The magical thinking of Westerners

Magical ThinkingThere’s a rich irony, in other words, in my reader’s insistence that magical thinking is less useful than the technical thinking he champions, because magical thinking is exactly the form of human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and goals that technical thinking handles so poorly. Americans dream of living in suburbs not because suburbs have any particular virtue-–most of them lack the amenities of city and countryside alike, while sharing the worst features of both--but because the suburban house, surrounded by its protective moat of grass, is a magical symbol brimfull of potent cultural meanings. Americans drive preposterously oversized and overpowered cars, not because these are better than smaller and more sensible vehicles in any objective way, but because they magically symbolize the freedom and power most Americans long ago surrendered to the machinery of a mass society. For that matter, the hallucinated wealth that keeps our mostly fictional economy churning away consists of sheer enchantment, with even less tangible substance behind it than the moonbeams and fairy dust of a child’s wonder tale.

To speak of these issues in terms of magic is not, by the way, just a metaphor. Dion Fortune, one of the premier magical theorists of the 20th century, defined magic as the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will. It’s predictable that a society fixated on seeing its own technology as the be-all and end-all of human achievement would misunderstand magic as a kind of failed physical technology, but that predictability makes modern attitudes about magic no less misleading. This is hardly the place for a detailed discussion of magic, but for our present purposes it can be seen as the use of psychologically potent symbolism to influence consciousness and, through consciousness, the universe as we experience it. The advertising campaigns that seduce so many people into buying, say, fizzy brown sugar water, by associating this product with symbols of happiness, self-esteem, or love, are good examples of magic at work--a debased magic, force-fitted into the manipulative mold of physical technology, but magic nonetheless.