Magic versus Magical Thinking, a Practical Guide (Part 3): One to Rule Them All

 

Vast swaths of the general public (here, there and everywhere) take great stock in the notion of inevitability. 

This is a very interesting fault in human perspective. The “inevitable” whatever can manifest as concretely positive, negative or neutral, or take a positive, negative or neutral tone. The reason I suggest that this is a human fault is because most people will relate the word inevitable to the word fate, and take both words together as an indication that no action is needed, so why bother to take any?

This is a type of magical thinking. Here are examples of abstract notions people take to be inevitable (aside from the punch lines of an old joke from Daniel Defoe’s 1726 play The Political History of the Devil, As Well Ancient as Modern, famously quoted by Benjamin Franklin: death and taxes): progress, world unity, the end of the world, equality, change makes us better, a simple solution to every question, and God’s will.  I’m sure you can think of a few abstract concepts that are linked to the notion of inevitability. Some of these could be categorized as “pipedreams,” others as apocalyptic fears.

When we think or believe that things or situations are inevitable, do we push back on the notion by trying some alternative or do we give up?

We are asked questions and the manner in which we are taught often implies that there are answers to every question and that we should know what those answers are or how to calculate them. We therefore dutifully attempt to find solutions to every question directed toward us. For example, here is an actual word problem that has been given to children in school:

There are 125 sheep and 5 dogs in a flock. 

How old is the shepherd?

Do you know what the answer is? When children are posed this questions, their first thought is likely: I’ve been given this as a math problem, there must be an answer, therefore, I’d better do something to come up with a solution. 

In reality, sometimes, it might be better to question the question. How old is the shepherd? is intended to be an exercise in logic; it is hoped that students will be able to discern that this question is illogically constructed and unanswerable. Hilarious results ensue, to be sure, when students try to compute answers to such a question. But, let’s be honest, this is a dirty trick to play on kids.

It’s a dirty trick to play on adults as well, who, sadly, also fall prey to the illogical question. The search for a fundamental theory of everything, in my humble opinion, is an adult variety entertaining the illogical question, a high-brow version of magical thinking. There is a lot of grant money being given to further abstract theories of everything, but I find questions along these lines a diversion from the kind of innovation we need—innovation that offers practical solutions to diverse daily problems. For example, it may be more practical to explore non-polluting ways of turning wastewater into biogas that can be safely used as fuel. We, as a species, certainly produce plenty of it! Why not recycle it!

The search for “one and done” solutions is another example of magical thinking. A gullible pubic is socially engineered down a pay-to-play rabbit hole that is papered with bright and misleading advertisements. However, as explored in a previous essay in this series, the world of intense diversity flies in the face of “one size fits all” thinking. We really do know better; one size cannot possibly fit all. Every place presents its own set of circumstances that need to be taken into account, and every individual in a place is liable to present a different set of skills and perspectives that may bear on those challenges. Baking bread is completely different at sea level than it is at high altitude.

Politically, we have in real-time reached that tipping point where utopian literature turns to its darker, fully dystopian side. Every single utopia ever conceived empowers a small elite counsel of elders to dictate what is best for the masses. Plato explored this in The Republic and The Laws, followed by a long line of writers, from Thomas More and Francis Bacon, to Margaret Cavendish and Jonathan Swift, on down to Edward Bellamy and William Morris, thence to appear ever darker in scope with Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, even unto Margaret Attwood. In the most positive examples of this form of literature, the minority band running the program is intelligent and benevolent; on the flip-side, the leadership is always less than well educated, punitive and totalitarian.

In the United States, circumstances beyond the control of the majority plebiscite has put the fate of our foundational liberalism, which for so long seemed to embody “inevitable progress,” into the hands of a conservative majority of the Supreme Court. This same court seems poised to undo all that has been traditionally (in my lifetime) regarded as “inevitable progress” toward equal recognition and rights for unique personhood, poised instead to enshrine “christian values,” retreat from founding Enlightenment principles to medieval standards of law, promote permissible armed violence, and put certain men in charge of institutions and bodies.

It is highly ironic that this small, ultra-conservative group (or members thereof) proclaims a literal orthodoxy exists within the text of our constitution, where two centuries of jurisprudence has seemingly seen the text through a lens more flexible and moving with the times. It seems that this portion of the Supreme Court group is throwing modern America back to the time Cotton Mather and the Salem Witch Trials. Note, however: Less well known than his discussion of devils inhabiting the invisible world, Cotton Mather was also a scientist; he was an advocate for inoculation against smallpox, and he wrote a book proclaiming harmony between Newtonian physics and religion. Fact!

Any claims of original this, orthodox that are illogical excuses to proclaim a modern paterfamilias--which is what? This could only mean a totalitarian autocracy the likes of Stalinism. But who would the pater be? Certainly not Jesus, who used parables to teach illiterate people how to navigate oppression while maintaining cultural ethos and personal integrity. The words of Jesus don’t seem to matter at all to “christians" who call for the death of liberal secularism, control of the womb and the right of armed, white hooligans to menace and kill—what resonates more are texts from Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

Meanwhile, the average person, having been rendered inert by false notions of inevitability that are accompanied by a blizzard of disinformation, is thrown down a socially engineered rabbit hole. When and where will we land? Shall the landing be hard or soft?

There are 330 million sheeple and 6 dogs in a flock.

Who is the shepherd?

