Magic, p.22
Magic, page 22
And I too have an amiable weakness—I am an indefatigable knocker of wood. If I make any statement which strikes me as too smug or self-satisfied, or in any way too boastful of good fortune, I look feverishly about for wood to knock.
Of course, I don’t for one moment really believe that knocking wood will keep off the jealous demons who lie in wait for the unwary soul who boasts of his good luck without the proper propitiation of the spirits and demons on whom good and bad luck depend. Still—after all—you know—come to think of it—what can you lose?
I have been growing a little uneasy, in consequence, over the way in which natural wood is used less and less in ordinary construction, and is therefore harder and harder to find in an emergency. I might, in fact, have been heading for a severe nervous breakdown, had I not heard a casual remark made by a friend.
He said, some time ago, “Things are going very well for me lately.” With that, he knocked on the tabletop and calmly said, “Knock plastic!”
Heavens! Talk about blinding flashes of illumination. Of course! In the modern world, the spirits will grow modern too. The old dryads, who inhabited trees and made sacred grooves sacred, giving rise to the modern notion of knocking wood,[1] must be largely unemployed now that more than half the world’s forests have been ground up into toothpicks and newsprint. Undoubtedly they now make their homes in vats of polymerizing plastic and respond eagerly to the cry of “Knock plastic!” I recommend it to one and all.
But knocking wood is only one example of a class of notions, so comforting and so productive of feelings of security, that men will seize upon them on the slightest provocation or on none at all.
Any piece of evidence tending to support such a “Security Belief,” however frail and nonsensical it might be, is grabbed and hugged close to the bosom. Every piece of evidence tending to break down a Security Belief, however strong and logical that evidence might be, is pushed away. (Indeed, if the evidence against a Security Belief is strong enough, those presenting the evidence might well be in danger of violence.)
It is very important, therefore, in weighing the merits of any widely held opinion, to consider whether it can be viewed as a Security Belief. If it is, then its popularity means nothing; it must be viewed with considerable suspicion.
It might, of course, be that the view is accurate. For instance, it is a comforting thought to Americans that the United States is the richest and most powerful nation in the world. But in all truth, it is, and this particular Security Belief (for Americans) is justified.
Nevertheless, the Universe is an insecure place, indeed, and on general principles Security Beliefs are much more likely to be false than true.
For instance, a poll of the heavy smokers of the world would probably show that almost all of them are firmly convinced that the arguments linking smoking with lung cancer are not conclusive. The same heavy majority would exist if members of the tobacco industry were polled. Why not? The opposite belief would leave them too medically insecure, or economically insecure, for comfort.
Then, too, when I was young, we kids had the firm belief that if one dropped a piece of candy into the incredible filth of the city streets, one need only touch the candy to the lips and then wave it up to the sky (“kissing it to God”) to make it perfectly pure and sanitary. We believed this despite all strictures on germs, because if we didn’t believe it, that piece of candy would go uneaten by ourselves, and someone else, who did believe it, would get to eat it.
Naturally, anyone can make up the necessary evidence in favor of a Security Belief. “My grandfather smoked a pack a day for seventy years and when he died his lungs were the last to go.” Or “Jerry kissed candy to God yesterday and today he won the forty-yard dash.”
If Grandfather had died of lung cancer at thirty-six, or if Jerry had come down with cholera—no problem, you cite other instances.
But let’s not sink to special cases. I have come up with six very broad Security Beliefs that, I think, blanket the field—although the Gentle Reader is welcome to add a seventh, if he can think of one.
SECURITY BELIEF NO.1: There exist supernatural forces that can be cajoled or forced into protecting mankind.
Here is the essence of superstition.
When a primitive hunting society is faced with the fact that game is sometimes plentiful and sometimes not, and when a primitive agricultural society watches drought come one year and floods the next, it seems only natural to assume—in default of anything better—that some more-than-human force is arranging things in this way.
Since nature is capricious, it would seem that the various gods, spirits, demons (whatever you wish to call them) are themselves capricious. In one way or another they must be induced or made to subordinate their wild impulses to the needs of humanity.
Who says this is easy? Obviously, it calls for all the skill of the wisest and most experienced men of the society. So there develops a specialized class of spirit manipulators—a priesthood, to use that term in its broadest sense.
It is fair enough to call spirit manipulation “magic.” The word comes from “magi,” the name given to the priestly caste of Zoroastrian Persia.
The popularity of this Security Belief is almost total. A certain Influential Personage in science fiction, who is much given to adopting these Security Beliefs and then pretending he is a member of a persecuted minority, once wrote to me: “Every society but ours has believed in magic. Why should we be so arrogant as to think that everyone but ourselves is wrong?”
My answer at the time was: “Every society but ours has believed the Sun revolved about the Earth. Do you want to settle the matter by majority vote?”
Actually the situation is worse than even the Influential Personage maintains. Every society, including our own, believes in magic. Nor do I restrict the belief only to the naive and uneducated of our culture. The most rational elements of our society, the well educated, the scientist, retain scraps of belief in magic.
