spellbound
September 1, 2018 2:52 AM   Subscribe

 
fwiw...
@charliejane: "I finally articulated why I hate Clarke's Third Law. ('Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.') People always quote this maxim. (Thread)"
posted by kliuless at 3:03 AM on September 1, 2018 [6 favorites]


this is brilliant! both the article and the museum exhibit. i've been trying to articulate my beliefs (that is really the wrong word tho) in supernatural stuff for ages, and pullman absolutely nails it. couching it in terms of imagination is exactly right because there is so much unknown even in terms of science that to us, in our present state of technological advancement, certain things may as well be magic. or, rather, let's say that ideas of magic are the only way to date we can grasp certain concepts that, if humanity exists in 1000 years, may well be taught prosaically in 8th grade science class. in that way, magic and science may not be mutually exclusive.
anyway, this makes me want to read his books.
posted by wibari at 5:38 AM on September 1, 2018 [9 favorites]


A bit about the CS Lewis bit.
“If we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather – surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?” That was CS Lewis, in Mere Christianity, 1952.
A couple of thoughts there, as a somewhat conservative Christian. For non-Christians it's worth noting the place CS Lewis occupies within the Western Christian intellectual universe, post 1980 or so: Clive Staples Lewis was an Oxbridge don and has a reputation as a leading apologist for Christianity. Within Evangelicalism broadly he's probably considered one of the most erudite Defenders of the Faith. Mere Christianity is exactly what it says on the tin: Lewis's attempt to come to grips with a Christianity that one can defend using just the New Testament, without centuries of dogmatic accretions and political entanglings.

But the quoted sentiment is perhaps not his best offering.

People "selling themselves to the devil" and receiving power in return is a bizarre, straw-man characterisation of magic. It's Faust interpreted in quite the wrong way, and to my mind, has little to do with the history of Western magic.

One might point out, if we're restricting ourselves to "Mere" Christianity, the book of Jude's approving, unqualified quotation of the Book of Enoch:
Now Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men also, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of His saints... (Jude 1:14)
Which is quoting from here. That's interesting, because the Book of Enoch (at least the first 36 chapters of the Book of Watchers, before the prose degenerates into unreadable waffle) has much to say about the nature of spiritual reality, spiritual beings, the origin of various practices and areas of knowledge, etc. And if a first-century Christian writer took this seriously, Mr. Lewis ought to have as well - according to his own terms. Yet he appears not to have, and has here resorted to tropes and stereotypes. Very bad analogy, and lazy on the part of Mr. Lewis.
posted by iffthen at 5:49 AM on September 1, 2018 [8 favorites]


I'm going to try to articulate this here, but may fail.

I have this sort of Jungian look at ritual in that it reflects deeper things about humanity and the human psyche which may not be immediately apparent within any single culture, and so if I feel driven to do any kind of ritual I do it because that is what _I_ need for myself, not because it's Magic or whatever.

(Most of mine are mundane and not appropriating any existing practices, but I can understand finding existing frameworks from one's own culture or another one appealing for these purposes.)

I have rituals I do, some might consider them spellcasting or somehow or another trying to bend the Universe to my will. I'm mostly doing them because they help me process things in a way that I can't do otherwise. Symbols have mental power, and if you play with them, you can help your mental process find healing.

Okay, I might have succeeded in saying what I wanted to. I play with things that look like "woo" but I don't have "woo" feelings about them, I do them as sort of symbolic psychological processing exercises.
posted by hippybear at 6:05 AM on September 1, 2018 [27 favorites]


This was a strange piece. As an artist and art teacher and devourer of all things creative, I am pretty well soaking in the realm of the imagination. I mean without imagination humans would be just, I don't know, fleshy ants that walk funny. Boring. But I don't know that Pullman clearly articulates the line between having an active imagination and letting your imagination contradict rationality and letting it drive your actions.

I mean he's framing the article around an exhibit on magic. One of the pieces he mentions is an amulet containing a human heart. I mean sure, at our few hundred years remove, it seems spooky and quaint in a fun way, but that human heart belonged to an actual human, and it was removed from their dead body, which is not and never has been what you'd call a neighbourly act. It was a violation.

