[A-List] Magical Thinking

[Bill Totten]

The Archdruid Report (June 02 2010)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial
society


As I write these words, the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico
continues unchecked. It seems almost obscene to suggest that
anything positive might come out of an oil spill that is already
the largest in US history, and of course it's true that whatever
good might be salvaged from the situation will offer little
consolation to the ravaged ecosystems and destroyed communities of
the Gulf. Still, as teacher and Foxfire founder Eliot Wigginton
noted, learning is only made possible by failure, and a failure
this gargantuan and many-sided can at least offer us some pointed
lessons for the future.

Most of those, to be sure, should have been obvious a long time
ago. The fantasy of technological potency that leads the great
majority of Americans, and slightly smaller majorities elsewhere in
the industrial world, to think that any imaginable difficulty must
have a promptly available technical solution, has been wearing thin
for some time. Still, the spectacle of one of the world's largest
oil companies trying to shove chunks of used automobile tire down
an undersea gusher in a failed attempt to stanch the flow has
enough of a comic opera quality to lead to hard questions about
just how well prepared we are to handle the downside of our own
technologies once those have been pushed to the wall by the hard
limits of geology and physics.

It will take time for those questions to be asked by more than a
very small minority, and even longer for the answers to find their
way into the collective conversation of our time. Right now, a
great many people seem to be stuck in the same kind of unreason
that led travelers stranded by the Eyjafjallajokull eruptions
earlier this spring to pound their fists on airline employees'
desks and demand that somebody do something to get the ash out of
the air. Equally useless demands that BP, or the US government, or
somebody, get out there and stop the oil spill right away, have
filled the media of late. It seems very hard for many people to
grasp that all the possible ways to stop the spill right away have
been tried and have failed, and that the one real hope left - the
hard work of drilling a relief well next to the one that's spewing
oil into the Gulf, so that cement can be injected far enough down
the borehole to matter - can't be completed before August at the
earliest, and could possibly take until the end of the year.

The gap between that bitter reality and the fantasy of instant
techno-fulfillment that plays so large a role in the modern mind
has been filled, on most peak oil websites, with a flurry of
comments proposing a dizzying assortment of impractical gimmicks to
deal with the crisis. Perhaps the saddest of these is the
insistence, repeated even by people who ought to know better, that
the US ought to use a nuclear weapon against the well.

This particular bit of uninspired lunacy takes various forms. Some
suggest setting off a warhead at the wellhead; somehow they've
managed not to notice the impact of the resulting tsunami on all
the oil platforms and pipelines in the Gulf, just for starters.
Others insist that a warhead ought to be lowered down the well
bore; of course this fails to deal with the fact that the bore is
jammed with wrecked drilling hardware, not to mention full of hot,
sand-laden crude oil blasting up from the depths at a pressure of
13,000 pounds per square inch, not much less than that used in
industrial machinery to make water cut holes in solid metal. Still
others propose drilling a hole down next to the existing well and
putting the warhead down that; here again, by the time a hole wide
enough to admit even a small tactical warhead could be drilled to
that level, the relief wells now under way will be long finished.

The notion that a nuclear weapon is the answer to BP's undersea
gusher is conclusive evidence, if any more were needed, that
reasonable thought has gone right out the window. Admittedly it's
only fair to say that this happened with nuclear weapons a long
time ago. To a frightening extent, the US nuclear arsenal has
become a phallic talisman of national omnipotence that serves
mostly to help Americans distract themselves from the waning of the
real foundations of their country's former hegemony. If that
arsenal ever ceases to be militarily useful - and it's probably a
safe bet that China, to name only one likely candidate, has scores
of laboratories working right now on technologies to make that
happen, paid by the billions a year we spend to import salad
shooters and cheap electronics - our national nervous breakdown may
be one for the record books.

Still, there's a sense in which it's unfair to critique the
proponents of nuking BP's oil well merely because their plan won't
work and could very easily make an already catastrophic situation
even worse. These are difficulties in putting the plan into
practice, and it's not supposed to be put into practice. It serves,
rather, as an incantation, a way to banish the appalling awareness
that neither you, nor I, nor anyone else except the fairly small
number people actually struggling to deal with the well, can do
anything about it.

Incantations of this sort make up a remarkably large fraction of
the talk about peak oil and the future of industrial society these
days. Get into an online conversation on the subject, for example,
and you can be all but certain that at least one of the people
involved will pipe up with a plan to solve it. It doesn't matter at
all that, much more than nine times out of ten, the person
proposing the plan is doing nothing to make it happen, and neither
is anybody else. The plan is not meant to happen. It's meant to
dispell the profoundly troubling sense that the future is spinning
out of control and there's not actually all that much that we can
do about it.

Grand plans of this kind are hardly the only sort of incantation
being chanted at the moment. A claim splashed across the
cornucopian end of the internet in recent weeks insists that the
world has enough readily available crude oil to keep going at the
present rate of production for 800 years. To describe this as the
end product of a horse's digestive tract is to insult honest
manure; not one scrap of evidence backs such a claim, but then
evidence is beside the point when you're composing an incantation.

