Magic versus Magical Thinking, a Practical Guide (Part 1): Of Recipes, Rites and Action

 

In the beginning, when people were evolving, power was present in the place where one found oneself—by power, I mean the inherent dangers of a place, such as raging waters, sheer cliffs, and roaming gigantic flesh eating creatures. Survival, in such places, came to be seen as a certain sort of blessing, and the people who seemed to have better survival tools (or rather who seemed to make better choices) came to be revered. Some of those revered people, when asked to what they attributed their success at overcoming adversity, might have said something like, “I owe it to the benevolent spirit of the place,” by which they might have meant that they had learned by experience, trial and error, how to make good choices in a hostile environment. Indeed, some people are better suited to survival in certain places than others, and this can only be the result of an education by experience that teaches a type of discernment when it comes to making choices, especially when the unexpected happens. Such people, when they die, become the stuff of legends, and sometimes the legends of such people become so famous, they are turned into demi-gods.

Another scenario related to hero worship is the worship of forces of nature, such as water, air, fire, quaking earth, and the like, seen and unseen. Survival of the fittest when it comes to forces of nature is also an aspect of the power of place, where the unexpected happening can limit or endanger chances of survival.

Yet another scenario related to worship is the reverence of any thing or being that produces food. In such a scenario, corn is reverenced, wheat is reverenced, cows are reverenced, and so forth.

I will say that none of these models of reverence is inherently incorrect; these are all valid examples of reverence and respect. With reverence and respect to the powers of place, to the life-giving powers of food produced in the natural world, to exemplars of right discernment and choice, one is able to learn from past example, build on that with innovation, and survive, even to the point of producing offspring that carry the species forward in time toward newer innovation.

I will now identify an aspect of these primitive forms of reverence that I believe to be incorrect: magic.

This is not to say that magic and magical moments do not exist or that they are irrelevant. Magic is very real; it may be the most real thing there is. Magic goes back to the power of place and the power of the unexpected. Magic is an experience, an awesome and unexpected result. The error comes when people believe they can recreate a magical experience by performing a litany of rites, instead of living and experiencing, learning. The error occurs when people do not, as the heroic exemplars of the past did (or may have done), use and build on the knowledge acquired through experiences of surviving the powers of place and the unexpected to make choices, then accept responsibility for inauspicious outcomes. 

Simply put, one person’s choice might work for someone else, but this is not necessarily the case, and is most often not. In the words of a song Doris Day sang, but hated:

“Que sera, sera

Whatever will be, will be

The future's not ours to see

Que sera, sera

What will be, will be

Que sera, sera.”

The Great British Bake Off television series delivers a concrete example of what I am talking about. At some point, all the participants are given the same recipe to prepare. Amazingly, the results are different for every single participant. Why? They are all using the same ingredients in the same weather conditions, with roughly identical equipment. Why is it that the results can be so different?

Recipes (receipts, in old style) are scientific formulae from the realm of the practical cook. Someone made a tasty dish and invited friends to dinner. The friends really enjoyed the dish and wanted to recreate it in their own homes, so they asked for the receipt, which was a list of ingredients, most often, including a sketchy explanation of how the ingredients were to be combined. The cook had been preparing the dish for so long, it was second nature, and they figured another (experienced) cook would know what was intended.

Here is a recipe from “Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus [Estes]”:

Mushroom Sauce, Italian Style—(for macaroni, spaghetti, ravioli and rice)—a small piece of butter about the size of an egg. One or two onions, cut very small. About two pounds of beef. Let all brown. Prepare as you would pot roast. Add Italian dried mushrooms, soaked overnight in hot water, chopped in small pieces. Add about one-half can of tomatoes. Let all cook well. Salt and pepper to taste. Add a little flour to thicken. 

The beef, is it cubed or a slab of meat? Small, medium or large onions; yellow or red? What quantity of dried mushrooms? What size can of tomatoes are we talking about? Do you know how to make pot roast? Is this done in the oven or on the stovetop? What sized pot to use? Any added liquid, or do the tomatoes suffice? At what temperature? For how long?