I think rationality gets a bad rap, and I think the idea that rationality has our society in an iron grip is greatly overblown. If anything we haven't given it much of a chance. It's embraced when it can make our material lives more comfortable, but once something starts chafing, it's back to magical thinking. Rational living just requires a lot of hard work and most people are too tired or lazy or privileged to bother with it.

Humans are not great at facing reality and the first thing they'll do is find a witch to burn or foist up a despot to do the burning for them. It was terrible throughout history, but at least it was understandable, because sure, maybe demons were real? The jury was out on that. Now we know better, but still find new witches to burn when the world as it is starts pushing up against the skin of the world we wish to be.

Yes, we've got very complicated, high-tech bombs that could flatten the entire world, but we are still utter children who retreat into baby thinking when confronted with mere inconvenience let alone imminent disaster.
posted by picea at 6:13 AM on September 1, 2018 [15 favorites]


Now we know better

I think a sizeable chunk of Metafilter would disagree with you there, in the sense that not everyone here is a philosophical Monist. There's also a large difference between "magic" and "magical thinking".
posted by iffthen at 6:27 AM on September 1, 2018 [5 favorites]


I don't think we know if the heart amulet was consensual or contributed to that person's death. Today, we use the bodies of the deceased for our own benefit, in organ donation and as medical research tools. If, to the best of my knowledge, installing my heart in an amulet after I go would protect and help the bearer, I might well agree to that.

to me at least, a lot of rationality is Christian thought in slimy new clothes, and I'd like to see it become less prominent. what if like...people are okay and pluralism is good actually? idk the emphasis on how few people are hard working enough to follow this path and the claim we're all "utter children who retreat into baby thinking" sound pretty much like "humans are sinful by default and need saving/fixing" from here. yikes.

to be clear I dislike Christianity more and think it's a bigger problem, but rationality as I've experienced it is excessively concerned with saving my eternal soul from Roko's Basilisk, not improving the world we're in.
posted by bagel at 6:56 AM on September 1, 2018 [18 favorites]


> that human heart belonged to an actual human, and it was removed from their dead body, which is not and never has been what you'd call a neighbourly act. It was a violation.

This is what you're calling rationality? The person was dead. They didn't care about their heart, or anything, any more. It was not a violation of anything except people's irrational feelings. Which most of us share, just as most of us have our superstitious habits, but that's a strange example to pick.

Excellent article; thanks for posting it (and naming the author!).
posted by languagehat at 7:35 AM on September 1, 2018 [5 favorites]


The idea that magic is just witches and amulets, etc., is very limited. As just one example, one of my own personal good luck charms is when I look at a digital display and it's all 1's. I don't think that's mentioned in the Necronomicon.

More broadly, the idea that there is an abstract world mostly invisible to the physical world is quite valuable. Magic can be thought of as manipulating the world through that abstract layer instead of physically. I'm not sure that's entirely out of the question, and there are millions of people who believe it wholeheartedly. There are a lot of ways you can go with that kind of ability and only some of them are evil. As they say (or used to anyway) "Visualize World Peace".
posted by M-x shell at 7:47 AM on September 1, 2018 [7 favorites]


For me, one of the worst cultural casualties of 9/11 was 20th century humanism, which didn't mind writing its first manifesto with liberal rabbis and Unitarian ministers. As a movement, it was greatly concerned with values like universal education (Dewey), militarism (Vonnegut), ecological destruction (Sagan), and feminism (tons of Marxist feminists). In my experience most of the humanists I meet (even though I don't count myself among them) are still in the social justice tradition, but the media presentation pretty much got steeplejacked by xenophobia.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 7:48 AM on September 1, 2018 [15 favorites]


I flipflop around on magic a lot.

One of my tutors explained recently that he's been taught all of the spells known by one of his informants from PNG where he does fieldwork for his ethnographies. The informant doesn't want those spells forgotten, but his own children have no interest in learning them or undergoing the necessary ritual knowledge accumulation.
Who am I to say those spells are worthless nonsense? They're a body of knowledge which has application in reality. Whether or not I would choose to use them as solutions myself, and acknowledging that commoditised magic as a trick on the vulnerable is dangerous, I really don't think I can say that it was a waste of anyone's time learning or practicing them.

