When I was in primary school in Scotland, forming "gangs" was one of the games that seemed to be pretty much universal. Someone who wanted to start a gang would link arms with a friend, then walk around the playground chanting "Who wants to be in our gang?" and collecting prospects. These gangs tended not to last more than one lunch hour, but the allure of joining up (even for such a limited time) was potent.
There seems to be something fundamental about humans that means we find being part of a group very seductive, and that seems to make us vulnerable to "hacks" that exploit this impulse to get us to do things, or be less critical of our stated beliefs*.
This is what sticks out for me from my friend Daniel's recent post about the kind of religion he objects to, and is sort of in the background of his most recent post about meme-responses to the situation in Ferguson. In both cases, it seems to me that people's membership of particular religious or ideological groups is blinding them to the unpleasant implications of things they believe. Of course, in relation to religion, this isn't a new idea. In fact, part of the core of the New Atheist suite of arguments against religion is the idea that religion makes people particularly vulnerable to this kind of hack.
Where New Atheism seems to me to fall down, is in the assumption that doing away with religion will do away with this quirk of human thought. You can see this in the way that New Atheism has itself become a gang of sorts** and begun to suffer from some of the problems that gang-ness tends to cause. In the case of the New Atheists, I'd characterise these as a tendency toward gatekeeping, the construction of various folk devils***, and falling in love with heroes. If you want more on gatekeeping or folk devils, Fred Clark at Slacktivist and the guys at Nonprophet Status do a pretty good job respectively****.
What I want to talk about right at the moment is heroes.
A hero is a person who, as a result of their achievements or statements, has been acclaimed as great and adopted as a representative of a certain group or ideology. This makes them slightly less human (in the sense of being a complete person with virtues, flaws, and frailties) in the eyes of their admirers, and tends to give their views more weight than those of the average person.
This can happen at a variety of scales, so you can be a globally-recognisably Hero of New Atheism or Feminism or Socialism, or a local hero like a parish priest or the leader of a chapter of the International Socialists. The most complete form of this, I would call something like "sainthood" - the point at which someone ceases to be human at all (usually after their death) and is pretty much pure symbol. I'd call Ghandi, John Lennon and Martin Luther King examples of this.
The problems inherent in having heroes are pretty clear, when you examine how this tends to work.
The first issue is that heroes tend to get more allowances for bad behaviour, because their status as group representatives makes them more valuable than the rank and file members. The most famous example of this is the sexual abuse problems within the Catholic church (and in that case it was exacerbated by Church policies designed explicitly to minimise scandal and thereby protect abusers) but anyone who's been a member of a group with an abusive but important member (anecdotal examples I've heard include socialist groups in Wellington, kink communities in the US, and a university pagan/shamanic society) knows that this is not a purely religious problem. There are also more public secular examples like the recent revelations about the BBC and British Conservative Party.
The second issue is that heroes tend to have their pronouncements heard and promulgated regardless of their merits. Having said something intelligent once is no guarantee of continuing to do this indefinitely. For example, I think Richard Dawkins is entirely correct about the logical extreme unlikeliness of God (at least in the majority of Church-doctrinal conceptions) existing. Meanwhile, his pronouncements on any issue relating to rape, sexual harassment (really women in general) or the relative danger posed by non-majority-white-people religions are woefully off-base, and yet are received as wisdom on the basis of his atheist thinking.
This is also true of other New Atheist heroes like Sam "torturing Muslims is super-cool" Harris and Christopher "the war in Iraq hasn't killed enough people, and by the way did I mention how women are biologically destined to be unfunny (whoops sorry that was a joke or maybe a secret plan to get more women being funny)" Hitchens. This is dangerous, because while there's no earthly reason for atheism to be associated with racism or sexism, an uncritical admiration of racist sexist people due to their status as atheist heroes is starting to build those links - at least in the minds of the wider public.
Did you notice, by the way, that in these previous two paragraphs I've stuck with the view that atheism is in and of itself a rational and logical point of view? It's entirely possible for a person to be right about (or good at) one or more things (and receive appropriate acclaim for that) while still being wrong about other things, or even an actually terrible human being. This brings me to my final problem with heroes.
Communities who have heroes often feel the need to defend them, because of their status as community representatives. More than once when I've raised Dawkins' or Hitchens' problems with women, or Harris's racism in a discussion, I've been told that I'm attempting to smear them in order to discredit their advocacy for atheism (and presumably by extension atheism as a point of view). This is not an uncommon phenomenon in comment threads around the web.
I was really taken with the article "How To Be A Fan of Problematic Things"***** and I think that probably has the core of the principle you need for dealing with problematic thinkers. Unfortunately, heroising someone tends to short-circuit the capacity for that kind of critical analysis.