When a horseshoe hangs over Bohr’s desk (assuming one really did), that is a magical warding-off of misfortune through the power of “cold iron” over a spirit world stuck in the Bronze Age. When I knock wood (or plastic) I too engage in spirit manipulation.
But can we argue, as the Influential Personage does, that there must be something to magic since so many people believe in it?
No, of course not. It is too tempting to believe. What can be easier than to believe that one can avoid misfortune by so simple a device as knocking on wood? If it’s wrong, you lose nothing. If it’s right, you gain so much. One would need to be woodenly austere indeed to refuse the odds.
Still, if magic doesn’t work, won’t people recognize that eventually and abandon it?
But who says magic doesn’t work? Of course it works—in the estimation of those who believe.
Suppose you knock on wood and misfortune doesn’t follow. See? Of course, you might go back in time and not knock on wood and find out that misfortune doesn’t follow, anyway—but how can you arrange a control like that?
Or suppose you see a pin and pick it up on ten successive days, and on nine of those days nothing much happened one way or the other, but on the tenth you get good news in the mail. It is the work of a moment to remember that tenth day and forget the other nine—and what better proof do you want anyway?
Or what if you carefully light two on a match and three minutes later fall and break your leg. Surely you can argue that if you had lit that third cigarette, you would have broken your neck, not your leg.
You can’t lose! If you want to believe, you can believe!
Indeed, magic can work in actual fact. A tightrope walker, having surreptitiously rubbed the rabbit’s foot under his belt, can advance with such self-confidence as to perform perfectly. An actor, stepping out on stage just after someone has whistled in his dressing room, can be so nervous that he will muff his lines. In other words, even if magic doesn’t work, belief in magic does.
But then, how do scientists go about disproving the usefulness of magic? They don’t! It’s an impossibility. Few, if any, believers would accept the disproof anyway.
What scientists do is to work on the assumption that Security Belief No. 1 is false. They take into account no capricious forces in their analysis of the Universe. They set up a minimum number of generalizations (miscalled “natural laws”) and assume that nothing happens or can be made to happen that is outside those natural laws. Advancing knowledge may make it necessary to modify the generalizations now and then, but always they remain non-capricious.
Ironically enough, scientists themselves become a new priesthood. Some Security Believers see in the scientist the new magus. It is the scientist, now, who can manipulate the Universe, by mysterious rites understood by him only, so as to insure the safety of man under all circumstances. This belief, in my opinion, is as ill-founded as the earlier one.
Again, a Security Belief can be modified to give it a scientific tang. Thus, where once we had angels and spirits descending to Earth to interfere in our affairs and mete out justice, we now have advanced beings in flying saucers doing so (according to some). In fact, part of the popularity of the whole flying saucer mystique is, in my opinion, the ease with which the extraterrestrials can be looked upon as a new scientific version of angels.
SECURITY BELIEF NO. 2: There is no such thing, really, as death.
Man, as far as we know, is the only species capable of foreseeing the inevitability of death. An individual man or woman knows, for certain, as no other creature can, that someday he or she must die.
This is an absolutely shattering piece of knowledge and one can’t help but wonder how much it, by itself, affects human behavior, making it fundamentally different from the behavior of other animals.
Or perhaps the effect is less than we might expect, since men so universally and so resolutely refuse to think of it. How many individuals live as though they expect to keep on going forever? Almost every one of us, I think.
A comparatively sensible way of denying death is to suppose that it is a family that is the real living entity and that the individual does not truly die while the family lives. This is one of the bases of ancestor worship, since the ancestor lives as long as he has a descendant to worship him.
Under these circumstances, naturally, the lack of children (especially sons, for in most tribal societies women didn’t count) was a supreme disaster. It was so in early Israelite society, for instance, as the Bible tells us. Definite rules are given in the Bible that oblige men to take, as wives, the widows of their childless brothers, in order to give those wives sons who might be counted as descendants of the dead man.
The crime of Onan (“onanism”) is not what you probably think it is, but was his refusal to perform this service for his dead brother (see Genesis 38:7–10).
A more literal denial of death is also very popular. Almost every society we know of has some notion of an “afterlife.” There is someplace where an immortal residue of each human body can go. The shade can live a gray and dismal existence in a place like Hades or Sheol, but he lives.
Under more imaginative conditions, the afterlife, or a portion of it, can become an abode of bliss while another portion can become an abode of torment. Then, the notion of immortality can be linked with the notion of reward and punishment. There is a Security Belief angle to this too, since it increases one’s security in the midst of poverty and misery to know you’ll live like a god in Heaven, while that rich fellow over there is going straight to Hell, ha, ha, and good for him.
Failing an afterlife in some place beyond Earth, you can have one on Earth itself by arranging a belief in reincarnation or in transmigration of souls.
While reincarnation is no part of the dominant religious beliefs in the Western world, such are its Security Belief values that any evidence in its favor is delightedly accepted. When, in the 1950s, a rather silly book entitled The Search for Bridey Murphy appeared and seemed to indicate the actual existence of reincarnation, it became a best-seller at once. There was nothing to it, to be sure.