Whether you prescribe the power to placebo, training of the mind, active ingredients or something more, magic has done a lot for people. I've performed rituals, and found them to be beneficial in certain ways. That's enough for me, most of the time.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 8:09 AM on September 1, 2018 [5 favorites]


Humans insist upon living in an anthropocentric universe. It requires a good deal of magic to maintain this illusion...
posted by jim in austin at 8:45 AM on September 1, 2018 [16 favorites]


As a scientist I find that article uncompelling, even while enjoying Pullman's work. Certainly we need ritual and enjoy poetry. Any time I want to I can go see a movie about flying dragons. Nobody forbids this. There are no "Reason Police" arresting me for the enjoyment of magical imagination. I'm more worried about the current atmosphere where if you want to believe in dragons, you find a place on the internet with other dragon enthusiasts and never leave that place. If there are people who are all-reason, with no appreciation of the ecstatic, I've never met them. But every day I meet people who defend the irrational even if it means other people's deaths: people who believe without evidence that vaccinations are dangerous, people who believe that climate change is a hoax. I'm sorry, but that's what worries me.
posted by acrasis at 9:09 AM on September 1, 2018 [16 favorites]


It is interesting, but I feel we have the privilege of toying safely with these ideas courtesy of many forebears who fought a deadly fight with similar ones when they were powerful forces for falsehood and oppression.
posted by Segundus at 9:14 AM on September 1, 2018 [7 favorites]


> wibari:
"anyway, this makes me want to read his books."
Wibari, do read his books, he has an excellent and fairly well-organized imagination. They are classed as Young Adult, but are not limited to young adults. There was a movie of the Golden Compass that was terribly disappointing.

People turn to magic and religion because believing that our amazing world could exist because of randomness is difficult and terrifying. How could the gossamer wings of a dragonfly, the graceful petals of a nasturtium, fireflies, blue skies, exist without a Creator? and these are just things in my yard. I believe in evolution, I understand that hundreds of thousands of years of randomly-instigated mutations have gone into the dragonfly. I understand, rationally, that very bad things happen randomly; there are lakes that occasionally release clouds of toxic gas, killing those on their shores, earthquakes, tsunamis, viruses. You can't invent religion or magic or astrology or ny other system of meaning without impressive feats of imagination.

I miss the comfort of religion to explain that there is a place for me where I might be rewarded for doing Good, that there is a grand pattern and design. I am deeply concerned that there is no substitute for religion. We need a moral authority, we need to be encouraged to be good, even though being slothful, greedy, avaricious, lustful, angry, gluttonous, and proud are way more fun, and pretty effective on an individual basis. Religion encourages us to behave for the greater good, at least that's the idea. In the very long game, evolution will reward a species that prioritizes the greater good, but the short term individual good may end us first.

There is a current trend towards magic in culture and books. As we move from the big bureaucratic, male-dominated machine of religion, which can be seen to fail on many fronts, we want something to provide meaning. Pullman's books have a strong ethic, using magic as an essential force that can be channeled for good or evil. I'm kind of expecting a prophet, a woman would be ideal, to come forward to make a new religion. It would be swell if it could be based on equality and the greater good; that might help us through our coming hard times. Here in the country of end-stage capitalism, maybe we should just start it as a business, offer classes, memberships, sell some indulgences. Surely this has been tried, but there's clearly no end of room for new religions. Cortex and Jessamyn, you're both charismatic ...
posted by theora55 at 9:18 AM on September 1, 2018 [5 favorites]


maybe demons were real? The jury was out on that. Now we know better,

a point of view I ascribed to up until I was maybe twenty-one at which point a few heroic doses of psychedelics forever scrambled my certainty as to what reality was/wasn't. I have certainly seen demons inhabiting passing strangers, as has Ralph Steadman it seems.
posted by philip-random at 10:17 AM on September 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


Humans insist upon living in an anthropocentric universe. It requires a good deal of magic to maintain this illusion...

