A Time of Magic
As humans, we live our lives by dogmas; settled doctrines that tell us how things ought to be. Even in an open society, where almost everything is theoretically up for debate, there is always a untouchable core of ideas and customs that form the base of the pillar, and woe betide the creature who takes it into his head to start chipping away at them.
Not that it would ever occur to him.
It’s one thing to step outside the band of “socially acceptable” ideas and off into la-la-land. It’s quite another to notice that Nazis, Communists, Liberals, Theonomists, Technocrats, and Reactionaries are all variations on the same theme, and start attacking the fundamental assumptions which they all share.
Most of what gets called “extremism” is pretty mundane stuff that sits outside the Overton Window-of-the-moment. Most of what gets called “radicalism” is just artful and provocative re-statements of core cultural values—a tech worker opposed to slavery might get their hackles up at the “radical” suggestion that it is only through their willingness to ignore slavery (or near-slavery) in China or the Congo that they are able to enjoy their iPhone, but the suggestion isn’t so much radical as it is just the observation of an everyday fact.
“Radical” would be to suggest that the liberal world—like the rest of humanity before it—doesn’t really care about slavery when it doesn’t happen to the “friends and family” group, however construed.
Or to suggest that fighting a war to end slavery is the coward’s way out—a real abolitionist would fight a war to make sure that no part of his nation’s supply chain was ever touched by slavery, and that if this meant doing without tobacco, cotton, cacao, tropical fruit, avocados, microchips, batteries, or electricity (all produced by slave labor at one time or another), then so be it.
You can see why the dogmas of civilization are never seriously questioned, even in an open society. They form civilization’s backbone.
They also define its classes and microcultures. Its religions. Its political tribes. In contexts where visibly adhering to dogma is important, such adherence is usually signaled by use of a shibboleth—that is, a code phrase or buzzword (or manner of speaking made up of code phrases and buzzwords) that not only identifies one to others who believe the same things, but also helps curtail the development of thoughts that might lead one astray. Or worse, into radicalism.
In times of relative stability, the dogmas that make up the walls of our worldviews help contain the impulses that might rock the boat.
But in times of instability, when the world seems to make no sense even when viewed with the most strident dogmatism, the human animal can revert to something less propositional, with a logic all its own.
Beyond Dogma
Consider your political and cultural enemies. Think about the insanity regularly on display from their corner.
Think of the declarations they make, declarations which they obviously think normative or unremarkable, and how they leave you tilting your head like a confused puppy, trying to make sense of the untrammeled nonsense on display.
I am confident that you can call such an experience to mind regardless of where you sit on the political, ideological, or religious spectrum.
The people on the other side of the line have a worldview that feels tilted a few degrees off prime. They regularly proclaim things that you know are complete bullshit, and they’re usually formulated as slogans.
What’s more, these slogans follow a predictable pattern. Consider these:
Trans-women are women.
The President is guilty of treason.
It is a child, not a choice.
No person is illegal.
All of these slogans seek to re-make reality (sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly) by redefining language, as if the universe itself will listen to our demands and rewrite itself in response to them, if only we demand these things loudly enough. They may sound crazy when they come from people who don’t share your worldview or priors, but when they come from your own team, they give comfort and a sense of purpose, because they are not exactly slogans or shibboleths.
They are spells.
The Nature of Religion
Spells, fetishes, magical symbols, and dreams of the afterlife are older than recorded history. This impulse to interact with the universe through a web of symbols, doctrines, archetypes and abstractions seems to be unique to humans (at least on this planet).
Why should this be? What is religion? What the hell is it even for?
To answer (respectively) with “Because God made it this way” “[My] religion is the revealed truth of the universe” or “To show humanity the way to salvation/enlightenment” is to miss the point of the question. Such answers might or might not be true for one or another of the hundreds of thousands of religious traditions that have popped up over the course of human history, but adjudicating that dispute is not relevant for understanding the unfolding of history (which is, after all, an enterprise firmly grounded in this world, not in the next).
So let’s table the question of whether your preferred religion is true and let’s look more at what religion is. Is it a memeplex that assuages existential angst (as argued by Marx and Freud)? Is it a byproduct of cognitive biases (as argued by Dennet)? Is it a virus of the mind (as argued by Dawkins)? Is it how humans attempt to make sense of dreams and hallucinogenic visions (as implied by later-day disciples of Fraizer)? Is it a response to actual entheogenic and/or meditative revelations of a spiritual or alien realm (as mystics often argue)? What on earth could this pith and marrow of human culture actually be?
One of the less popular ideas knocking around among evolutionary thinkers1 is that religion is an aspect of the so-called Extended Phenotype (that suite of features of human nature that includes culture, sociality, cognition, and behavioral quirks). Religion would, in this paradigm, be seen as a vital part of the human survival machinery, predisposing us towards believing in things that are metaphorically and/or directionally true, even if the literal reading of these beliefs seems to defy common sense.
