When Magic Lost Its Magic

We don't believe in magic anymore. At least, most of us don't. But if you stop and think about it for a bit, you’ll hopefully notice why this disbelief is not a good thing. Remember where magic came from: It came from, among other reasons, a need to explain what was not explainable (dreams, mental illness, the weather, the meaning of life, etc.). Magic and luck were the answers to everything that didn’t have an answer. Similarly, religion came of the need to give meaning and purpose to life. Why are we here, who put us here, who holds power over our lives that we should fear Him or Her or Them? Magic drove our curiosity. It proved that, as a species, we thought about the world and tried to explain it, just like we do today. Only, I argue, we do less questioning and explaining than we used to.

The fact that we no longer need these fantastical explanations scares me. We seem to think, as 2017 approaches, that there aren’t any more unexplainable phenomena in the universe. We think we have enough science to understand most of what goes on in our universe, in our brains, beyond our senses and comprehension, and that the small holes that do exist in our great library of knowledge will quickly, soon, be filled in. The fact is, we cannot conceivably know everything, and there are a hundred thousand googol things we can’t even begin to understand. Just because they aren’t as close to home as gravity and neurons and the aurora borealis doesn’t mean we can stop thinking about things that we don’t yet have the brain-power to understand (think, dark matter, black holes, human consciousness).

Try to list anything you might attribute to magic, if you believed in magic. I’ll bet you won't come up with much. But our ancestors sure came up with a lot. All you have to do is dip half a toe into the study of folklore to know that. Because we can't think of many truly perplexing phenomena, we seem to have begun thinking that we have most of it down. Magic, the need to theorize about things that are beyond our knowledge, doesn't hold value any more. We think we know what we need to know, and that everything we don’t know lies on this path forward in time where, eventually, we’ll know it all. The dying of magic in our cultures has paralleled the dying of questioning and curiosity and the fact that humans know very, very little. We’re reaching the end of discovery. Science is more and more technical, more about fine-tuning what we already know, more math and calculations, less hypothesizing.

I’m not saying we should believe in magic and give crazy explanations for the things that confuse us, but I am saying that we don't believe in magic for reasons that are absolutely total garbage. We think we know enough about the world to think there isn't much left out there to explain. We think we have all the tools, all the data, all the frameworks to figure it all out. We don't.

We have to be open to the fact that we know very little.

We have to stop being afraid of theories that break out of the Box of Normal.

We are on the verge of forgetting that noticing the strange and odd and wonderful things in our world has led us, inevitably, to discovering so much of what is actually real and true, the science that is driving our world forward into (what can be) a magical future.