It requires less than maintaining the illusion of a Materialist universe.
posted by Liquidwolf at 10:31 AM on September 1, 2018 [2 favorites]


Pullman seems to be conflating belief and imagination. But to believe something, you need to think it's the truth (at least a metaphorical truth, if not a literal one). Whereas imagination doesn't require belief. In fact, it's explicitly make-believe.

Imagination is what you use to wonder about how things might be or could be. Not what IS. Reason is what you use to investigate what is.

Personally, I'm terrible at belief or faith or trust whatever you want to call it. But I'm good at imagining. I think belief and imagination are at odds, actually. The more unshakeable belief you have, the less room you have for imagining alternative possibilities -- and vice versa. If you are open to imagining all possibilities, then what do you actually believe?

I don't think that religiosity (whether based in some version of folk magic or not) is actually imaginative. It tends to be quite dogmatic and orthodox. That's practical if you believe in the religious dogma, suffocating if you don't.
posted by rue72 at 10:55 AM on September 1, 2018 [9 favorites]


The belief in magic is probably a very common "fundamentalism" gene, to cause people to cohere to a larger group based on mere words rather than kinship, now influencing everyone from millennia of authoritarian social approval. These words were written and in the form of cultural commands that had magical attachments for divine reward and punishment, discouraging negative, cynical reactions and elevating the positive, miraculous explanations. Belief in the power of words became the basis for dogma and required belief enforcement for intensity. This intensification of belief stressed literal interpretation, strict obedience, certainty of belief, black and white thinking, extreme loyalty and devotion, and cruel earthly punishment to set an example, but with no corresponding earthly reward (other than established royalty and wealth). Mentally, cultivated magical instances function as a conversion to the group, and sudden exclusion from it, and an escape from the realities. Ironically, science can also behave like a fundamentalism with the facts. The point is to be open to investigation and reasonable conclusions, but willing to dismiss the discredited parts. No formal training required.
posted by Brian B. at 10:56 AM on September 1, 2018


Whether you prescribe the power to placebo, training of the mind, active ingredients or something more, magic has done a lot for people.

There is a world of difference between "Magic has done a lot for people," and "Belief in magic has done a lot for people" or "Things people believed were magic have done a lot for people." The latter two are obviously true, and grumpy humanists such as myself don't deny them. On the other hand, the first is---literally--- magical thinking. I won't try to argue anybody out of it, but it will be hard to understand why anyone would be skeptical of magical claims without those distinctions.
posted by This time is different. at 11:12 AM on September 1, 2018 [4 favorites]


I loved this, but I have long identified as a superstitious atheist with zero concern about the inherent contradiction.
posted by thivaia at 11:17 AM on September 1, 2018 [10 favorites]


I've been bothered by a lot of Rationalists who jump from "that's *very* improbable" to "that's impossible"*. Very little can be proved to be impossible, mostly tautologies. Personally when things are in the *very* improbably bucket I don't believe my ability to judge probability works very well. With the exception of special cases being what they are and all. I suspect there's a topological change that happens to the mind when we make that transition.
*Though I have no problem with people who use "impossible" as a convenient fiction for the very improbably.
posted by aleph at 11:20 AM on September 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


First we insist that we are made in the very image and likeness of utter Perfection. Then we demand that the world conform to that vanity. And, when it doesn’t, we turn on each other.

What a species.
posted by Barack Spinoza at 12:17 PM on September 1, 2018 [2 favorites]


picea: . . . But I don't know that Pullman clearly articulates the line between having an active imagination and letting your imagination contradict rationality and letting it drive your actions.
That's the part of the article I found sticky. As an atheist and materialist who's also a fan of all sorts of ritual and occult-related experiences, the difference between the statement, "this is a fun thing to think about," and "I believe there's more than a vanishingly small chance this thing is true" is huge. I'd count the former as imagination. The later is something very different and less obviously harmless.
Trying to understand superstition rationally is like trying to pick up something made of wood by using a magnet.
I'd argue that trying to understand superstition rationally is like conducting experiments to demonstrate that magnets don't pick up wood. Indulging in superstition as a rationalist is like writing a short story about a world where wood-magnets exist.
posted by eotvos at 12:18 PM on September 1, 2018 [3 favorites]


I like to argue that every rationalist has at least one extremely important non-rational belief.

