The One Aspect of Magic that is Incredibly Real
And how it affects you right now
The supernatural is, according to historian Keith Thomas,
“rightly disdained by intelligent persons.”
Unfortunately, it would then seem that we are not as intelligent as we’d like to think.
Despite the ability of the most brilliant among us to create literary masterpieces, lead countries through global warfare, and invent the computer, even those brilliant minds have believed at one point in something…more.
You could say they believed in magic.
Magic is Part of Our Story
This puts many of the most brilliant of us in cohorts with a majority of the populace.
People continue to report firsthand experiences with supernatural phenomena, in a 2005 poll, Gallup found that three in four Americans believe in the paranormal, while more recent studies had similar findings — with many of these not including religion among the paranormal beliefs considered.
The belief in the supernatural is not a modern phenomenon. It has been around for thousands of years — who knows when it became a thing, or why this tendency may have evolved?
Psychologists may have some answers.
Some believe that these beliefs offer a protective shield from the chaos that sometimes engulfs us, during which we scramble for some meaning to hang onto.
People do not like randomness.
We like to be in control.
How Paranormal Beliefs Award Us Control
Before Game Theory was a thing, French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously postulated that the belief in God was a perfectly rational decision.
“Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.” — Blaise Pascal
I am not trying to convince you of this argument—there are criticisms of it, too. The most popular one is that there is not one but many possible Gods to believe in.
But Pascal’s wager does give believers an ultimate sense of control over their own eternal destiny, all you need to do is believe and you are granted eternal happiness.
The same sort of rationale can be applied to all sorts of paranormal beliefs.
Sure, the house is likely not haunted, but if it is — and you visit or are not prepared for it — you may just lose everything when the demon catches you in the unawares.
Sure, horoscopes and astrology have no proven explanatory power, but they reduce the complexity of the world and give us comfort in the structured causal framework they allow us to operate in.
Sure, that lucky bracelet may not bring good fortune, but if it does — and you do not wear it — you could miss out on the opportunity of your lifetime!
Einstein distinguished three human impulses behind the development of religious belief: fear, social or moral concerns, and a cosmic religious feeling.
The same may be said for other forms of paranormal belief — the fear of a random world; the longing for love, connection, and to “be somebody”. But what about the third impulse?
A Meaning-Shaped Hole
Einstein deemed the third impulse to be the most mature and described how the individual feels
“[…] the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves in nature … and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.”
Einstein saw no conflict between science and religion in this, further stating that he saw religion as “an age-old endeavour of mankind” to become conscious of higher values and goals that “should be”.
Science, instead, describes what “is”.
If science provides a “description of the terrain of reality”, then religions, mythologies and other paranormal beliefs attempt to provide a “map through it”.
According to psychologist Jonathan Haidt, it is
“almost as if our minds contain a secret staircase taking us from an ordinary life up to something sacred and deeply interconnected, and the door to that staircase opens only on rare occasions.”
Religions, meditative practices, forms of dance, and a variety of “superstitious behaviour” thus attempt to help people climb this staircase — or navigate through this terrain that makes up our reality.
The word “superstition” comes from the Latin superstitiōne, first appearing 2500 years ago as a loose translation of the Greek word deisidaimonia — “fear of the gods.”
Evolutionary biologists Foster and Kokko — amongst others — posit that superstitious behaviours, which arise from “the incorrect assignment of cause and effect”, are favoured by natural selection in a manner that is analogous to Pascal’s wager described above.
The gist is that these sorts of beliefs may have been selected for even if they lead to frequent errors (e.g. it turns out to be a towel, not a ghost) as long as the occasional result carries with them great benefits.
These benefits could include social solidarity, making religious communities stronger throughout the ages and giving them an evolutionary advantage.
As Jonathan Haidt puts it,
“Why do our minds contain such a staircase? I believe its because there was a long period in human evolution during which it was adaptive to lose the self and merge with others. It wasn’t adaptive for individuals to do so, but it was adaptive for groups.”
The One Aspect
Who knows what lurks behind the veil of our apparent reality, but one thing seems certain; magic is often used to explain cause and effect, and whether erroneous or not, the effects of the belief are tangible, these beliefs also seem deeply ingrained in our psyche.
[…]magic is often used to explain cause and effect, and whether erroneous or not, the effects of the belief are tangible, these beliefs also seem deeply ingrained in our psyche
Real or not, beliefs have shaped our story, probably since before prerecorded history, and they have spellbinding effects on very real actions taken today as well. You only need to look up at the pyramids, back at the Crusades, or even at aspects of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict to realize that this is the case.
Nevertheless, we are still here.
Life and humanity have continued to go on.
And the belief in the paranormal is as common as ever.
Perhaps it is not something we should scoff at or discard without trying to understand a bit more.
Friedrich Nietzsche referred to how the rise of science would eliminate the plausibility of a rational belief in God, writing;
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? …who will wipe this blood off us?
He was not stating this triumphantly.
Perhaps Nietzsche was right, perhaps we are more reliant on these beliefs to maintain order than the scientific community would like to think.
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References
- Horgan, J. (n.d.). Brilliant Scientists Are Open-Minded about Paranormal Stuff, So Why Not You? [online] Scientific American Blog Network. Available at: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/brilliant-scientists-are-open-minded-about-paranormal-stuff-so-why-not-you/.
- Conocimiento, V. al (2017). The Science of Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Conan Doyle. [online] OpenMind. Available at: https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/the-science-of-sherlock-holmes-and-the-ghosts-of-conan-doyle/.
- Gallup, I. (2005). Three in Four Americans Believe in Paranormal. [online] Gallup.com. Available at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/16915/three-four-americans-believe-paranormal.aspx.
- Statista. (n.d.). Paranormal beliefs in Britain, by age 2017. [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/935178/paranormal-beliefs-in-britain/.
- CNN, H.E. (n.d.). What statistics can tell us about Americans’ skyrocketing belief in ghosts. [online] CNN. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/21/politics/harry-enten-podcast-margins-of-error-ghosts/index.html [Accessed 26 Apr. 2022].
- Drinkwater, K.G., Dagnall, N., Denovan, A. and Williams, C. (2021). Paranormal Belief, Thinking Style and Delusion Formation: A Latent Profile Analysis of Within-Individual Variations in Experience-Based Paranormal Facets. Frontiers in Psychology, 12.
- Robson, D. (2014). Psychology: The truth about the paranormal. [online] Bbc.com. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20141030-the-truth-about-the-paranormal.
- Foster, K.R. and Kokko, H. (2008). The evolution of superstitious and superstition-like behaviour. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 276(1654), pp.31–37.
- Lewis, E. (2019). The Yale Herald. [online] medium.com. Available at: https://yaleherald.com/post-religious-post-scientific-post-ironic-6312111c5bd4.