___
* I'm not going to go the route of suggesting that intelligent, well-educated people can't genuinely believe in, say, the Biblical account of Creation (as interpreted by Ken Ham) and must therefore be lying. I do think though, that there are probably different levels or classes of belief depending on how much conscious attention has been put into squaring them with the world we live in and their implications for your other beliefs. I think that humans are capable of holding sincere yet contradictory beliefs so long as they don't pay too much attention to the contradiction. There's something disingenuous about pouring mental effort into ignoring or handwaving those contradictions, but I think there are people who simply aren't fully aware of them. Of course, there are also people who deliberately espouse beliefs they don't really hold for reasons of Magic.
** In a recent internet argument I got told that I was wrong to think of atheism as a movement and that I was trying to pull the classic Christian apologist swifty of claiming that atheism is a religion and therefore atheists are religious and should go and vanish in a puff of logic or something. While it's true that atheism per se is actually just a single component of a wider worldview, I think there's such a thing as New Atheism which tends to include a specific set of views in addition to disbelief in god(s). I also think that once you have conferences dedicated to your interest or point of view, you can safely be called a movement or at least an informal organisation.
***At some point this will be a link to another post where I unpack this idea a bit. In the mean time, what I'm talking about here is a form of demonisation strawman where you construct a position so vile or ridiculous that opposition to it is a basic human response. You then justify your own extreme statements or actions by claiming that you oppose the folk devil that you've built (and covertly including a much wider group under the same umbrella term). Classic examples include "the humourless PC brigade", "delusional religious people", "lazy welfare queens" etc. It's important to understand that I'm not claiming that examples of these classes of people don't exist - just that they're rarer in their purest forms than the constructers of folk devils like to admit.
**** Fred Clark tends to talk about gatekeeping in an American white evangelist context, and the NS fellas talk more about islamophobia than other classes of folk devil, but they'll both give you some grounding in the ways these concepts work.
***** For bonus points check out this article about what happens when things that didn't start out racist become racist in a new context.
Showing posts with label beliefs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beliefs. Show all posts
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Lest we forget
ANZAC Day has always made me a bit uncomfortable. I suspect this is partly a consequence of being brought up Quaker(ish)* - I have an inherent dislike of armies and militarism that makes the spectacle of hundreds of servicemen and women in uniform filling up the streets in the days leading up to ANZAC Day feel a bit like an invasion. I also did a research project about the treatment of conscientious objectors and their families when I was in high school which left me with a very nasty taste in my mouth about the RSA.
All this is to say that I come from a point fairly widely outside of the mainstream here. I realise that for many people the point of the day is to honour those who did what they felt was right and made the ultimate sacrifice, but I feel like the strong involvement of the military poisons that. It seems to me that the most important lesson we can learn from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign is never to repeat it. Not just to avoid the ridiculous strategic and tactical mistakes that led to the monstrous waste of life, but to value human life more highly and to be highly critical of government's reasons for extinguishing it.
Of all the wars we have involved ourselves in over the last hundred years, I think only a tiny minority of those have been in any way justifiable. Disturbingly, I see increasing attempts to try and recast World War 1 in this light. That can't be allowed to happen.
Moreover, I think it's important (especially in regard to World War 1) to honour equally those who refused to fight. New Zealand conscientious objectors in World War 1 were deported to the front and subject to horrific punishments, many of which took place in No Man's Land - thus putting them in more physical danger than the actual combatants. You can read about this in Archibald Baxter's book We Will Not Cease.
Honouring the dead who acted in good faith is a noble thing, but perhaps it's time we paid less attention to Rupert Brooke and Laurence Binyon, and more to Wilfred Owen and Rowan Atkinson.
*My parents are anything but dogmatic, but my "mental furniture" is fairly Quaker in the same way that the mental furniture of ex-Catholics includes the instructions on the right calls and responses and when to sit, stand, or kneel in the course of a Mass.
All this is to say that I come from a point fairly widely outside of the mainstream here. I realise that for many people the point of the day is to honour those who did what they felt was right and made the ultimate sacrifice, but I feel like the strong involvement of the military poisons that. It seems to me that the most important lesson we can learn from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign is never to repeat it. Not just to avoid the ridiculous strategic and tactical mistakes that led to the monstrous waste of life, but to value human life more highly and to be highly critical of government's reasons for extinguishing it.
Of all the wars we have involved ourselves in over the last hundred years, I think only a tiny minority of those have been in any way justifiable. Disturbingly, I see increasing attempts to try and recast World War 1 in this light. That can't be allowed to happen.
Moreover, I think it's important (especially in regard to World War 1) to honour equally those who refused to fight. New Zealand conscientious objectors in World War 1 were deported to the front and subject to horrific punishments, many of which took place in No Man's Land - thus putting them in more physical danger than the actual combatants. You can read about this in Archibald Baxter's book We Will Not Cease.