The experienced, practical (that is, practicing) cook can take that receipt, procure the ingredients, and turn them into a delicious meal. In the hands of others, “results may vary.” And that is the truth of the matter, results do vary; life is not cast by lots, nor can the turn of a card predict outcomes—that is magical thinking. 

That’s all for now. Not sure when the next installment will be, but I can say that it will have something to do with praxis, religion, reason and governance.

Current Events

Eventful, today;
not much else to say,
except that—little by little—we slip away,
but maybe that’s okay.

Voices, loudly they cry;

“Choices,” they proclaim, “buy!”

Fruits of summer
winter in discontent;
smart suits are dumber,
tinder for wildfire foment.

Voices, quietly they sigh;
invoices quell the buy-high.

From inane to insane,
rinse, repeat and remain.

Maybe it’s okay
that we slip away
when truths known no longer hold sway
with those who have the say.

© 2012 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

The statistics for our National GNP (gross national product) can only be generated by our purchases. We can only purchase when we have jobs and income. We can only have jobs and income if the corporations that earn the GNP open up the job market to a wider audience. Policy makers don't see this as a reality that needs to be faced; they continue to make policy based on the notion that their jobs depend on the support of corporate lobbies, not on the wider audience of potential purchasing public. The policies made by policy makers allow corporations and their talking-head-suits to abuse the working classes of the world, workers here and abroad, so that they can control more money with fewer workers (or cheaper off-shore labor). The result is economic stagnation. Policy makers know this, but refuse to do anything but pander to the corporate lobbies. Privatization has driven the cost of everything upward, even though the quality of what we are buying (think education) is substantially less. "They" tell us the costs are greater, after "they" said that business could do it all better and for less. This is the new definition of "less is more." If that weren't bad enough, out and out fraud is committed, throughout all industries, unchecked, unabated, unregulated. Seems to be a national insanity, for which there is no cure.

Austerity For ALL!

There has been a great deal of political talk about security in this century. Growth is the security of organic life. The security of the imagination lies in calling, all our lives, for more liberty, more rebellion, more belief.  

 - Muriel Rukeyser

Men may lack vocabularies, but men in danger share more thoughts than they are given credit for, because they share the same dilemma. Let death draw near, and all men gathered together in twos or threes cease to be shy in their discussion either of it or of life. No school of philosophy can boast a better teacher than peril, when it approaches at a pace lively enough to be contemplated. 

- John Mason Brown

I must say that I find the political stance of conservatives, worldwide, quite amusing. 

The idea that there must be austerity, in these times of world financial crisis, might make sense if the austerity was intended for each, according to their ability. Strangely, the austerities are only meant to be experienced by those people who already experience austerity; the austerity that threatens to be meted out does not cut in all directions. The same breath that proclaims austerity for the rest of us also says that the wealthy should not be taxed, if we want the wealthy to invest in the economy, to create jobs. 

How could anyone believe such rubbish--this is the very thinking, championed by Reaganites and Thatcherites, who double-teamed it to deregulate and privatize, that ultimately led to the disaster we are all trying to live through now. 

The Third World War, in essence, has arrived! It is characterized by a the complete abandonment of any notion of collective endeavor, by which all might be raised up. Can any of you remember when it was a goal to end hunger? Instead, what we have is an overall sense of shameless individualism. Drill, Baby, Drill! is the shrill cry from Wall Street and The City. Think not what I can do to help you build your investment portfolio, but what I can do to fleece you! The environment be damned, I want you to drive your old beater until fossil fuels are but a memory. This shameless and amoral attitude is not limited to investment companies, insurance companies, the banking industry and corporate manufacturing; the Pod People have taken over your unions, your municipal governments, your primary, secondary and higher education systems, your political parties, your government buildings. Moreover, we have been trained to the idea that equal opportunity toward materialism, toward having (of the same rather than the unique) is synonymous with freedom.

Let's face it: bankrupt politics and policies, promulgated by politicians that have been bought by the so-called "Free Market," are bankrupting our municipalities, the very places that need infrastructure and job development, and passing the costs of bankruptcy on to you and to me.

