). For Weber’s sociology of  religion the
critical case is inner-worldly asceticism, above all as expressed in
Puritanism, because of its role in the  emergence of capitalism and the
other essential features of the modern world.

 Weber then turns to the central topic of the essay, "the tensions
existing between religion and the world," which  involves not only the
notion of religious rejections of the world, but at least equally
worldly rejections of religion. He  begins with the emergence of
salvation religions from magic....