Such metaphorically/directionally true things would include symbols and stories that preserve wisdom, propound social rules, and encode natural rhythms.
For my money, of all the potential explanations for religion, this one rings the closest to true, but it is still inadequate, because—proceeding as it does from a late enlightenment WEIRD understanding of religion—it does not go nearly far enough.
Deep Intuitions
At the root of human nature, way way down below the rational level, below even anything we moderns might recognize as “religion,” sits a set of intuitions about the universe that, in and of themselves, seem obviously insane, yet which provide the engine for human adaptation. They are conserved by evolution and are provoked to expression by cognitive dissonance, cultural dissolution, and other extremities of human experience.
And what are these intuitions?
That the universe can be appeased, provoked, and transformed through the proper use of sex, violence, language, sacrifice, and purity (or its lack).
I am, in other words, talking about magic.
Not stage magic, but “invoking the power of the gods to work miracles” magic. Honest-to-gods sorcery of the sort that all religions call “divine intervention” when done in the name of their own god(s), and “demonic” or “witchcraft” when done in the name of other gods or powers. This sorcery can be wrought even in the absence of any supporting religious framework, and I am about to argue that, as insane as it sounds, we are witnessing the front end of a worldwide outbreak of sorcery the likes of which we haven’t seen in centuries.
To make this argument, I must explain what magic is and how it is supposed to work.
Five Kinds of Magic
In all cultures, magic is tied to five things:
Sympathetic Magic (a.k.a. Homeopathy): This is the notion that what happens at one level of reality is reflected at another level—or, as the neopagans say, “As above, so below.”2 An obvious (and salacious) example of this is the fertility orgy, held always in early spring in order to help the gods remember that it’s time to bring back the season of fruitfulness to the land. You can also find a glaring example in the Torah when Jacob uses mottled sticks to bewitch the goats he herds into breeding mottled kids, which he is contractually entitled to take as his wage (Genesis chapter 30).
Word Magic: To name something is to label it, to categorize it, to say something about its nature. The name a child receives colors their life experience in ways uncountable. Language—the correct language—is seen the world over to shape reality. The “true name” of a thing is seen to be an embodiment of its essence, and changing the name of the thing can thereby either be a recognition of a changed reality (for example, calling a girl a “woman”), or it can be a magical act whereby one seeks, through language, to change reality (for example, calling a girl a “boy”).
Categorical Transgression: The ordering of the world is considered by all religions to be the province of the gods, which is why things like eating the “wrong” kinds of meat, getting jiggy with members of your own sex, or with animals, etc. are almost universally considered a ritual impurity (the literal meaning of “abomination”) unless they are done under cover of a magical shield (such as a “sacrement”). These transgressions are frowned upon in humans, however the most powerful/significant of the gods are always beings who erase or transcend the categories that otherwise bind the world. Yahweh, the masculine sky-god of the Hebrews, was also called “El Shaddai” (i.e. the Many-Breasted One). We get the word “Hermaphrodite” from the god Hermaphroditus (son of Hermes and his sister Aphrodite), who was both male and female, and was thus the divine expression of the spiritual ideal of the human form (achievable by humans only through sexual union, itself considered in all cultures everywhere as a kind of holy magic of the “categorical transgression” type). Zeus and Yahweh were both said to cross the barrier between heaven and earth, and between the gods and men, by impregnating human women. For a human to deliberately transgress the categories which order the universe is an act of seizing the power of the gods.
Divine Provocation: Often in ancient myth, when something is so deeply unbalanced in the world that only the gods can fix it, it so happens that the gods don’t really give a damn. When this happens, the humans in the story go about being provocative in worship, sacrilegious, idolatrous and/or apostate, flagrantly sinning, and anything else they can think of to annoy the hell out of the gods in hopes that this will force the gods to come deal with the situation. The book of Job showcases one of the (many) examples of this in the Bible. Job spends the entire book demanding—directly and indirectly—that Yahweh show up and account for His apparently faithless actions...and it half-works! Kind of. Job embarrasses Yahweh into showing up, though not into accounting for himself.
Propitiation: Propitiation is a kind of bribery (or “appeasement,” if you want to be charitable). In the pre-modern world, this magical practice took the form of offering of blood sacrifice to atone for sin (near-eastern cults, including the Hebrews) or to feed the gods (sun-cults including the Aztecs), circumcision (Egyptians, Hebrews, Muslims, and several others), and of engaging in reflective fasts or voluntary privation (such as giving something up for Lent or fasting during Ramadan). In giving up something one dearly loves, one shows both devotion to goodness and sincerity in one’s desires—and communicates that one is available to be bought by the god who is willing to honor one’s sacrifice.