Career politicians, so far removed from what actual people have to deal with in the world that their bankrupt policies created, dole out clichés from the Reagan/Thatcher playbook, and expect us all to pay their salaries, not to mention their pensions and their healthcare. There is no austerity for them, and neither for their masters. Our politicians are willing puppets, because the system they steward feeds them. This is why the so-called "bipartisan" political realm looks and acts like a circus. 

We are, to a greater extent, unwilling puppets. The blame has been put to us, for electing these very officials. I submit that this is yet another case of "blaming the victim," but I concede that there is an element of truth to the assertion. Where is the truth of it? Well, when our economies shifted, in the wake of deregulation that paved the way, from manufacturing to finance (along with it's ugly twin real estate development), the attitude shifted from fiduciary responsibility to unfettered greed. There has been another economic shift, however--one just as devastating. 

The shift has gone hand-in-hand with the move from manufacturing to finance, and it has been fueled by the very technologies that have given birth to social networking, fostering elitism and bolstering a false sense of individualism, one that values the one-line chat quip or the anonymous reactionary rant over a stimulating discussion of actual values between people who stand face-to-face in order to work together.

How can this be? The very medium that has seemed to offer greater democratic action for average people, in such movements as "The Arab Spring," have been used by their creators and primary corporate manipulators, the gatekeepers, as it were, of a worldwide system of corruption.

Does my statement mean that I am a morbid conspiracy theorist? No, not at all, not at all. I may be reading history a certain way, but it is history that I am reading, and the indicators have been hiding in plain sight. I need go no further than the recent and continuing Murdoch Hacking Scandal. Who was Tony Blair serving, while visiting Murdoch in Queensland? Was he serving the British Public or was he serving Rupert Murdoch? He has testified that Murdoch was attempting to pressure members of Parliament to call off the investigation. What does this mean for the public, wherever Murdoch media enterprises exist? It means nothing less than that influence of the filthy rich cuts in on your free speech, not to mention your expectation of privacy or truth in reporting/advertising.

Social media allows us to communicate internationally--as long as political forces don't censor the internet, as in China, Cuba, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, and other countries. Interestingly enough, most of the countries that sensor the internet have repressive governments. The other end of the spectrum is the Murdoch variety, where the internet so free it is mined for information that is used to make money, and possibly ruin lives. On the one hand, there is the hyper-regulation of closed-government, on the other, the unprotected world of deregulation and the so-called "open" government "free market" fracas. In both cases, the people in control are people of power and wealth, people with no self-control, who are all too willing to tell you how to live, just so long as they don't have to live that way themselves.

Additionally, the internet is also used to fuel identity politics. With our good intentions, many of us seek to establish greater freedoms and foster choice for all. We sign up with groups that claim to be for the purpose of activism toward the social values we say we desire. But then these groups tell us how to think and how to act and how to vote. Unwittingly, we have allowed ourselves to become pawns in what ends up being an identity politics smokescreen. Someone else writes the letter, we just click the button.  Sorry to burst the bubble, but that really isn't how democracy works. 

Obviously, equal rights and social justice should be for all, but the way it plays out, sometimes it seems as though rights and justice are for some, even few, rather than for all. While we are all arguing identity politics, war crimes are being committed all over the world, by ours and perhaps every government. People in all parts of the world are being abused and denied access to food, shelter, clean water. But because we are bickering about how one kind is either oppressed or even entitled over another kind, we don't see the larger issue, that we are all being oppressed and used, if not abused and denied. And we are all guilty of denying that humanity is one kind and that all are entitled.

In short, for the "freedom" to "share" our thoughts, we pay. We pay in the way our every move is documented and analyzed for what we do, who we like, how we live, how we spend, so that we can be objectified in the morass of unfettered materialistic capitalism that aggregation feeds. We pay, and we will pay until there is nothing left to pay with.

There is nothing left to say about this, except that fools and their money are soon parted. Do you resemble that remark? I know that I do, and I suspect that you do, as well. Not always by choice is this true.

Remember this during the upcoming election season, particularly when some talking-head tells you that you need to be austere in your spending (what little you have) for the good of everyone and that public programs should be sacrificed for the good of the system. That is one horse the talking-heads will ride. And then they'll attempt to ride another, at the same time, and you know what that will be. 

