Magical Thinking

                What makes thinking magical thinking? There is a very easy answer to this question of course: magical thinking is any thinking I believe is foolish or immature. In this sense magical thinking is simply a pejorative phrase I apply to other people’s mistaken notions. Can we define magical thinking in a more precise sense though? We can start with an example I have heard enough times to take as an exemplar of what it means to think magically. Of course, every time I hear this tale it transpires in a different place. For this reason I have a mild suspicion it is apocryphal though I don’t know this for certain nor is it relevant for even if this story were literally, factually true it is being used as an ‘urban legend’. So, either in New Guinea or ‘somewhere in Africa I forget where’ or perhaps in the Amazonian jungle there is a belief that a certain ’magical salve’ stops bullets. Of course, since every such anecdote has a moral, the hapless proponents of this belief rush foolishly into battle with opponents bearing firearms and are duly slaughtered. For the sake of argument let’s take this story at face value. What does it mean to call such a belief magical? This question has nothing to do with the salve. There may actually BE a salve-like substance whose physical properties stop bullets (though no one has discovered one) and if we are serious Humeans we can only know by trying. The ‘Somewhere in Africans’ may then have simply been making a physical experiment that like many physical experiments failed. This is not the point of the tale however. It is usually implied that the salve has some occult property imparted to it or activated within it by some ritual process. The bullet salve then is not just an expression of techne but of a certain sort of techne. The kind of techne we call magical because (I suppose) it involves a ritual or symbolic element used to activate a power in nature that was previously hidden or unsuspected. This is an important precision for there is a false belief that magic is ‘supernatural’. ‘Supernatural’ is a specific term in catholic theology that is very misleading when applied, say, to non-western cultures. This is because they have no conception of magical operations as anything but natural to the extent that they think of their metaphysical basis at all. The only exception to this would be the one version of the tale I heard where the ‘witchdoctor’ was replaced by a ‘pastor’ and in that iteration the intervention is indeed assumed to be a ‘miracle’ in the Christian sense though miracles have no conceptual relation to magic.

                The moral of the story of course is that it is stupid to trust in a bullet salve because magical techne does not work whereas a certain ‘western’ techne (the gun) does. In a battle of our techne and their techne ours won. Therefore ours is comprehensively and not just contextually superior. Of course, the story itself it does not prove this at all unless we attribute to the ‘Somewhere in Africans’ a belief that magical operations are infallible. Magical forces cannot be summoned by any fool and even then they can fail in their effect. By the way, Western techne can fail in its effect too. Had the opponents of the ‘Somewhere in Africans’ been wielding 18^th century muskets they would have griped endlessly about misfires and general inaccuracy. Indeed, if you rushed into battle thinking you could snipe at individual targets with a flintlock you might well lose even to the bullet salve! Of course this is not the moral of the story. The tale exists to reinforce the lesson that magical techne fails intrinsically whereas a flintlock fails accidently. Again, if we are Humeans all this means is that flintlocks DO sometimes hit their targets. Alas, the Humean problem is that we cannot DENY the same of the salve. At some point a bullet salve may well stop a bullet while a badly designed firearm that wildly misses its target makes fools of the soldiers who trusted in its efficacy. If someday, ‘magical’ techne were to defeat Western techne we would have to reverse the story, or rather, others would reverse the story as it’s the winners who get to tell the tale. The true techne is the techne that wins the military showdown and though military victory is a good test of military techne it may not be a comprehensive test of all techne in all contexts.

                Now I do in fact have an intuition on what makes magical thinking magical if we are trying to use the word ‘magic’ in a conceptually precise way rather than just as a vague signifier for something we don’t like. It involves throwing away the supposed distinction between ‘magical’ and ‘scientific’ techne or ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ explanation. In my view these terms are propagandistic and dissolve anyway when we apply them to history or outside the context of western culture. I do think, however, there is a distinction between symbolic/vitalistic ontology and mechanist ontology and that this is the real difference we are grasping for when we tell the bullet salve tale. That is for another post however in what I hope is a continuing series that will take us not only outside the Western framework of thinking but down into its own bowels (and you will see the point of this scatological reference as we go).