Namely, rationalists believe in the validity of rational analysis itself, and that belief cannot be arrived at by rational means, because that would amount to arguing in a circle, which rationalism forbids.

So I would say that either rationalism needs to be amended to allow some class of circular argument, which would seem very difficult to do, or that rationalism rests upon a non-rational foundation, which would mean there is at least one non-rational way of reaching valid conclusions.
posted by jamjam at 1:09 PM on September 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


On what grounds are you offering the argument, though? Don’t you encounter your own vicious circle before the rationalist can even respond?
posted by Barack Spinoza at 1:12 PM on September 1, 2018


Something interesting is that many practices coded as laughable and "woo" were coded that way BEFORE the scientific method and controlled clinical trials in medicine were even in place. A great deal of what 15th/16th/17th/18th century university coded as "real" medicine as opposed to quackery and witchcraft essentially was when women, barred from universities and academics were practicing something it was laughable, hysterical, and an old wives tale, or worse dangerous and magical; but if men were doing it, it was serious and rational. A great deal of clinical trials have actually found a lot of what "real" doctors were doing well into the 19th century was in fact more harmful than good and many of the people would have been better off with a warm poultice and some herbal tea. Not to mention the Anglo Saxon herbal medicine has done pretty good in a recent clinical trial. Of course it hasn't generated a whole lot more clinical trials since, because we all "know" that herbal medicine is so laughable that it's not even worth researching it to find out, because good science means eliminating entire fields of potential healing techniques before studying them in order to understand things more factually.

A lot of what we laugh at as woo has a lot more to do with the fact that it was associated with women and became laughable long before there were clinical trials in place to even find out the truth behind the sentiment. The worldview that we appeal to when we think of "rational" is filled with myth and bias and human sentiment that bears nothing to do with reality itself and the destruction of indigenous communities and ideologies and worldviews more often associated with women and nurturers are frequently disparaged without actual evidence.
posted by xarnop at 1:20 PM on September 1, 2018 [17 favorites]


No, because the whole idea of arguing in a circle -- not merely that this is a forbidden argument -- is a feature of rationalism dependent on the idea of reaching valid conclusions by arguing logically from premises that are assumed to be true.

Non-rational approaches are not necessarily bound by it -- arguing in terms of cause and effect, for example, may not be logical if causes can propagate backward in time, or if the truth of an assertion cannot change in an infinitely short interval of time, because otherwise that change would violate the law of the excluded middle -- and even if it could change in an instant, there are still problems if you identify the time line with the real axis.
posted by jamjam at 1:31 PM on September 1, 2018


Re: the Bible and magic.
That shit is full of wizard battles.
posted by runcibleshaw at 2:24 PM on September 1, 2018 [3 favorites]


A lot of what we laugh at as woo has a lot more to do with the fact that it was associated with women and became laughable long before there were clinical trials in place to even find out the truth behind the sentiment. The worldview that we appeal to when we think of "rational" is filled with myth and bias and human sentiment that bears nothing to do with reality itself and the destruction of indigenous communities and ideologies and worldviews more often associated with women and nurturers are frequently disparaged without actual evidence.

This is true, but there needs to be some note given that it can also be a problem to frame things as women and indigenous communities are therefore somehow more connected to "magic" because of failings of rationality in practice when it could be said it was as much that men were acting out of superstition and women were acting on proven evidence. The issue is as much in how things are explained and how those explanations are in themselves viewed, often not the values of the actions which can have effect without knowing how that effect is achieved. Separating the talk and belief about a thing from the actual effect of it and its cause or mechanism, if any, are two different tasks.

If one thinks of "magic" as a thing having/creating some significant effect without understanding the mechanism of it or a deception based on some form of bias in confirmation or framing. This is where the saying about sufficiently advanced technology doesn't quite work. It's one thing to say one might see the effect of some hitherto unknown piece of technology as being akin to magic as its use produces some radically new and unexpected result outside our normal frame of reference, but another then to assume or believe the cause of that effect is "magic" and not something explicable in more mechanical terms. The jump to belief in seemingly fantastic claims of cause from unexpected or, currently, inexplicable result are two different areas of speculation each requiring different proofs.