If austerity is the solution, then austerity must be for ALL--one for all and all for one (--or it should be for no one)!! No more bond issues to grease the wheels of a few, no more tax breaks to business entities and moguls with offshore accounts, no more municipal shell games with taxpayer money, no more bailouts to banks who run citizens into bankruptcy with service-charges, and no more of all the rest, while denying basic needs to those who have been ground down in the fallout of World War III, the invisible war declared on you and on me.

If we believe that what we think matters, we need to read more (to be better informed), we need to talk more (not merely exchange chat quips and tweets), we need to rise up on our hind legs and declare ourselves to be active members, all for one and one for all, against the bipartisan circus act that will keep telling us we have to pay the price for their bad and self-interested, self-perpetuating policies.

Stalemate

Long a monument to inaction,

the days and ways to change
fly as birds on the wing.

Control is the final destination
for those who must be right;
if not me, then no one.

Passive-agression has a face:
blank eyes smolder with hate;
why are you not in my image?!

No brilliant strategy can bind;
the way to freedom, step away
and proclaim the game unworthy.

The resulting stale mate
claims a winless victory
and a libation of gall.

Birds on the wing fly away,
leading days and ways to change,
leaving droppings on all monuments of inaction.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

The Measure of Modern Morality

The world, as seen through the lens of the news media, seems to be playing itself out like a parable written by Nietzsche. War, abuse of power, betrayal of the innocent by wolves cunningly disguised as sheep, whether these wolves are politicians, clergy, bankers, generals… It seems like one bad joke that keeps playing itself into deeper and deeper territory. What was once faintly amusing amusing and treated as cliché (e.g., “death and taxes…”) now is far past its pall, and the thoughtful person reckons that the horrors of division that we see, playing themselves across all boundaries and senses, prove that Shakespeare was all too insightful about human nature when he has his character Hamlet observe that customs are “More honour'd in the breach than the observance.” What we see played out now is mostly breach, and little, if any, observance. Apparently, the breachers rule!

Surely, this is what Nietzsche meant when he emphatically stated “God is dead!” This statement was used as a battering ram against Nietzsche, of course, who was treated as a pariah by the academic establishment and the church.

It is very interesting that people judged Nietzsche based on that single quip, out of its context.

Here is more of the passage from The Gay Science:

"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment.

The passage was spoken by a madman—perhaps this is Nietzsche being tongue in cheek about himself; only a madman could make assertions that turn the world of the worldly upside down by stripping the worldly of their illusions. Nietzsche is the most famous pariah ever, for his polemics against the Christian Church Universal, of which this passage could be thought the crowning statement, if only by those who have not read Nietzsche’s oeuvre in the way Nietzsche himself read all the works that informed him; he called this way of reading lento—Italian for slow. Slow reading for maximum absorption.

Nietzsche was excoriated for reporting the truth of he saw about the way people act. Ironically, the seer actually did go mad, and died before his mature thought could be completely developed.

ÐÑ

The Church Universal is an interesting institution. It claims to ground itself in the teachings of Jesus, but patterned itself as a hierarchy in the image of Roman Empire. And so it is an Empire, one that has, over two thousand years, controlled kings and billions of average people, the very slaves that Nietzsche identified in his writings. Of course, Christianity has splintered itself off into denomination after denomination, sect after sect, starting since well before the Councils of Nicea. Each sect has defined and controlled the masses according to its own version of the truth and moral code that it claims to pattern after the very simple commandment of Jesus. The Roman Church has deemphasized women and marginalized quite a lot of diverse interests and ethnicities and thought by using morality and fear as swords and cudgels. Countless innocents have been given the sword or the fire, or some other ultimate punishment for their declared “sins”. There is no peace on earth because religions and governments are continually at war, in an endless effort to command power.