Every form of magic you’ve heard of, from the transubstantiation of the Catholic Mass to the necromancy in the hoariest of horror stories, slots neatly into one or more of the above categories.
The Stuff of Thought
These modes of magical thought and behavior exist in every religious tradition, and existed prior to advanced civilizational development (they were recorded universally among previously-uncontacted tribal groups during the anthropological and missionary pushes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).3 They are thus independent of religious tradition, and therefore may reasonably be inferred to exist in the human mind on something like an instinctual level.4
Why should this be so?
Perhaps because all of them are useful on multiple levels, and confer a serious survival advantage on those individuals who are able to slip into them.
Some examples
Both in courting and in hierarchies, propitiation greases the wheels of human relationship. It also works as the seed for delayed gratification strategies required for long-bets and risky ventures.
In clannish groups, fertility cult orgies (scheduled and conducted at certain times of the year), help control intra-clan adultery and cheating by allowing strictly scheduled, chemically-assisted times in which one might let one’s hair down and go hog-wild. In some societies, this has the recognized benefit of maximizing genetic diversity, and the orgies are so arranged as to discourage the mating of those members of the clan who live nearer one another.
Sympathetic Magic (a.k.a. Homeopathy), from which such orgies are derived, also aids life in hunter-gatherer, herding, and farming societies. Conforming the rhythms of one’s life and work to the rhythms of the land conserves energy, orients one toward learning from one’s environment, and gives one the ability to see into the future.
Such thinking also lies at the root of many folk-medicine practices that are biochemically efficacious, such as the discovery of hormesis (the process by which one can inure oneself to certain toxins, drugs, etc., as Westley did with the fictional “iocane powder” in The Princess Bride), and is key to Nassim Taleb’s insights on the phenomenon of Antifragility, which was inspired by his reading on the Greek uses of hormesis.Word Magic—the reification of language—has obvious benefits for both solidifying communication and contributing to the continuity of culture. It also aids in the accumulation of wisdom and in the exercise of authority (essential in a hierarchical species).
Categorical Transgression—the blending of things which nature does not blend—is the essence of creativity and invention. Those animals who are willing/able to make the categorical leap between one thing and another are those that exhibit creativity and the willingness to re-order the world around them to create survival advantage.
Divine Provocation is an expression of the capacity for brinksmanship. From insects to humans, every organism that regularly interacts with other peer organisms seems to exhibit it. In humans it shows up in early childhood development, where toddlers break and jump off things as part of learning how the world works. The extreme (and odd) testing and probing behaviors that show up with Divine Provocation religious practice correlate heavily to what biologist Bret Weinstein describes as “Explorer Modes” and what philosopher Jordan Hall describes as “Valley Crossing Behaviors” (as does Categorical Transgression).
The Fragility of the Rational
The tools that make modernist civilization work are methodical, rational, incremental, and measured. These are tools which humans must stretch to grasp, but once grasped prove almost infinitely useful. While astonishingly powerful, this way of thinking forces the human mind into a mechanistic rut, which, when too thoroughly inhabited, often feels cold and uncongenial.
Human cognition instead naturally gravitates towards the intuitive and the “magical”—we have to be taught to be methodical, and it comes unnaturally enough that we’ve given it a name that encapsulates its alien severity: “intellectual discipline.” We must learn this discipline at the feet of those among us who are so bent as to approach things in a mechanistic fashion by default (i.e. autists, rationalists, etc.).
The results of this mismatch between the cognition we’re naturally inclined to, and the cognition our civilization requires, shows up most markedly at times of profound stress—some of which correlate with particular parts of the civilizational cycle.
If you overbalance a civilization too far into the realm of the efficient and the rational, you create a general feeling that “things just don’t fit right” and “something is missing,” which religious folks call “spiritual hunger.” I tend to view “spiritual hunger” as a lust for wildness, for the aesthetically fulfilling, for human connection, and for the gratification of the non-rational parts of our nature. With the activation of this thirst for transcendence, the love of a well-ordered civilization ebbs away unless something within the civilization can be found to slake it.
On the other hand, if you fail to pass the education and mental training down for even a generation, you risk an entire civilization losing its ability to think rationally, or to engage complex systems, using any tools other than the intuitive thinking kit that we’re all born with (i.e. magical plus linear cause-and-effect reasoning).
The Tipping Balance
We stand at a unique point in human history, a shining window of time when material culture has reached a zenith in its ability to gratify those of our mechanical needs that are easy to identify (food, drink, erotic stimulation, novelty) while the civilization itself has reached a nadir in its ability to identify (much less to meet) the non-rational/non-quantifiable needs of its people...just as the global demographic transition is in the process of crashing every economy in the world.
