Thursday, August 02, 2007

Ditch Magical Thinking

Science has been put forward (at least in the classical Western mind-set) as the most effective way to understand the natural world. Although science is often faulted for being incomplete, or inadequate to the task of explaining all of our experience, it has a unique place in our culture - it explains our world, and allows us to develop effective technologies in a way that magic and speculative philosophy never has.

For example, though someone may completely ignore their health, play the lottery, read their horoscope, believe in ghosts (all indications of magical thinking)– they still get on an airplane (the fruit of science). They don’t understand Bernoulli's principle, so it may as well be imps holding the plane up as a difference in air pressure. The fact that no one rode in airplanes even 100 years ago (or used a telephone, or a computer, or a light bulb, or sat in a car) underscores the 1,000s of technologies that have come from a better understanding of how the world works. Magic has never worked over the entire course of human history, while science has enabled technologies that rival the wildest fables. You’d think that folks would compare the outcome of magical thinking, and the outcome of scientific thinking and draw the obvious conclusions. Still, most folks seem to embrace the fruit of science, while retaining a magical worldview.

When we discover (much to our surprise) that magic is invisible to science, magical thinkers see this as a fault of science, not as an error in their way of seeing the world. Yet magical thinking injects inaccurate, often dangerous ways of viewing the world. Consider the popularity of prosperity thinking (currently championed by no less than Oprah) in a world where we allow billions to face hunger, famine, disease, and early preventable death. Consider our unwillingness to face up to the way we have polluted our world, while ignoring the clear results – declining fisheries, animal extinctions, global warming. We can raise over 600 million dollars in 10 days to see Spiderman III, but we can’t be bothered to address Darfur, the Central African Republic, drug resistant TB, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, acute malnutrition - the list goes on.

We forget that we live in a democracy (that is, we are responsible for the state of things), and let our infrastructure crumble, our children go without health coverage, and our commitment to fairness and decency dissolve, while we seek immediate gratification (and fall further in debt).

At least one reason these things happen is that we fail to see the obvious conclusions science presents us, and take responsibility for ourselves, our community and our planet. Magic does not work, and our culture is not going to be made happy, healthy or wise by magical thinking. We cannot hand over political power to the greedy and corrupt and expect good to come of it. We can’t insist on buying the cheapest goods and expect anything other than exploitation, slavery and shoddy practices to come of it.

Instead, we should be spending our political and economic capital in ways that help build a world in which we all can live. Paying careful attention to the way things are (the legacy of science) is a first step in this process, because it helps us exchange our magical (wishful) thinking for a glimpse of what actually is. Even more crucial are the next steps, where we create a fairer, more just culture based, not on what we wished was real, but based on what actually exists.