Honouring the dead who acted in good faith is a noble thing, but perhaps it's time we paid less attention to Rupert Brooke and Laurence Binyon, and more to Wilfred Owen and Rowan Atkinson.
*My parents are anything but dogmatic, but my "mental furniture" is fairly Quaker in the same way that the mental furniture of ex-Catholics includes the instructions on the right calls and responses and when to sit, stand, or kneel in the course of a Mass.
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Lobotomy
Way back in 2011, in an attempt to stop neglecting this blog so much, I reviewed a terrible movie I'd watched called Asylum. If you can't be bothered going back and reading it my post in full, the movie was about teenagers being stalked and murdered by the ghost of a sadistic psychiatrist who wielded lobotomy picks as weapons. It was really very bad.
Anyhow, one of the things I mentioned in that review was that it was that the non-stupid bits of the killer psychiatrist's story loosely mirrored the life and work of Dr. Walter Freeman, the American physician who pioneered and did much to popularise the transorbital "icepick" lobotomy. I thought that it was a shame that Asylum ignored this connection in favour of really dumb slasher-backstory, because I feel like Freeman is kind of a tragic figure. He genuinely seems to have been motivated by what he saw as the best interests of people who would otherwise have been confined to state asylums.
The Psychologist has just put up a really interesting article about letters to Freeman from his patients and his responses - it's a really fascinating look at the way lobotomy was viewed at the time, and how it was able to continue for so long.
(Hat-tip to Mind Hacks for the link.)
Anyhow, one of the things I mentioned in that review was that it was that the non-stupid bits of the killer psychiatrist's story loosely mirrored the life and work of Dr. Walter Freeman, the American physician who pioneered and did much to popularise the transorbital "icepick" lobotomy. I thought that it was a shame that Asylum ignored this connection in favour of really dumb slasher-backstory, because I feel like Freeman is kind of a tragic figure. He genuinely seems to have been motivated by what he saw as the best interests of people who would otherwise have been confined to state asylums.
The Psychologist has just put up a really interesting article about letters to Freeman from his patients and his responses - it's a really fascinating look at the way lobotomy was viewed at the time, and how it was able to continue for so long.
(Hat-tip to Mind Hacks for the link.)
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Magic: part 4 - A practical example
Remember way back in the first one of these where I said I thought the distinction between "Magick" and stage magic was something of a false dichotomy? Here's what I mean: watch the video below - for as long as you can stand at least. Sorry for the random German subtitles - the version I watched initially has now been taken down.
Right. That woman's name is Kiesha Crowther, she calls herself Little Grandmother (here is her amazing personal website) and she is a Magus.
Depending on your personal definition of "Magus" you may well have a number of objections to that assertion. Her video is hokey as all get-out, and clearly bunk. Water is demonstrably not entirely made of crystals, there are almost certainly no "scientists" planning to hand out your personal stock of magic crystals to the people of Fukushima and dump them into the radioactive holding ponds because "love is stronger than radiation", and the idea that you personally will definitely have a large stock of magic crystals lying around is bizarre*. Moreover, if you've clicked through to her site you'll see that she's made a number of very bold claims about her supposed psychic abilities and the high degrees she holds in Native American traditional magics - these are all almost certainly lies as well.
But this misses the point.
A stage magician is not judged on their ability to actually saw people in half and magically heal them on the spot. A stage magician is judged on their ability to draw an audience into a consensus, misdirect their attention and provide a pleasing illusion that they have sawed someone in half. This takes a level of control over human perception which approaches the truly magical in the hands of a masterful practitioner - for a spectacular example check out this guy. Similarly, you can only judge the power of a Magus like Little Grandmother when you understand their true goal. In this case it's pretty simple - money, and the prestige necessary to create more money.
For those of you who didn't manage the whole video try it again, for those who did - pay close attention. Notice how crafted the whole thing is. She really does try to cover as many generically-New Age bases as she can, and even goes so far as to vaguely allude to some sort of Evil Big Government conspiracy to suppress True Knowledge toward the end there to try and bring in the survivalists. This is a magical ritual. She is trying to draw power from her followers to increase her stature and pull in some energy-in-the-form-of-money at the same time. The fact that her self-claimed powers are nonsense is entirely irrelevant because it's all misdirection - it's a carefully constructed mirage designed to hook into the cultural obsessions of largely white, fairly affluent, mostly-Americans, and me circa 1995.
And while she's no Crowley, Kiesha Crowther is powerful enough for her own ends. So long as she maintains her ritual Face Of Sincerity, keeps posing with massive crystals, and refuses to shut up she'll keep on getting speaking engagements and requests to run workshops and do rituals. She wields sufficient cultural force to have at least some of her detractors shouted down and shunned (if you really want you can check out the controversy on the New Age web here, but be warned - it's a hell of a rabbit hole). She's even been smart enough to keep her mythology sufficiently white-bread to leave her a back door out if she ever decides to "renounce" it all and "convert" to a more conservative racket like fundamentalist Evangelicalism.