Magic versus Magical Thinking, a Practical Guide (Part 2): Of Origins, Migrations, Memory and Nostalgia

 

Of all the various types of magical thinking, this particular variety is among the most frequent—and the most dangerous:

If only we could return to the way things were, everything would be all right.

If only that could possibly be true, in any way shape or form! This expression of longing, however, is most often the result of incomplete, in some cases manufactured, memory. 

Here is an example of what I mean. That collection of “books” that comes to many of us prepackaged in a single volume called The Bible, with all its errors of translation and transliteration, gaps, glosses and bridgework, contains in its first book not one but two creation stories. (As an aside, there are actually many other creation stories throughout the entire collection. Look to the Psalms, Hosea, Isaiah, Job, Proverbs,  Jeremiah, John and, of course, Revelation.) Most people who have read Genesis from start to end conflate the two stories, so that they become a single narrative. (The same thing happens with the Jesus birthday stories of the gospels.) What I mean to imply by mentioning this is that all such stories are afterward stories and not true accounts of any reality, particularly, as in similar stories from other cultural heritages, when anthropomorphism is applied to planets, stars or birds from the sky, ants and worms from below ground, or the fish in the sea. If you ever read any Greek mythology, even the most watered down versions, you understand what I mean. Said another way, we may have lived through our beginnings, but we were not there at our beginning.

As alluded to in the previous essay, people long for settled place and a sense of belonging in the midst of change and upheaval. This is not what the experience of living dishes out. 

The photo above was taken by me at the V Bar V Petroglyph Heritage site in Sedona, Arizona. Created over a long period by tribes identified today as Sinagua, this is a storyboard that could be applicable to many groupings of people, anywhere in the world, except that this particular storyboard is a product tied to a particular place and a particular time (roughly 1100 through 1400 CE). The storyboard is an almanac, depicting among other things seasonal changes and migration patterns that area dwellers followed. Not much, naturally, is known of the specific peoples who contributed to the storyboard; “mysteriously disappeared” is always the explanation given, but what we must read into that is a prolonged period of drought and/or invasion by unfriendly or warring tribes, as well as the ravages of colonization; anything might have triggered human migration from the area. What any person might be able to read (given a basic background in world mythology and South Western symbolism) on this magnificent stone cliff is the story of people in constant seasonal migration. During winter, groups would follow the herds of elk and other creatures, which would roughly end at the Spring thaw, at which time the People would shift their operations to rivers for fishing and collection of reeds for fashioning baskets, fishing traps and other useful items. In late Spring, the People would remove to flat or terraced fertile areas near water, in sheltered valleys or in the shadow of buttes, to plant, gather and build up stores for the winter. Throughout the area, there are fine examples of cliff dugout and masonry buildings, all of which were abandoned, for whatever reason.

At the site, we were given rough information by a white Forest Service docent, and then also an Indigenous Representative came (we were lucky; tribal representatives are not always available). People asked questions about the various symbols. The tribal Representative both knew and did not know. I remembered experiencing this shifting sort of vagueness on a decades previous trip to Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, where a question was asked about symbols in murals on the walls of the Mission Church. 

There are very specific reasons for this shifting between knowing and not knowing. First of all, there is a palpable, even visceral cultural memory of the violent ravages of colonization. Acoma was violently taken over by the Spanish, who then forced Christianity on the indigenous. There was a lot of resistance; one aspect of resistance to oppression is the presence of native symbols, discretely placed, under the radar. Telling strangers about that is like giving away personal identity. Secondly, because migration has always been a way seasonal way of life, and climate shifts play a huge role in that, many of the indigenous who live in a certain area now may have come from somewhere else; the tides of time and assimilation have sometimes washed away specific local cultural memory. 

The notion that the way we were is better than way things are now is a lie we tell ourselves when we feel unmoored from rootedness by the vicissitudes of an ever-changing world. The truth is, people want to feel rooted and complacent, but the reality is people cannot live that way for very long. The lands and cultures, the economies and governances are in constant fluctuation. There has never been the stasis our soul longs for. Snapshots of a carefree childhood are an incomplete knowledge of what it took for our parents to bring us to adulthood. Nietzsche called nostalgia a form of nihilism. In Will to Power, he wrote: 

A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning.

As I know from the practical experience of bringing up twins, nothing stays the same. Just at the very moment you come to understand one stage child development and how to manage within it, the next stage crashes like a wave that you are completely unprepared for and ill equipped to deal with, except that you must.  When I now see cute little kids walking to the park, it tugs at my heart, but I wouldn’t want to go through those first five years of childrearing again, at the age that I am now. 

As the sage named Jesus told a man called Nicodemus, everyone must be reborn again as from above. Nicodemus responds with a ridiculous question, offered on purpose, as in a Socratic/rabbinic dialogue, “You cannot mean that a person is to reenter his mother’s womb and be born again.” The sage responds metaphorically, “No one can enter the kingdom of the Divine unless they are born of water and the spirit.” By this metaphor, I take it to mean that, of course, there is no going backward, there is only forward movement and momentum toward a change in perspective, a maturation of understanding, enlightenment.

The desire to go backwards, aside from being impossible, is completely unnatural. As the survivors of the Surfside Condominium disaster could attest, as much as one might long to return to a place once known of as home, it might well no longer be there. The desire to go backwards is, to some extent, an expression of rage at being forced to adapt. 

But, we are intended to migrate, both physically and mentally, through the seasons, and through every stage of life. As T. S. Eliot relates in that famous poem of his, which echoes the sentiments of writers who came before him:

In my end is my beginning.