The other day, I was in a zoom meeting with my friends from the Chicago Ethical Humanist Circle. Given that they are atheists, which I am not, their philosophical approach is how to replace magical thinking in all areas of life. And in this particular conversation, the focus was not on religion, but rather on politics and how to handle it exclusively with reason.
Magical thinking is the creation of blurry causal links where one thought does not follow another in an orderly way. To a reason purist, magical thinking can include everything from religion to superstition to fantasy and imaginative thinking to all thought processes that are poorly constructed in terms of logic and scientific thinking. Within the area of politics, my friends were focusing on the cult that has developed around Trump as well as white nationalist philosophies and all the different conspiracy theories like QAnon. According to my friends, if only everyone in the world would follow the dictates of reason, the world would be filled with peace, prosperity, brotherly and sisterly love and happiness. All conflicts would be resolved based on mutually agreed upon understandings of the problems under consideration. Logic and scientific evidence would establish the foundations of these mutually agreed upon understandings. Once the facts were established, solutions to problems could follow automatically.
Sounds like an intellectual paradise to me. So the question is why can’t we get people to leave magical thinking behind at least in politics? If people are going to follow causal links in such a private way that it is impossible to explain their lines of thought to another person, then it is simply one person’s belief versus another person’s belief, and the conflict is never going to be resolved. As a matter of fact, throughout history, such conflicts have frequently escalated into wars.
So, on the one hand, the ideas of my friends from the Chicago Ethical Humanist Circle are well-intentioned. The real question is are they feasible, are they doable? The answer is probably, not at least with regard to all people for all time. Reason has some real downsides. It’s supposed to act as a foundation for compromise, based on a mutually agreed upon understanding of a problem situation. In an ideal situation, the problem gets settled and people return to living in harmony and with a sense of peace. But peace for too long of a period of time can lead to boredom and numbness. And in today’s world, with such sustained use of reason in so many areas of human life, reason has become the foundation not only for peace, but for life in an experiential vacuum. Peace for too long a period of time can lead to entropic disintegration of a person’s sense of self.
Now I know that for most of you, what I am saying amounts to blasphemy and heresy. How is it possible for a civilized man like myself not to extol the benefits of peace in the face of all the regional military conflicts that are still going on in the world and in the face of the potential for annihilation from nuclear weapons? But, in truth, I am not advocating for an anti-reason stance. For me, in spite of their limitations, reason and peace are wonderful. I am simply trying to find an explanation for all the millions of people in the world whose lives are not based on reason and peace. And, as in so many other areas and aspects of life I have explored in this column, I keep coming back to one basic foundation for the limitations of life for modern humans. And that foundation is the excessive frictionlessness and mediation of life for modern humans as a result of modern technology, a foundation that leads to a dangerous numbness.
And that modern technology couldn’t have been created without the elevation of the thought processes of reason during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Reason externalized itself through modern technology. Whereas in traditional societies, reason was a fragile beacon for peace in a world truly filled with all kinds of magical thinking, a mode of thinking which reflected not only the vibrancy but also the tempestuousness of natural processes, in modern societies, reason reinforces the dangerous entropic tendencies of excessive frictionlessness and mediation stemming from modern technological processes. Paradoxically, reason performs its function best when surrounded by a living environment filled with unreason.
Let’s examine what reason is made up of. Reason consists of a lot of defined discrete components that follow one another in an orderly way, but that never merge with one another. Each component is distinct from the component behind it and ahead of it, yet each component can be deduced from the previous one on the basis of logic or induced from the previous one on the basis of scientific evidence. By keeping the components of an argument separate, both sides of a dispute can follow them easily, so that hopefully some inevitable conclusion can be agreed upon, even if it’s that some of the premises are still subject to debate. And by keeping the arguments clean, hopefully disputed premises can be broken into smaller and smaller parts, until they can be shaped into thoughts that allow people to follow the arguments into acceptable conclusions. The problem is that for many people such argument structures leading to a peaceful conclusion are boring and ultimately numbing.
Magical thinking, on the other hand, has components that merge with one another through organic flowing blendable continual arguments. As a result, the arguments are not easily followed by people who have not been involved in their creation. In other words, the arguments appear to be private and have to be accepted on faith. Complicated flowing arguments where the components run into one another. Such organic arguments are vibrantly stimulating but they lead to conflict and ultimately, in some cases, violence.
These are some conclusions I have come to recently. Maybe, what it means is that there are no ultimate political solutions among people in life. Dangerous passion or dangerous numbness. Take your pick. Although in today’s world the enveloping numbness created by modern technology leads me to conclude that a little passion, a little magical thinking, introduced into political discourse, as long as it’s not Trump’s extreme abrasive passion or overwhelming magical thinking, is necessary in order to get people involved with an organic vision of things. Something that can give them focus and purpose. And maybe some meaningful vibrant peace.
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