Manipulation of the gap between perception and reality, resulting in a massive increase of personal power.
Magic.
_______
*Possibly less bizarre if you're one of the "Tribe Of Many Colours" she's addressing in this video, but still.
Right. That woman's name is Kiesha Crowther, she calls herself Little Grandmother (here is her amazing personal website) and she is a Magus.
Depending on your personal definition of "Magus" you may well have a number of objections to that assertion. Her video is hokey as all get-out, and clearly bunk. Water is demonstrably not entirely made of crystals, there are almost certainly no "scientists" planning to hand out your personal stock of magic crystals to the people of Fukushima and dump them into the radioactive holding ponds because "love is stronger than radiation", and the idea that you personally will definitely have a large stock of magic crystals lying around is bizarre*. Moreover, if you've clicked through to her site you'll see that she's made a number of very bold claims about her supposed psychic abilities and the high degrees she holds in Native American traditional magics - these are all almost certainly lies as well.
But this misses the point.
A stage magician is not judged on their ability to actually saw people in half and magically heal them on the spot. A stage magician is judged on their ability to draw an audience into a consensus, misdirect their attention and provide a pleasing illusion that they have sawed someone in half. This takes a level of control over human perception which approaches the truly magical in the hands of a masterful practitioner - for a spectacular example check out this guy. Similarly, you can only judge the power of a Magus like Little Grandmother when you understand their true goal. In this case it's pretty simple - money, and the prestige necessary to create more money.
For those of you who didn't manage the whole video try it again, for those who did - pay close attention. Notice how crafted the whole thing is. She really does try to cover as many generically-New Age bases as she can, and even goes so far as to vaguely allude to some sort of Evil Big Government conspiracy to suppress True Knowledge toward the end there to try and bring in the survivalists. This is a magical ritual. She is trying to draw power from her followers to increase her stature and pull in some energy-in-the-form-of-money at the same time. The fact that her self-claimed powers are nonsense is entirely irrelevant because it's all misdirection - it's a carefully constructed mirage designed to hook into the cultural obsessions of largely white, fairly affluent, mostly-Americans, and me circa 1995.
And while she's no Crowley, Kiesha Crowther is powerful enough for her own ends. So long as she maintains her ritual Face Of Sincerity, keeps posing with massive crystals, and refuses to shut up she'll keep on getting speaking engagements and requests to run workshops and do rituals. She wields sufficient cultural force to have at least some of her detractors shouted down and shunned (if you really want you can check out the controversy on the New Age web here, but be warned - it's a hell of a rabbit hole). She's even been smart enough to keep her mythology sufficiently white-bread to leave her a back door out if she ever decides to "renounce" it all and "convert" to a more conservative racket like fundamentalist Evangelicalism.
Manipulation of the gap between perception and reality, resulting in a massive increase of personal power.
Magic.
_______
*Possibly less bizarre if you're one of the "Tribe Of Many Colours" she's addressing in this video, but still.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
On picking and choosing your traditions
We had a pretty uneventful Hallowe'en Chez Wolfboy. A couple of kids came by, we gave them some toffees and they went away neither us or them any the richer for the experience (unless you account for enrichment by toffee, I suppose).
Earlier in the evening we'd taken the childer to some church's alternative un-Hallowe'en do in order to satisfy my wife's curiosity. It was all right, well attended by a wide sampling of the local community and obviously entertaining for the children if their parents could afford the variety of rides and bouncy castles etc. on offer. The insistence on ignoring Hallowe'en even as it filled the streets around us was a bit strange though.
I don't hold with the idea that Hallowe'en is in some way an "evil" festival. It makes more sense to consider it a shadow of Easter - the acknowledgement of death and decay that mirrors the celebration of life and rebirth. I do think that there are some problems with the way it's observed here in New Zealand though.
Firstly (and most obviously) it's the wrong time of year. This is a problem it shares with all our church-derived holidays. They began life as pagan seasonal holidays before being co-opted by Christianity, but since the church ignores their seasonal nature in favour of having a unified calendar around the world we antipodeans end up celebrating all our seasonal festivals in anti-sync. Hallowe'en has a logical psychic resonance as an autumnal festival - acknowledging the decay that is necessary for renewal and honouring Death as a mirror to Easter's birth-feast in the spring.
Secondly, I think we've picked up the wrong tradition. In Scotland, where I spent my childhood between the ages of 6 and 13, there's a tradition known as guising. Guising is almost the same as trick-or-treating - you still dress up and go call on the neighbours - but with a crucial difference. In order to get a treat, a guiser needs to do a "turn" - sing a song, tell some jokes, recite a poem, whatever. This turns the festival into a real community event - you spend time in neighbours' homes, entertaining them (often badly, but still).