To accept the history of bias in dealing with women and indigenous peoples shouldn't necessarily carry the additional acceptance of that proving either rationality is misplaced or that there is magic those ignored or oppressed by bias are able to wield as that can act to just shift bias to another form as can be seen in how popular culture treats indigenous people as having an entirely separate existence that can be relegated to myth instead of needing to be dealt with in reality.

So called rationality often fails due to refusal to look fully at an issue, relying as it does on often faulty linkage between belief and evidence, just as leaps to "magical" assertions fail due to assumptions over cause that are only supported by leaps to the fantastic for fitting a desired framing. "God must have saved me for a reason" carries the implication that God is interested in you specifically in a way that is somehow more meaningful than that of those who God let die, for example.

Being limited as we are, we always are acting in some measure of ignorance as to why things happen, if there is indeed a "why" to be found in the end. Attributing values to why under the guise of rationality or "magic" without accepting that basic ignorance, that there are things that we simply don't know or are going to be wrong about, causes hardship in the clash between differing values of ignorance and knowledge. That is the essence of the human struggle, the need to define the world in the face of our ignorance and at the cost of those who view it differently. Imagination, in that sense, can often be darker than the beauty found in the sparks of creativity for having potentially deadly effect. Those attributes though, the death dealing and life affirming, cannot be easily separated coming as they do from the same source, our sense of wanting to understand ourselves and the world beyond the limits of our knowledge as life is too overwhelming in experience for our minds to encompass without a frame to essentialize the experience. We tell stories to shrink the world to a more personally comprehensible size.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:15 PM on September 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


> we all "know" that herbal medicine is so laughable that it's not even worth researching it to find out

This is an interesting comment to me since I just had a discussion with a group of chemists on herbal remedies. We all knew, of course, that Tu Youyou was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her work on artemisinin, which was derived in part from old literature on the use of sweet wormwood in traditional Chinese medicine. One of the other participants talked about a lecture he'd heard which explained why a certain plant had to be picked under a full moon; it turned out that the active ingredient was destroyed in sunlight, so the plant had to be picked at night, which was only possible with light from the full moon. I wish he'd remembered the name of the active ingredient: it's a great example of how something which seems like pure superstition can be fully explained once the mechanism is understood.
posted by invokeuse at 5:28 PM on September 1, 2018 [21 favorites]


After Pullman gave us the misogynist shitshow that is La Belle Sauvage, I'm done with him.
posted by gurple at 8:51 PM on September 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


I would say that either rationalism needs to be amended to allow some class of circular argument, which would seem very difficult to do, or that rationalism rests upon a non-rational foundation, which would mean there is at least one non-rational way of reaching valid conclusions.

To the extent that pure reason consists of the rule-driven manipulation of formal symbolic systems, reason itself has already shown that there are truths that no such system can prove. But we don't even need to get that complicated to demonstrate the insufficiency of reason as some kind of ultimate guide for How To Person. All we need is to observe that reason is a set of mental tools for producing truths on the basis of other, pre-existing truths, and cannot possibly be more than that.

So there are essentially two ways for any proposition to conflict with the results of reasoning. The reasoning itself might be faulty, or the assumed truths one is reasoning with might not in fact be true. But if the reasoning is in fact sound, and the underlying assumptions are in fact true, then reason is completely capable of generating reliable truths that are not at all immediately obvious; that's pretty much the point of doing it.

Reason, properly applied, works hand in hand with intuition, and intuition does not operate along logical lines. Intuition works more like machine learning: throw a huge corpus of data at it, give it feedback about which of its results prove useful, and it will train up to produce more results of that kind.

There's at least as much danger in allowing intuition itself to define what is and is not useful as there is in pressing reason into the service of defending preconceived positions assumed to be true. Both of these errors stem, it seems to me, from the same emotional root: an unwillingness to admit that there are strong limits to the amount of control a mind can exert over the world it finds itself running in.

Since the Enlightenment, reason has been pressed into service to generate simply staggering amounts of technology, and that technology has given each of us far more control over our world than we would have had without it. But it has done very little to bring about the increase in responsibility that would be required to wield such astonishing powers without causing incalculable damage.

