Meditation 60: Magical Thinking

Waking from the long dream of reason, now nearly three hundred years old, it is a shock for a secular person to see the prevalence of magical thinking in the 21st Century. Science, technology, and common sense informed by rationality, should have eliminated the belief in magic, and yet that has not happened. What is magical thinking, and what is the source of its staying power? 

 

Magical thinking, as I define it, is thinking that goes beyond anything one could possibly know in a conventional way. What we do know, or have good reasons to surmise, are facts and natural laws that have their ground in earthly experience. All our reasonable empirical beliefs connect with that experience. We have no such experience of magical powers. All the evidence for magic is anecdotal and unrepeatable under laboratory conditions. After all the work on the paranormal done by reputable scientists, there is still no hard evidence of the supernatural realm. 

Magical thinking roams freely through the vast spaces of logical possibility. Its only restriction is the principle of non-contradiction, whose singular work is to rule out conceptual impossibilities. Thus it is perfectly possible to argue that there are incorporeal powers or purposeful deities that cause things to happen in the visible world but through ways unknown to us. One can claim to be able to control those powers, or propitiate them, and thus earn a living in the world as a priest, a prophet or a sage. No one likes the evil eye, or to be thought polluted in the judgment of the gods or the One God. A person who claims to be able to avert the 'eye' or bring the blessings of the gods, will certainly find a position among the credulous.

It is magical thinking that has worked out all the details of the argument about whether there are no gods or goddesses, many of them, or just one God. It certainly simplifies things to have only one God; yet, whether none, one or many, the thought of a Divine Being is a magical thought, and in such thinking there is no way to prove what is true. For example, in the Council of Nicea it was decided that the Western Christian Church would henceforth bear witness to a Triune God. There is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Heretics are those who can not accept the doctrine of the trinity, or surmount the surface incomprehensibility of doctrine. Some heretics hold that Jesus was purely a human being, and others that he was purely God. On the side of orthodoxy, much fine reasoning went into showing that the Doctrine of the Trinity held no contradictions, despite appearances to the contrary.

All three positions rest on magical thinking. Once you go beyond arguing propositions that have some fairly perspicuous connections to perception and empirical reasoning, you enter the realm of magical thinking. Now we start to imagine that invisible magical beings produce effects in the world in ways we do not understand. Oliver Cromwell, for instance, convinced himself that God's power acts immediately in the visible world, and that he was doing the direct work of God in deposing the King of England, Charles I. His continuing successes only confirmed him in this view.

Part of the allure of magical thinking is that it allows the free play of imagination beyond the bounds of sensation and perception. Though grounded in the faculties of perception, magical thinking creates images that point beyond this world to another supernatural one. What fun, like the Taoist Sage, to voyage beyond the four points of the compass, to spread the wings of your fancy and bring the light of magical imagination to bear on the unseen world. The dove of Kant's imagination wished to fly beyond the atmosphere and take to the stars. In very un-magical fashion, Kant promptly remarks that the dove needs air to fly at all. Yes, in the regular world, that is true, but not for a magical dove that has no need of air to fly. It is wonderful to be able to imagine gods and goddesses, to see Zeus in the clouds and Poseidon in the waves. One can catch a spiritual chill in dwelling on original sin and the prospect of heaven and hell. The whole body vibrates to magical thinking. It is addictive, and gives its practitioners a kind of pleasure that is not quite of this world.

Magical thinking is everywhere and ineradicable in human beings. We are the believing animals. The problem with magical thinking is that it asks us to believe something we can never know. Instead, we act as though belief alone, if only strong enough, can make our thoughts come true. In sum, magical thinking is a species of purely imaginative speculation that refuses to admit that its only basis is the imagination itself. In this, magical thinking differs from art and poetry, since in those creations we never lose sight of the imaginary. The poet knows that poetry is a work of the imagination and makes no claims for anything beyond a metaphorical truth for its images. (This, in itself is no small accomplishment, and the poets can boast of great achievements in shaping the human psyche.) The magical tract, however, presents itself as a handbook for influencing unseen powers. Magic, just like its kindred manifestation, religion, will retain its power as long as people want reassurances that there is something more to life than an animal existence, a meaning and purpose that transcends our individual finite lives, and as long as our ignorance prevents us from explaining things in a way we can understand without reference to occult or supernatural powers.