It's kind of a mystery to me why (given the mass settlement of NZ from the UK) we ended up with the somewhat thuggish and extortionist American version instead.
I want to bring it back - who's with me?
Earlier in the evening we'd taken the childer to some church's alternative un-Hallowe'en do in order to satisfy my wife's curiosity. It was all right, well attended by a wide sampling of the local community and obviously entertaining for the children if their parents could afford the variety of rides and bouncy castles etc. on offer. The insistence on ignoring Hallowe'en even as it filled the streets around us was a bit strange though.
I don't hold with the idea that Hallowe'en is in some way an "evil" festival. It makes more sense to consider it a shadow of Easter - the acknowledgement of death and decay that mirrors the celebration of life and rebirth. I do think that there are some problems with the way it's observed here in New Zealand though.
Firstly (and most obviously) it's the wrong time of year. This is a problem it shares with all our church-derived holidays. They began life as pagan seasonal holidays before being co-opted by Christianity, but since the church ignores their seasonal nature in favour of having a unified calendar around the world we antipodeans end up celebrating all our seasonal festivals in anti-sync. Hallowe'en has a logical psychic resonance as an autumnal festival - acknowledging the decay that is necessary for renewal and honouring Death as a mirror to Easter's birth-feast in the spring.
Secondly, I think we've picked up the wrong tradition. In Scotland, where I spent my childhood between the ages of 6 and 13, there's a tradition known as guising. Guising is almost the same as trick-or-treating - you still dress up and go call on the neighbours - but with a crucial difference. In order to get a treat, a guiser needs to do a "turn" - sing a song, tell some jokes, recite a poem, whatever. This turns the festival into a real community event - you spend time in neighbours' homes, entertaining them (often badly, but still).
It's kind of a mystery to me why (given the mass settlement of NZ from the UK) we ended up with the somewhat thuggish and extortionist American version instead.
I want to bring it back - who's with me?
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Magic: Part 3 - What it is (yo).
Holey schist this one took a long time to write! I'd like to say that was due to the quality of Deep Thoughts Being Thunk, but it's actually more to do with balancing work, and other stuff I'm trying to achieve, and other house-dwellers' internet needs. That and Dwarf Fortress*.
Last time, I talked about how humans live with a gap between perception and objective reality. The result of this is that humans by and large operate using a picture of the world (which is often largely constructed from assumptions based on past data) rather than direct perception of the world itself. This is what we call a "worldview".
It's tempting when thinking about worldviews (especially those of ancient or foreign people) as groups of beliefs that people can somehow "get past". While worldviews can and do change over time, and some elements of them may be open to doubt or question, for the majority of people most of the time their worldview is the totality of the world-as-it-is for them at any given time. So when we talk about (for example) ancient peoples sacrificing members of their communities in order to ensure divine favour, we are talking about the literal truth of the universe as they understood it - it's not enough to say they "thought" that they needed to do this, from their perspective they literally did.
This is still the case - unless some aspect of objective reality directly and constantly contradicts an aspect of a worldview, that worldview will represent its bearer's entire picture of reality. That's how come we're mostly OK with doing things like using an entirely fictional commodity as a medium of exchange - we all agree that it's real, so it is. Because of the odd relationship between our minds and our bodies, this can even bleed into the "real world". For example, superstition can actually make you better at doing stuff.
More perniciously, this can make us subject to suggestion. If an idea can be introduced into your worldview without you necessarily noticing it***, it can become a part of your picture of the world. If it can be introduced to many people simultaneously, the chance of any one of them having a dissonant reaction and rejecting it is greatly diminished.
When I use the term "magic", I'm referring to any technique that takes advantage of this feature of the human mindscape. This can encompass self-programming or de-programming techniques like meditation, prayer or visualisation, as well as techniques for influencing others like advertising, public relations, art, politics or culture jamming. The reason I talk about this stuff in terms of magic, is because I feel like there's something to be gained by seeing all of these tricks as belonging to the same set.
Also, on the perceptual level it can be valuable to have a magic "lens" or framework to look at things through. Humans like narratives, and understanding situations in terms of the shift in power from individual to individual (for example) can be a constructive additional tool in narrativising a situation without necessarily compromising the facts.
Two people (one of whom has a very painful past) get into a relationship. They truly love one another. After enough time for it to be particularly painful (say, 6 months to a year) the one who was hurt betrays the other. They then move on in their own life with confidence, leaving their erstwhile partner to recover in turn. This is a typically human situation, in that it doesn't really make any sense. Why betray someone you love? If you no longer love someone, why not simply leave?