In the modern era, the moral authority of particularly the Roman church has never faced so many challenges. Two of the biggest have to do with the marginalizing of women and homosexuals. Sex scandals continue to rock the faithful, as well they should. The church has fought on this battleground for generations, by primarily using the tool called denial, and by sweeping all transgressions under the carpet. Women and children have suffered abuse of priests who have all taken oaths to uphold and maintain holiness and sanctity in all interactions; the church denied claims, until they could be denied no more; and has finally tried to sweep it all away by sheltering and shuffling the offenders through the Empire, rather than by handing them over to the law. Now, in the U.S., Ireland and, most recently, Belgium, cases are being settled and priests are being defrocked. But there are some wealthy, conservative Catholics (who can afford to take out full page ads in the New York Times, no less) who continue claim that the victims are the ones to blame, not the clergy offenders or the church. Homosexuality is to blame. Women are to blame. Children are to blame. Abortion is to blame. According to the conservative line, the church should not have to bear responsibility for the sins perpetrated within its hierarchy, and its moral authority must not be questioned.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. wrote in his book “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table:

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.

ÐÑ

In Daybreak, Nietzsche speaks Moral Authority in the following manner:

Thus commands the authority of morality: an obscure fear and awe are at once to direct mankind in the case of precisely those actions the aims and means of which are least immediately obvious! This authority of morality paralyses thinking in the case of things about which it might be dangerous to think falsely—: this is how it is accustomed to justify itself before its accusers. Falsely: here that means ‘dangerously’—but dangerously for whom? Usually it is not really the danger to the performer of the action which wielders of authoritative morality have in view, but the danger to themselves, the possibility that their power and influence may be diminished if the right to act arbitrarily and foolishly according to the light, bright or dim, of one’s own reason is accorded to everybody: they themselves, of course, unhesitatingly exercise the right to arbitrariness and folly—they issue commands even where the questions of ‘how am I to act’ to what end am I to act’ are hardly possible or at least extremely difficult to answer. — And if the reason of mankind is of such extraordinarily slow growth that it has often been denied that it has grown at all during the whole course of mankind’s existence, what is more to blame than this solemn presence, indeed omnipresence, of moral commands which absolutely prohibit the utterance of individual questions as to How? And To what end? Have we not been brought up to feel pathetically and to flee into the dark precisely when reason ought to be taking as clear and cold a view as possible! That is to say, in the case of all our higher and weightier affairs.

Rather a frighteningly accurate description of the state of moral authority, as it was in the 1880s and even to the present day.

So we have this doctrinal hot potatoes constantly tossed at us—free-will and sin are juxtaposed to one another. We are offered the assurance of permanent lodgings of our eternal soul in Hell if we do not bow as slaves to the will an institution that is ancient, not modern.

Lost in all of this is the central teaching: Christ died for all.  Here is what Paul said in the first letter to the Corinthians (15:1-3):

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures…

What Paul tells us is that we have all been saved, and that we are free. Then we are sent on to preach this release from the bondage of sin by proclaiming the gospel, loving God and cherishing our neighbors as we cherish ourselves.

But ever since the day that the Church patterned itself on Empire, we have been told that we have not been saved, but continue in sin, and further that we can only be saved if we follow the arbitrary doctrines of people who live in the world but are not of the world, and don’t feel bound to adhere to civil law or even their own arbitrary doctrines!  Many of which doctrines are not at all in keeping with the teachings of Jesus during his ministry!

Mark 2:27:

(Jesus) said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

The Roman Church, and not this branch of the Church Universal alone, and not even just the Christian Church, has been acting as if this were the other way round, for far too long.

ÐÑ

Luke 4:18-19:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Let us recall that in Baptism we enter the new life. The prisoners are free, the blind see, the oppressed are released from the bondage of authoritarian rule. This, and every year, is the year of the Lord’s favor.

Let us pray that all may be reacquainted with and reminded of this simple and humbling truth, that we may live lives of goodness and compassion because we have been freed to do so, in unity with our neighbors, eschewing the lies of power and arbitrary authority.

Amen.

Holmes, Sr., Oliver Wendell. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. H. M. Caldwell Co., 1900, p. 129.

Nietzsche, Friedrich; Hollingdale, R.J., translator; Clark, MaudeMarie and Leiter, Brian; . Daybreak, Cambridge University Press, 1997. p. 62: 107. Our right to our folly.

Holy Bible, New International Version, Biblica Inc., 1973; various passages.