Real Magic (Part III)
Plagues & Paradigm Shifts
“Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.”
-Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
There are some eerie parallels between the world of the late Middle Ages and our own equally-dismal COVID era. Pandemics seem to have a way of exposing society’s institutions. The medieval authorities didn’t know that viruses existed; the church could only uselessly suggest that God was displeased. And I’m sure we can all agree that the responses from our modern institutions of medicine, government, and media have been depressing and leave it at that. The realization that the authorities are incompetent is never a happy one, but we aren’t the first to slog through the gloom and pessimism that follows it.
Loss of faith in the church eventually led to a scientific revolution and the flowering of the Renaissance. The transition of authority from church to science is epitomized by the discovery that the Earth revolves around the sun. Any fool could see that the sun “moved” across the sky until the optical illusion was broken. This fundamental paradigm shift was born from the dark days of the plague. The point of this essay is to suggest that a loss of faith in our scientific institutions might trigger a similar quantum leap forward. It would be foolish to think such events are only in our past and not in our future.
Here’s my nomination for the illusion due to be overturned. We seem to be piloting our bodies through an external reality, sensing it with our minds. But maybe we’ve had it backwards this whole time. What if reality is actually a product of our minds? That was the essence of the magical tradition, opposed first by the church and now by science. Like any good paradigm shift, it sounds crazy. But consider these three pieces of evidence…
First up is the placebo effect. That’s when fake medical treatments, with no actual medicine in them, still have the mysterious power to improve our health. Medical science is forced to account for the fact that our beliefs about molecules undeniably alter their effects on our bodies. Testing new medicines with clinical trials only works by factoring that in.
Then there is the infamous double-slit experiment. Physics hit a wall when it figured out that small particles aren’t there when no one is looking. Instead, they exist as a range of possibilities. Physicists call this an “indeterminate quantum state”, which collapses down into a single reality when observed. It works kind of like email. Before you push send, an email could go to anyone. It is the act of clicking send that transforms the long list of possible recipients into a single actual recipient. Measuring small particles does the same thing; observation is an act of creation.
Finally, there are the psychedelic drugs that were at the root of the pre-Christian magical tradition. Perturbing the mind with these chemical compounds feels like snapping awake. It’s as though you’ve been mistaking a reflection in a mirror or a pond for reality. Any fracture in the mirror or a ripple in the pond dispels the illusion instantly. In the same way, chemically distorting the mind reveals the resulting reality to be a product of the mind. The old paradigm of mind as a product of reality falls away, just like the illusion of the sun “moving” across the sky.
It is not in the nature of authority to recognize its own impermanence. Our science-fiction stories reflect our assumption that the doctrine of science will propel us forever into the future. Church doctrine also represented itself as eternal, right up until the unwinding of history made it irrelevant. In defiance of the church, the best minds of the late Middle Ages responded to the crisis of their day by reviving an interest in the past. I submit to you that a reverence for the past and a rebellious attitude toward authority are just the tools we will need as we face the crisis of our day.