One magical way of narrativising the situation would be to see the hurt one using the other as Sacrifice in a long-running ritual that transforms them personally from Hunted to Hunter - from Prey to Predator. In this conception, the love and betrayal are necessary elements to charge the ritual and make it fully effective. The facts remain the same, but the meaning has changed.
Magic can give us language to talk about the ways that our actions and beliefs can change us, and (if you're good at it) can let you have a certain amount of conscious control over those changes.
---
* My current bugbear is digging wells. It's a process that rarely happens without cockups or fatalities at this point. Current scheme for this fortress is to pump water out of the river - it'll require building an elevated pumping-platform, but it should prevent my water supply from re-stagnating, and avoid the risk of pressurising my well and flooding all the lower levels of the fortress.
** So long as it's stuff you have some degree of conscious control over - there's no evidence that it has any particular effect on pure luck.
*** "Occult" derives from the Latin verb "to hide" - this is important.
Last time, I talked about how humans live with a gap between perception and objective reality. The result of this is that humans by and large operate using a picture of the world (which is often largely constructed from assumptions based on past data) rather than direct perception of the world itself. This is what we call a "worldview".
It's tempting when thinking about worldviews (especially those of ancient or foreign people) as groups of beliefs that people can somehow "get past". While worldviews can and do change over time, and some elements of them may be open to doubt or question, for the majority of people most of the time their worldview is the totality of the world-as-it-is for them at any given time. So when we talk about (for example) ancient peoples sacrificing members of their communities in order to ensure divine favour, we are talking about the literal truth of the universe as they understood it - it's not enough to say they "thought" that they needed to do this, from their perspective they literally did.
This is still the case - unless some aspect of objective reality directly and constantly contradicts an aspect of a worldview, that worldview will represent its bearer's entire picture of reality. That's how come we're mostly OK with doing things like using an entirely fictional commodity as a medium of exchange - we all agree that it's real, so it is. Because of the odd relationship between our minds and our bodies, this can even bleed into the "real world". For example, superstition can actually make you better at doing stuff.
More perniciously, this can make us subject to suggestion. If an idea can be introduced into your worldview without you necessarily noticing it***, it can become a part of your picture of the world. If it can be introduced to many people simultaneously, the chance of any one of them having a dissonant reaction and rejecting it is greatly diminished.
When I use the term "magic", I'm referring to any technique that takes advantage of this feature of the human mindscape. This can encompass self-programming or de-programming techniques like meditation, prayer or visualisation, as well as techniques for influencing others like advertising, public relations, art, politics or culture jamming. The reason I talk about this stuff in terms of magic, is because I feel like there's something to be gained by seeing all of these tricks as belonging to the same set.
Also, on the perceptual level it can be valuable to have a magic "lens" or framework to look at things through. Humans like narratives, and understanding situations in terms of the shift in power from individual to individual (for example) can be a constructive additional tool in narrativising a situation without necessarily compromising the facts.
Two people (one of whom has a very painful past) get into a relationship. They truly love one another. After enough time for it to be particularly painful (say, 6 months to a year) the one who was hurt betrays the other. They then move on in their own life with confidence, leaving their erstwhile partner to recover in turn. This is a typically human situation, in that it doesn't really make any sense. Why betray someone you love? If you no longer love someone, why not simply leave?
One magical way of narrativising the situation would be to see the hurt one using the other as Sacrifice in a long-running ritual that transforms them personally from Hunted to Hunter - from Prey to Predator. In this conception, the love and betrayal are necessary elements to charge the ritual and make it fully effective. The facts remain the same, but the meaning has changed.
Magic can give us language to talk about the ways that our actions and beliefs can change us, and (if you're good at it) can let you have a certain amount of conscious control over those changes.
---
* My current bugbear is digging wells. It's a process that rarely happens without cockups or fatalities at this point. Current scheme for this fortress is to pump water out of the river - it'll require building an elevated pumping-platform, but it should prevent my water supply from re-stagnating, and avoid the risk of pressurising my well and flooding all the lower levels of the fortress.
** So long as it's stuff you have some degree of conscious control over - there's no evidence that it has any particular effect on pure luck.
*** "Occult" derives from the Latin verb "to hide" - this is important.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Magic: Part 2 - Perception and reality
In my last post, I finished up like this: "Magic, in the sense that I want to talk about it means the art of understanding and manipulating the relationship between perception and reality."
There's a sentence that needs unpacking, if ever I saw one. I'll start with the second half first - the relationship between perception and reality.
It's not too hard to accept, if you look at it rationally, that there's a gulf between objective reality* and our perception of it. Starting at the most basic level, our senses are attuned to a very specific (and, cosmically speaking, quite small) spectrum of data: we can only hear at best between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz** (and this degrades as we age); we can see only a small range of the available radiation spectrum (visible light) and feel only a tiny range outside that (heat); our chemical sensitivity (taste and smell) is negligible compared to many other species; and because we lack whiskers or electrical sensing mechanisms, our sense of touch pretty much ends at our skins.