All of this is occurring at a civilizational moment when the largest and most powerful voting block in the United States is one that, by and large, never received an education that gave them the tools of intellectual discipline required for the maintenance and continuance of a complex technological civilization.
When the world shifts unpredictably, when heuristics and methodologies are inadequate to the demands of the moment, and when existential crises loom on every horizon, people can’t just sit idly by. They must do something.
And so, individual by individual, community by community, they return to the deep wells of magical thinking, with an emphasis on spontaneous, widespread, independent magical practice in all its forms.
Propitiation is coming back in the form of voluntary fasting, the purchase of indulgences (gifts to environmental charities, etc.), and various forms of asceticism (veganism, no-fap, etc.).
Word Magic was a big deal before the Reformation. It then went into a bit of a decline before it was revived by Hegel in the 19th century, and also was championed by Helena Petrona Blavatsky (the founder of the Theosophical movement) whose influence is now—through entities such as the Lucius Trust—pervasive at the top of the International Governance, NGO, and similar sectors. Incantations, namings, prayers, etc. are all forms of Word Magic. You’ve engaged in it yourself—politically correct language games and sloganeering, with each microculture developing its own peculiar forms, all spring from the most basic intuition of word-magic: that thought, language, and consensus define and shape reality (this is also called “social constructionism”).
Homeopathy rears its head today not just in homeopathic medicine,5 but also in the re-imagining of voting as a quasi-religious duty, the belief that “supporting our leaders” by putting flags and other icons in one’s social media profile might have a meaningful effect on the outcome of a war or a cultural battle, the intuition that dosing oneself with spike proteins will render one immune to damage from spike proteins, and the notion that if one stages public rituals at which race/gender/subcultural relations are properly modeled it will convince the world to abandon the ways of injustice.
Categorical Transgression seeks to call forth the divine through the erasure of all constraining categories, such as race, culture, religion, sexuality, class, age, species, and especially (at least currently) those of male and female.
Most importantly, almost everyone, everywhere is reaching for Divine Provocation (the modernist name for this is “accelerationism”) in an attempt to try to provoke the universe into forcing our world back into some kind of equilibrium.
The Sanity of Insanity and the Birth of the Future
We live in a world where our collective ability to make sense of our own civilization (based as it is on cognitive tools that are difficult for humans) is breaking down, so the entire human race at once is reaching for our basic intuitions to make everything better, and everyone at once is alighting on magic, incantation, sacrifice, bargaining with the gods, trying to remake the world into something sensible through force of will, and by provoking contradictions that must resolve themselves. It is the nature of the gods to create order out of chaos, and if we are sliding into chaos no matter what we do, is it not better to get it over with by maximizing the chaos in order to provoke a new, intelligible order as soon as possible?
Insane, sure.
But it is how the human mind works. In the absence of any alternative, humans default to magic.
This is perhaps the most potent wildcard of all, which is why I left it for last in the deck. The inclination towards magic is provoked by times such as ours, and the kind of magic provoked is of an especially powerful and potent kind, because it makes the unthinkable thinkable. It is exactly what one might reach for if one wishes to unmake a world (or a view of the world), to burn it down and build upon its ruins something new and hitherto unimagined.
Humans everywhere are now playing with matches. Global leaders and their patrons are attempting to finally bring about a techno-fascist utopia, religious folks and social conservatives of all stripes are beginning a hard push for a return to their imagined pasts, radicals are sensing the teetering power structures and laying their plans to move in, and everywhere there is a sense of bubbling chaos, of a world trying to catch and hold its breath before diving headlong into the abyss.
The human capacity for sorcery is the ultimate wildcard, because magical thinking pushes people to do things that defy their own stated interests, that might even work directly against what they hold most dear, because anything that breaks the world loose from its terrifying death-spiral is better than waiting to hit bottom.
Faced with a species that does that in response to civilizational stress, the only prediction one might make with complete confidence is that all bets are off. As J. Michael Straczynski observed:
“No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.”
Next time I will reflect on what, in light of these possible futures and wildcards, I think will actually happen, and why.
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In the meantime, I invite you to post any corrections or arguments in the comments, or send them directly to me at feedback@jdsawyer.net.
1Originating, as far as I can tell, from Bret Weinstein, building upon Richard Dawkins’s argument that culture is part of the phenotypic expression of the human genome.
2In fairness, they stole this idea from Hereticism.
3Documented at length in The Golden Bough by James George Frazier, Eternity in Their Hearts by Don Richardson, and many others
4This would make them analogous to Jung’s archetypes, except that those are potent metaphorical images (i.e. symbols) rather than modes of thought (i.e. protocols).
5In homeopathic tinctures, the nature of a substance is said to be “energetically” imprinted upon water that it was once in contact with, and therefore that water can supposedly be used to stimulate your immune system to fight off infection or poisoning (rather like a vaccine).