Get ready for a rambling incoherent rant.
It’s Halloween, so of course media and news outlets are doing stories based around traditional Halloween cliches. One of those is “witches.” This morning I heard part of an NPR interview that blew through the better part of an hour discussing modern witchcraft with people (all women) who seem to think that there is something to it. Coupled with recent reports that the number of self-professed witches in the US has exploded in recent years, this disturbs me some.
Now, I couldn’t care less about peoples religion most of the time. As Heinlein pointed out, one mans theology is another mans belly laugh, and at a certain level witchcraft in no sillier, theologically, than Catholicism or Judaism or Raelism or any other -ism that actually posits the existence of the supernatural. But in actual practice, witchcraft – of which there are of course many divergent forms – is a belief system that not only puts its faith in the supernatural, but believes that it can actually *use* the supernatural to do Real World Stuff.
No. I’m sorry, not sorry, but no. Your hexes and potions and chants and invocations? If you think that you’re actually accomplishing anything real… you’re just plain-ass wrong. Now if that stuff makes you feel better? Fine, I guess. So long as you understand it’s hogwash and you’re doing it essentially for entertainment value, then it’s no worse of a way to spend your time than, say, watching anime. But the belief that “magic is real” sets my teeth on edge.
Why? Because… it doesn’t work. Thousands of years wasted by millions, probably billions of practitioners, and not so much as a levitating frog. Sure, every now and then practitioners of the magical arts stumble across something useful: Chinese alchemists tried to come up with an elixir of life and whipped up black powder instead. So… hurray. But they didn’t really know what they were doing, and what they came up with had nothing to do with what they wanted.
What I’m seeing a lot of these days is what you might call “political witchcraft.” People who don’t like the way the world or the country is these days and, rather than campaigning for political solutions they *do* like, they’re resorting to witchcraft. Sometimes the results are weird to the point of being downright hilarious, such as this… person. Sometimes the results are bizarre to the point of being virtually inexplicable. But however they’re doing it, they’re wasting their time. Like a white supremacist shooting up a synagogue, anyone who goes public with patently absurd witchy nonsense is going to turn off people who might have agreed with them. I’m sure, for example, that for any political position a witch might take, there are more than a few conventionally religious people who agree with that position. But the moment that witch starts casting spells, the conventionally religious person is probably going to head for the hills. Witchcraft, after all, is often something that your bigger religions have the death penalty for.
Magic, as in practices that successfully tap into the supernatural to do stuff, is hogwash. But more broadly, magic *does* kinda exist, in several forms. There’s the kind of trickery that Penn & Teller can do; there’s nothing supernatural about it, but most people would be hard pressed to come up with a better explanation. Vaguely related is another kind of magic… equally non-supernatural, but perhaps far more powerful: the magic of what intelligent and imaginative humans can do. If you come from a culture that has no form of writing, someone producing even a crude form of data recording by pressing shapes into clay or carving runes on sticks is giving you a form of magic far more powerful than anything dreamed up by a shaman under the influence of toad sweat and mushrooms. The ability to count and do simple math? Magic. The calculation of time, the length of the year, predicting the seasons and the phases of the moon? Magic. The first time someone drew a sketch of a real thing on a cave wall or a flat rock and someone else recognized what it was? Magic. Even “meme magic,” where people make simple jokes and wind up controlling the direction of the political discourse. Those sorts of magic should be celebrated. As should the magic of technology… the “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” sort of technology. A simple transistor walkie talkie from the 1970s would have been explainable only in terms of magic to someone from 1700. A warp drive brought back with a time machine from the 26th century would seem magical today.
But there’s an important difference between “techno-magic” and “supernatural magic.” Let’s say you have a technomage straight out of Babylon 5, and a wizard straight out of the Potterverse. Their skills are, let’s say, roughly identical. They can do much the same sort of “magic.” What’s the difference? Why would I encourage the technomage to lay a smackdown on the Potterwizard, standing by with a shotgun and an orbiting AC-130 in order to finish the job? Why is “magic-magic” offensive? Because it’s a cheat. And because it is, at it’s heart, *ignorant,* limiting and self destructive.
Look at the major forms of wizarding and witchcraft in the modern world. You’ve got your Potterverse wizards. You’ve got your Jedi. You’ve got your X-Men mutants and other superpowered characters. And you have your real-world “witches.” What do all their forms of magic have in common? You learn from a book of wisdom. You learn what to do to make what happen. What do you *not* do? Well, you don’t innovate. What spells there are, are what there are. And… you don’t spend too much time trying to figure out how the magic works. Why it works. What the mechanism is that makes it work. It’s enough that it does work. To hell with “research.”
But a technomage – even if that technomage is Just Some Guy who got an electrical engineering degree and who makes ham radios in his basement as a hobby – would know *how* his magic works. What the underlying principles are. In order to become an engineer, a scientist, a technician… a person needs to know a lot of stuff beyond just the rote mechanics including the virtually complete history of their field. The magic of science and technology is not a cheat. It’s hard work, hard won, by not only the person in question but the many generations who came before. Name any magic-seeming technology and you can trace it back to it’s first glimmerings.
And anyone can become acquainted with the magic of science. You don’t need to be some special child of destiny, or have the right parentage, or a high enough midichlorian count or special genetic mutations. You just need to be non-stupid and have the discipline to put in the work and be ready to learn and understand.
But people want the fast and easy route, and they think that magic will do it for them. That if they do the right rituals, mutter the right words, believe the right things, the world will warp and flow around them into a shape they are happier with. But they’re fooling themselves. And their numbers seem to be growing.