On top of this, our brains only have a limited "pool" of processing power to apply to the task of processing and sorting the sensory information that's available - and it's the same pool of processing power it uses for thinking and telling the body to execute voluntary movements. To save time and power, we have a bunch of cognitive shortcuts or "filters" in place to fit incoming data to pre-determined patterns and interpret it in light of pre-determined principles.
For example, if you look at this:
...you probably don't need to stop and figure out what that particular arrangement of wooden pieces is for. You see a shape that corresponds to the label "chair" and your pre-existing filters helpfully fill in all of the information you might need about what a chair is, what it's for and any particularly potent memories you might have related to chairs in general or chairs of this general design in particular.
This is a mostly-good-enough solution. It does save time and energy and vastly improve our survival rates*** but that doesn't really change the fact that most of what you see when you look at the picture above is not the chair-that-you-see, but rather your ideas-about-chairs made manifest.
Most people probably don't feel especially strongly about chairs, but if you did, you can see how easy it would be for your ideas-about-chairs to be strongly coloured by that depth of feeling. in fact (because ideas are sticky, and tend to cohere to one another in strange ways) chairs might become a symbol for you of all of those strong feelings.
Magic operates in this space of "ideas-about-things" and the feelings and sub-concepts that attach to those ideas.
*Assuming there is such a thing - but that's an argument for another time...
** This is less than it sounds like, because an octave is double the original frequency - so from concert A to the next one is a gap of 440 Hz, while the gap to the next A up the scale is 880 and the one after that is 1760 (and so on and so forth).
*** You don't need to stop and think to decide that stepping out of the way of a bus is a good idea, for example.
There's a sentence that needs unpacking, if ever I saw one. I'll start with the second half first - the relationship between perception and reality.
It's not too hard to accept, if you look at it rationally, that there's a gulf between objective reality* and our perception of it. Starting at the most basic level, our senses are attuned to a very specific (and, cosmically speaking, quite small) spectrum of data: we can only hear at best between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz** (and this degrades as we age); we can see only a small range of the available radiation spectrum (visible light) and feel only a tiny range outside that (heat); our chemical sensitivity (taste and smell) is negligible compared to many other species; and because we lack whiskers or electrical sensing mechanisms, our sense of touch pretty much ends at our skins.
On top of this, our brains only have a limited "pool" of processing power to apply to the task of processing and sorting the sensory information that's available - and it's the same pool of processing power it uses for thinking and telling the body to execute voluntary movements. To save time and power, we have a bunch of cognitive shortcuts or "filters" in place to fit incoming data to pre-determined patterns and interpret it in light of pre-determined principles.
For example, if you look at this:
This is a mostly-good-enough solution. It does save time and energy and vastly improve our survival rates*** but that doesn't really change the fact that most of what you see when you look at the picture above is not the chair-that-you-see, but rather your ideas-about-chairs made manifest.
Most people probably don't feel especially strongly about chairs, but if you did, you can see how easy it would be for your ideas-about-chairs to be strongly coloured by that depth of feeling. in fact (because ideas are sticky, and tend to cohere to one another in strange ways) chairs might become a symbol for you of all of those strong feelings.
Magic operates in this space of "ideas-about-things" and the feelings and sub-concepts that attach to those ideas.
*Assuming there is such a thing - but that's an argument for another time...
** This is less than it sounds like, because an octave is double the original frequency - so from concert A to the next one is a gap of 440 Hz, while the gap to the next A up the scale is 880 and the one after that is 1760 (and so on and so forth).
*** You don't need to stop and think to decide that stepping out of the way of a bus is a good idea, for example.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Magic: Part 1 - "Not Magic"
Right. Now that I've done with silly media-fiddling for a bit, I'd like to talk about some other things I find a bit more interesting. First though, I need to talk about magic. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, you could do worse than reading this, this, or this. There's also a book called the Disinformation Book of Lies which is about 50/50 helpful/unhelpful, but is interesting enough to be worth a read regardless.
One of the difficult things about discussing magic is that people tend to use the term to mean very different things. If you went and read any of the links above you'll have a sense of the direction I'm heading in with this, but it's still worth clarifying.
Some people use the term in a religious sense - a meaning that's often analogous to the more mystical conceptions of prayer. These people often continue Aleister Crowley's convention of using the spelling "magick" to distinguish between their practice and stage magic. I think this is a false dichotomy, as the kind of magic I'm talking about has more in common with stage magic than you might think.
Aside from that, I think this definition is about halfway right. The primary problem is that in thinking of magic in a spiritual or religious sense (as opposed to, say, a practical or political sense) there's a tendency to follow on from that into constructing yourself a colourful cosmology and/or complex moral dogma - and from there you simply start building yourself a new and temporarily more interesting Black Iron Prison to live in.
