Van Morrison’s career traces a cultural movement from youthful openness and spiritual wonder towards bitterness, calculation and disenchantment.

Looking back on Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison’s career when he turned 80 last year, I was struck by how it reflects a larger cultural movement from enchantment to disenchantment that has unfolded since the 1960s.

Over a century ago, classical sociologist Max Weber foresaw our current predicament when he declared:

The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

For Weber, modern life was being drained of meaning by the cold logic of bureaucratic efficiency, leaving us trapped in an “iron cage” that worships calculation over spirit. Later thinkers sharpened the vision.

Iain McGilchrist gave these insights a neurological frame, arguing that the brain’s hemispheres attend to the world in radically different ways. The right embraces metaphor, ambiguity and awe; the left pursues abstraction, categorisation and control. For McGilchrist, modern western culture has enthroned the left hemisphere, mistaking models for reality and reducing the living whole to fragments that can be manipulated but never fully understood.

Artificial intelligence represents the culmination of these tendencies, favouring classification, prediction and optimisation. Algorithms not only calculate but define what is real, fastening the locks on Weber’s cage through processes that enclose even imagination itself.

Perhaps no musician shows this more vividly than Van Morrison, who is not merely an........

© Pearls and Irritations