The logic that underlies this kind of incantatory communication is
often called "magical thinking" nowadays. There's a deep irony in
this phrase, since this kind of thinking is exactly what mages -
actual practitioners of magic - don't do. I've generally avoided
talking about magic in these essays, but this is a context where
that can't be avoided. I'd like to ask those of my readers who have
religious or rationalist objections to magic to keep reading; they
may be surprised by some of what follows.

Probably the best place to start that discussion is with an elegant
volume that's sitting on the desk next to my keyboard as I type
these words. Scarlet Imprint, a small British magical publisher,
has just released an anthology about the crisis of our time {1}
titled XVI; students of magical symbolism will recognize this
gnomic label as a reference to the sixteenth arcanum of the Tarot,
which shows a tower being blown to smithereens. I have an essay in
it; so do sixteen other contemporary mages; I'd be indulging in
absurdity if I claimed to agree with more than a part of what's in
the book, but one thing not to be found in its pages is the sort of
"magical thinking" just mentioned.

There's a reason for this. One of the most distinguished 20th
century theoreticians and practitioners of magic, Dion Fortune,
defined magic as "the art and science of causing change in
consciousness in accordance with will". (If that doesn't sound like
a recipe for making broomsticks fly, you're beginning to catch on.)
The basic tools of the mage are will and imagination; the raw
materials he or she works with are symbolism and ritual - "poetry
in the realm of acts", as Fortune's near-contemporary Ross Nichols
defined that last term. The point of magic, as Fortune's definition
suggests, is changing states and contents of consciousness; it can
have effects on the material world as well, but that normally
involves influencing beings that bridge the gap between mind and
matter - you and me, for example.

Exactly what can and can't be done by way of will and imagination,
working through emotionally powerful symbols and ritual
psychodrama, is a question on which not all mages agree. Still, I
don't know of anyone in the field who claims to be able to levitate
a broom, say, or to do any of the other things that make up the
stock in trade of fantasy magicians. If magic instead of science
had come out on top in the reality wars of the late Renaissance, we
might all be watching movies in which mysterious scientists in
white lab coats mutter algebraic formulae, climb astride giant test
tubes, and zoom off to the Moon; compare that to real science, and
you've got some sense of the gap between Harry Potter and real
magic.

This is why serious mages generally roll their eyes when somebody
comes along and insists that we ought to be able to solve physical
problems - for example, shortages of material substances - with
what amounts to magic. This happens quite often; I can usually
count on hearing from somebody every month or so who thinks that
because I've written several books on magic, and serve as the
presiding officer of a contemporary Druid order, I ought to agree
with them that we can conjure some replacement for petroleum out of
thin air, or in some other way produce a world much more
comfortable than the one we've got, by some change in consciousness
or other.

They tend to be rather discomfited when I explain to them, as
gently as possible, that they've made a very elementary mistake in
magical theory. The technical term for it is confounding the
planes; "the planes of existence", an old axiom has it, "are
discrete and not continuous" - which means in plain English that
mind is mind, matter is matter, and making the transition from mind
to matter is not an easy, much less an automatic, thing; it has to
be done in specific ways, and with careful attention to the very
real limits of the material world.

Now this does not mean that magic is useless in the face of the
predicament of the industrial world. The problem is that the
changes in consciousness that would actually do some good are
changes that next to nobody in the industrial world is willing to
make: for example, a shift in priorities that deliberately embraces
poverty, accepting a rich personal, intellectual, and social life
as a substitute for, or even an improvement on, the material
extravagance that the industrial nations currently offer their more
favored inmates. That change in consciousness is certainly
accessible to each and every one of us; human beings just like us
have been making it for many thousands of years; but it requires a
rare willingness to step outside of the approved habits and ideas
of modern industrial cultures. Striking a rebellious pose and
claiming originality is very fashionable these days; actually
rejecting the conventional wisdom of our time, and thinking
thoughts that conflict with those of one's contemporaries, is less
common now than it was in the supposedly conformist Fifties.

I've come to suspect that one of the principal reasons for that,
and more generally for the remarkable way in which today's
industrial societies are continuing to sleepwalk toward the abyss,
is precisely the habit of incantation discussed earlier in this
post. The internet is the natural home of incantation; discussions
on email lists and online forums, bereft of the subtleties of
normal human communication, often turn into a duel of incantations
that the loudest and most intransigent voice generally wins.

Now it's worth noting that incantation is a tool, and like any
other tool, it can be used or misused. There are plenty of contexts
in which the skillful use of incantations can have beneficial
effects. Assure yourself repeatedly that you can accomplish some
task that is in fact within your powers, for example, and your odds
of accomplishing it go up significantly; assure yourself repeatedly
that it's out of your reach, and your chances of failure do the
same. Still, using incantations as a nonchemical tranquilizer to
ward off stress, and to assure yourself that everything is fine
when everything is not fine, is much more problematic. In a time of
crisis when keeping a level head and going on with life is crucial,
it can have a valid place, but if it's being used to drown out the
still small voice that warns of approaching danger, it's an
invitation to disaster. In next week's post, however, I propose to
offer a counterspell.

Link {1}: http://www.scarletimprint.com/xvi.htm
_____

John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of
Druids in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative
spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of
more than twenty books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser,
2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the
Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He lives in Cumberland,
Maryland. 

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/06/magical-thinking.html


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