People of an aggressively atheistic persuasion, on the other hand, tend to use the term "magic" to label beliefs or practices they consider to have no logical grounding. Again, this contains a flash of insight into the way magic works, but because it's couched primarily in a dismissive mode (and thus contains precisely the kind of cognitive bias that a good skeptic should be striving against) it's ultimately self-defeating. There is indeed a cognitive error known as "magical thinking", and it is indeed related to the actual practice of magic - but it's not the same thing.
Magical thinking is the habit of building non-existent causal links between things in your mind, particularly when those causal links prevent you from challenging your own values or assumptions.
An example:
I take a folk remedy for a minor ailment, that ailment clears up and I therefore assume that the folk remedy is efficacious. The problem in this case is that because my ailment was so minor, it might well have cleared up by itself, and though the remedy might have made me feel better at the time, there's no evidence that the remedy in question is more effective than any other placebo. If I were aggressively anti-scientific in my outlook, then it would be very tempting at that point to decide that people who decried my remedy of choice had some other agenda or had been deluded by some sort of conspiracy.
Another example:
Something bad happens to someone I love - perhaps a medical emergency of the sort that sometimes happens without being predictable. The plain truth is that sometimes awful things simply do happen out of the blue to people who do not even remotely deserve them, and that those things are quite often nobody's fault*.
It is tempting however, to go looking for contributing factors - and the ones that are most often seized on are those with some sort of temporal relationship to the terrible event in question. Something that happened immediately before the event is a good candidate. I might then go on to become a crusader against the thing that I have decided "caused" my loved one's accident**.
So if these things aren't magic - what is? Magic, in the sense that I want to talk about it means the art of understanding and manipulating the relationship between perception and reality.
And we'll talk more about that next time...
*I suppose if you buy into the convention of referring to the-world-untamed as "Mother Nature" you could blame her, but she is a somewhat unsatisfying object of anger.
** The same impulse comes into play when loved ones misbehave in ways that aren't foreseen: cf. school shootings in the US and the corresponding panics about heavy metal music and violent video games.
One of the difficult things about discussing magic is that people tend to use the term to mean very different things. If you went and read any of the links above you'll have a sense of the direction I'm heading in with this, but it's still worth clarifying.
Some people use the term in a religious sense - a meaning that's often analogous to the more mystical conceptions of prayer. These people often continue Aleister Crowley's convention of using the spelling "magick" to distinguish between their practice and stage magic. I think this is a false dichotomy, as the kind of magic I'm talking about has more in common with stage magic than you might think.
Aside from that, I think this definition is about halfway right. The primary problem is that in thinking of magic in a spiritual or religious sense (as opposed to, say, a practical or political sense) there's a tendency to follow on from that into constructing yourself a colourful cosmology and/or complex moral dogma - and from there you simply start building yourself a new and temporarily more interesting Black Iron Prison to live in.
People of an aggressively atheistic persuasion, on the other hand, tend to use the term "magic" to label beliefs or practices they consider to have no logical grounding. Again, this contains a flash of insight into the way magic works, but because it's couched primarily in a dismissive mode (and thus contains precisely the kind of cognitive bias that a good skeptic should be striving against) it's ultimately self-defeating. There is indeed a cognitive error known as "magical thinking", and it is indeed related to the actual practice of magic - but it's not the same thing.
Magical thinking is the habit of building non-existent causal links between things in your mind, particularly when those causal links prevent you from challenging your own values or assumptions.
An example:
I take a folk remedy for a minor ailment, that ailment clears up and I therefore assume that the folk remedy is efficacious. The problem in this case is that because my ailment was so minor, it might well have cleared up by itself, and though the remedy might have made me feel better at the time, there's no evidence that the remedy in question is more effective than any other placebo. If I were aggressively anti-scientific in my outlook, then it would be very tempting at that point to decide that people who decried my remedy of choice had some other agenda or had been deluded by some sort of conspiracy.
Another example:
Something bad happens to someone I love - perhaps a medical emergency of the sort that sometimes happens without being predictable. The plain truth is that sometimes awful things simply do happen out of the blue to people who do not even remotely deserve them, and that those things are quite often nobody's fault*.
It is tempting however, to go looking for contributing factors - and the ones that are most often seized on are those with some sort of temporal relationship to the terrible event in question. Something that happened immediately before the event is a good candidate. I might then go on to become a crusader against the thing that I have decided "caused" my loved one's accident**.
And we'll talk more about that next time...
*I suppose if you buy into the convention of referring to the-world-untamed as "Mother Nature" you could blame her, but she is a somewhat unsatisfying object of anger.
** The same impulse comes into play when loved ones misbehave in ways that aren't foreseen: cf. school shootings in the US and the corresponding panics about heavy metal music and violent video games.
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