Modernity and Evil: Some Sociological Reflections On the Problem of Meaning

Abstract

It is often said that religious disaffection is largely the result, not so much of intellectual doubts, as of the experiential sense of the world's suffering and injustice. Much of the Enlightenment polemic revolved around the problem of the theodicy and, according to a survey of the attitudes of German proletarians in 1906, the majority's religious disbelief appeared to stem from the failure of religious systems to cope adequately with the “‘injustice’ of the order of the world.”In the same essay, however, Weber distinguishes three radical attempts to answer the problems posed by the world's imperfections. These, he claimed, “...give rationally satisfying answers for the basis of the incongruity between destiny and merit, the Indian doctrine of Kharma, Zoroastrian dualism, the predestination decree of the deus absconditus. These solutions are rationally closed; in pure form, they are found only as exceptions.”