And, of course, the whole doctrine of spiritualism, the entire battery of mediums and table-rappings and ectoplasm and ghosts and poltergeists and a million other things are all based on the firm insistence of mankind that death does not take place; that something persists; that the conscious personality is somehow immortal.
Is there any use then in trying to debunk spiritualism? It can’t be done. No matter how many mediums are shown to be fakes, the ardent believer will believe the next medium he encounters. He may do even better. He may denounce the proof of fakedom as itself a fraud and continue to have faith in the fake, however transparent.
Science proceeds on the assumption that Security Belief No. 2 is false also.
Yet scientists are human too, and individuals among them (as distinct from science in the abstract) long for security. Sir Oliver J. Lodge, a scientist of considerable reputation, depressed by the death of a son in World War I, tried to reach him through spiritualism and became a devotee of “psychic research.”
My friend, the Influential Personage, has often cited Lodge and men like him as evidence of the value of psychic research. “If you believe Lodge’s observations on the electron, why don’t you believe his observations on spirits?”
The answer is, of course, that Lodge has no security to gain from an electron but does from spirits. —And scientists are human too.
SECURITY BELIEF NO. 3: There is some purpose to the Universe.
After all, if you’re going to have a whole battery of spirits and demons running the Universe, you can’t really have them doing it all for nothing.
The Zoroastrians of Persia worked out a delightfully complicated scheme of the Universe. They imagined the whole of existence to be engaged in a cosmic war. Ahura Mazda, leading countless spirits under the banner of Light and Good, encountered an equally powerful army under Ahriman fighting for Darkness and Evil. The forces were almost evenly matched and individual men could feel that with them lay the balance of power. If they strove to be good they were contributing to the “right side” in the most colossal conflict ever imagined.
Some of these notions crept into Judaism and Christianity, and we have the war of God versus the Devil. In the Judeo-Christian view, however, there is no question as to who will win. God must and will win. It makes things less exciting.
This Security Belief is also assumed to be false by science. Science does not merely ignore the possibility of a cosmic war, when it tries to work out the origins and ultimate fate of the Universe; it ignores the possibility of any deliberate purpose anywhere.
The most basic generalizations of science (the laws of thermodynamics, for instance, or quantum theory) assume random movement of particles, random collisions, random energy transfers, and so on. From considerations of probability one can assume that with many particles and over long periods of time, certain events are reasonably sure to take place, but concerning individual particles and over short periods of time, nothing can be predicted.
Possibly, no scientific view is so unpopular with nonscientists as this one. It seems to make everything so “meaningless.”
But does it? Is it absolutely necessary to have the entire Universe or all of life meaningful? Can we not consider that what is meaningless in one context is meaningful in another; that a book in Chinese which is meaningless to me is meaningful to a Chinaman? And can we not consider that each of us can so arrange his own particular life so as to make it meaningful to himself and to those he influences? And in that case does not all of life and all the Universe come to have meaning to him?
Surely it is those who find their own lives essentially meaningless who most strive to impose meaning on the Universe as a way of making up for the personal lack.
SECURITY BELIEF NO. 4: Individuals have special powers that will enable them to get something for nothing.
“Wishing will make it so” is a line from a popular song and oh, how many people believe it. It is much easier to wish, hope, and pray, than to take the trouble to do something.
I once wrote a book in which a passage contained a description of the dangers of the population explosion and of the necessity for birth control. A reviewer who looked over that passage wrote in the margin, “I’d say this was God’s problem, wouldn’t you?”
It was like taking candy from a baby to write under that in clear print: “God helps those who help themselves.”
But think of the popularity of stories in which characters get three wishes, or the power to turn everything they touch into gold, or are given a spear that will always find the mark, or a gem that will discolor in the presence of danger.
And just imagine if we had amazing powers all the time and didn’t know it—telepathy, for instance. How eager we are to have it. (Who hasn’t experienced a coincidence and at once cried out, “Telepathy!”) How ready we are to believe in advanced cases elsewhere since that will improve the possibilities of ourselves possessing the power if we practiced hard enough.
Some wild powers represent the ability to foresee the future—clairvoyance. Or else one gains the knowledge to calculate the future by means of astrology, numerology, palmistry, tea leaves, or a thousand other hoary frauds.
Here we come close to Security Belief No. 1. If we foresee the future, we might change it by appropriate action and this is nearly the equivalent of spirit manipulation.
In a way, science has fulfilled the fairy tales. The jet plane goes far faster and farther than the flying horse and the seven-league boots of the fable writers of yore. We have rockets which seek out their targets, like Thor’s hammer, and do far more damage. We have, not gems, but badges that discolor in the presence of too much accumulated radiation.
But these do not represent “something for nothing.” They are not awarded through supernatural agency and don’t act capriciously. They are the hard-earned products of the generalizations concerning the Universe built up by a science that denies most or all of the Security Beliefs.
