The Occult Establishment looked at occult activity in the 20th century. It was a follow-up to Webb’s The Occult Underground, which examined the rise of the occult in the 19th century.The occult, Webb said, rose in the 1800s in opposition to the Enlightenment and rationalism. It then grew and, in the 1900s, became organized.And political.Webb documents in The Occult Establishment that, as the occult grew stronger in the 20th century, it started to take political positions. The entire book paints pictures of those political movements, from Nazism to the Haight-Ashbury and Jerry Rubin’s “Be-In.” He calls them the “Progressive Underground” (as opposed to the 19th-century’s “Occult Underground”).It’s a compelling and fascinating book, but is it relevant today?The Progressive Underground has disappeared, hasn’t it?The world today is all about business and technology and aggressive politics. Tarot card readers are derisible oddities and no one is dropping acid as a political statement (Joe Rogan’s efforts to normalize psychedelics notwithstanding). There seems to be an increased interest in UFOs, but it’s based on logical deductions made from increasing video footage.Go back and look at that Norman Cohn quote above. He said Webb’s book “offers the most vivid portrayal yet given of that hydra, irrationalism; and leaves one waiting, with curiosity if not with trepidation, to see what the next head will look like.”I don’t know if Cohn knew it, but that hydra’s head was already sprouting in 1977.It was sprouting under the name of “postmodernism.” The theories of Jacque Derrida and Michel Foucault were a celebration of the irrational. They were an explicit denunciation of the Enlightenment and the rationalism that defined all of modernity. Hence, the name “postmodernism.”In that sense, the postmodernists were kind of like the 19th-century occultists: a revolt against rationalism, but isolated and not effectively political.One of the accusations against Derrida, after all, was that his theories merely tore down modernity but didn’t offer any political options, which made him irrelevant. Mikics, Who Was Jacques Derrida? 217.Thaddeus Russell strenuously argues that Foucault’s theories aren’t political (though Foucault himself was; he, for instance, manned barricades and threw rocks at police during the 1969 “battle of Vincennes.” Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, 178). If anything, Russell appears to argue, the upshots of Foucault’s theories are libertarian (which, among political theories, is the most “a-political” . . . it’s the politics of being left alone).Derrida’s and Foucault’s theories, in other words, were attacks on the Enlightenment and rationality, but they weren’t political.