I am frequently amused by the fact that so much of our technology amounts to creating tiny little inscriptions on tiny little crystals. We have completely literally learned how to create runes of power; our technology is indeed now so advanced as to be literally indistinguishable from certain kinds of magic.

All of which has drifted somewhat from the original point, as seems to be the way with both reason and magic. The point is that of course there exist non-rational ways of reaching valid conclusions. We use them all the time. But that doesn't mean that non-rational methods in general are guaranteed to be useful. If a non-rational method makes a truth claim that conflicts with the results of demonstrably correct reasoning applied to more reliable truths, reason wins. End of.
posted by flabdablet at 12:11 AM on September 2, 2018 [8 favorites]


Wouldn't the rational thing be to acknowledge that magic is a part of human life?

One thing I find is missing in this discussion is the fact that a number of people have believed they were witches throughout time, even back when that belief could lead to their violent deaths.
When I was a kid and lived in a tiny village in Yorkshire, it was widely believed that our neighbor, a single mother, was a witch. I was not supposed to play with her daughter, but hey, they were the neighbors. We did spend a lot of time making potions out of stuff we found in the ditches, but I don't know if that was Sarah's mum having a laugh or if there was some reality to it.
I do know that my grandparents have consulted witches about the myth/superstition tied to our family farm. They quoted Niels Bohr, as Pullmann does. I uphold the ritual connected to that myth, even though I too am an atheist.

Another thing I'm wondering about is that there may be different views on magic and superstition in Europe and the US, because the evangelicals have such a huge political role in the US. Even though the Catholic Church does have a political voice in some European countries and a lot of racists are finding their Christianity so they can wave it at Muslims and Jews, it's nothing near the situation in the US, and Euro-Christians rarely believe stupid stuff, like creationism.
posted by mumimor at 3:57 AM on September 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


that there may be different views on magic and superstition in Europe and the US
Well Europe has history going back a few thousand years whilest white US went genocidal on their native inhabitants.
I would like to see African belief systems included in this conversation.
posted by adamvasco at 8:49 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


> It is interesting, but I feel we have the privilege of toying safely with these ideas courtesy of many forebears who fought a deadly fight with similar ones when they were powerful forces for falsehood and oppression.

Sounds like witchcraft to me -- "an invisible, imaginary world that could affect human life and be affected in turn by those who knew how to do it". A lot of magic is treating ideas like the real things that they are.

> I'm kind of expecting a prophet, a woman would be ideal, to come forward to make a new religion.

Unfortunately, religious Witchcraft is notoriously un-prophet-able, especially because it's not new. But if you're an ecofeminist you could try Starhawk.
posted by heatherlogan at 10:17 AM on September 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


> that human heart belonged to an actual human, and it was removed from their dead body, which is not and never has been what you'd call a neighbourly act. It was a violation.

The human heart in the heart-shaped lead and silver case was "found concealed in the crypt beneath Christ’s Church, Cork" (and dates from the 12th or 13th century). To me this sounds more like a Christian saint's relic. Real neighbourly toward their dead saints, those Christians.

Edit: Context is everything.
posted by heatherlogan at 10:24 AM on September 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


"We are interested in facts because we are interested in myth. We are interested in myth insofar as myth constructs facts."

"Motivated reasoning rules everything around me."
posted by kliuless at 4:19 AM on September 3, 2018


Real neighbourly toward their dead saints, those Christians.

Edit: Context is everything.


Indeed it is. And in an age where saints' relics were taken far more seriously than they are now, it's at least arguable that the saint in question could have felt honoured by the prospect of having his corpse's heart removed and preserved.

Imputing non-neighbourliness to those who actually did the work of cutting it out and preserving it would then be no more justified than doing the same to those who might one day act upon the organ donor sticker that's stuck on my driver's licence (and, I trust, on yours).
posted by flabdablet at 4:25 AM on September 3, 2018 [4 favorites]


speaking of rune-etched silicon and (subjunctive) narrative consciousness, i was thinking money (debt and equity) finance -- what is the 'price' of something? -- along with the 'political arts' (channeling power!) also come close to magic nowadays... with economists as high priests (to varying religions) for our modern-day feudal warlords.

as matt levine says:
Money, financial instruments, the right of the state to tax its citizens -- at some level these are delusions. It's just that they are collective delusions; because we all believe in them, they work. They are what Yuval Noah Harari calls an "imagined reality": "something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world." "Politics," writes David Graeber, "is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them." Money shares in that character. That means that Shrout's project is not purely silly. "If you could convince everyone in the entire world that you were King of France," writes Graeber, "then you would actually be the King of France." If Shrout could convince enough people that the state has no power to tax them, then the state would have no power to tax them. If he could convince enough people that his $100 trillion of paper was money, it would be money.
or, as cs lewis would have it :P
[t]he heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. ... God is more than god, not less: Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about "parallels" and "pagan Christs": they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic?
which richard powers updates to: "At the end it's as if a digital Byzantium has somehow crossed over into the real world. That is my metaphor for reading; that's what reading does. In the end, the book becomes an apology for the virtuality of fiction, fiction not as a replacement for the real world, but as a hybrid place where the real world is suspended and reconstituted into something more survivable."
posted by kliuless at 6:09 AM on September 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


If Shrout could convince enough people that the state has no power to tax them, then the state would have no power to tax them. If he could convince enough people that his $100 trillion of paper was money, it would be money.

And if Shrout could convince enough people that Facebook and Twitter were complete fucking wastes of their time, democracy would be healthier.
posted by flabdablet at 7:11 AM on September 3, 2018


I am cautious about Pullman's use of the word "imagination" based solely on a passage from Northern Lights (which was released in the US as The Golden Compass because of reasons).

Avoiding spoilers, the primary character in the book is a girl aged just before puberty, in those sunset years of "childhood". She is able to code-switch a lot, lie effectively, and generally blag her way through anything. She is given the monicker "Lyra Silvertongue" by a very important character.

And yet in one scene Pullman explains Lyra's reaction to something by saying she is "not an imaginative child." This gets commented on a lot, because it seems entirely at odds with all of the rich imaginative stories she uses to navigate a dangerous world. Mrs. Hobo suspected it was an Extremely British phrase, such as the way parents use the word "clever" here to mean "obnoxious".

I think it was a very carefully chosen word, there, and that it can show more about what he thought about the role of imagination in the self (at least in the 90s when he wrote that book).
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 9:24 AM on September 3, 2018


Coming into this late, but I disagree with... dunno. Plenty here, but especially this:
Trying to understand superstition rationally is like trying to pick up something made of wood by using a magnet.
That is an unhelpful perspective. I think humans are naturally inclined toward animism and spirituality as a hardware limitation: our minds cannot model anything more complicated than themselves, and when we don't know how something works, we tend to assume it works like we do because what else are we going to do? (This is also why projection is such a thing in politics and life generally. Our shorthand of 'complex system' is 'human-like system.')

To give a concrete example: weather is too big to imagine, so our internal picture of it is imperfect because it has to be. We also have a habit of anthropomorphizing it unless we catch ourselves doing it and correct ourselves, which is where rationality is a step forward.

tl;dr: Magic is people imagining a world we can negotiate with, reason with, convince or trick because a human mind cannot contain something bigger than or truly alien to itself. In my life, it occupies the same space as the Just World Fallacy or binary thinking or any other broadly shared human cognitive bias.
posted by mordax at 1:02 PM on September 3, 2018 [5 favorites]


"But what is experimental reasoning? If we look at the vast seventeenth-century literature on witchcraft, it is full of reports of careful observations and sworn evidence – even of experiments. Glanvill, the house philosopher of the early Royal Society, regarded witchcraft as the paradigm of experimental reasoning." - Lakatos
posted by os tuberoes at 1:44 AM on September 4, 2018 [3 favorites]


regarded witchcraft as the paradigm of experimental reasoning.

Good point. If we assume that magic once functioned like science, and possibly still does among more primitive people, then in the presence of reliable scientific knowledge, the magic worldview does what the article's subtitle says: defies rational explanation. It would be difficult to see magic as defiantly irrational previous to ancient attempts at science, so the magic worldview should perhaps be considered a reaction to, or development of, civilization itself.
posted by Brian B. at 1:04 AM on September 5, 2018


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