Although astrology, witchcraft, ghosts, fairies, and prophecy still provide popular entertainment for many, few today put much actual stock in their veracity. We are, so our smugly arrogant thinking goes, far too sophisticated for this sort of superstition, our knowledge and wisdom being self-evident compared with that of people in the past.
Toward the end of his magisterial book Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England, Keith Thomas tried to account for the centuries of abiding faith in practices and beliefs that we “modern” people now find absurd. In his analysis of the persistence—some might say stubbornness—of our faith in that which we are certain will both protect us from harm and provide us with some sense of control over a world that often seems both confusing and frightening, Mr. Thomas wrote the following by way of explanation:
“It is a feature of many systems of thought, and not only primitive ones, that they possess a self-confirming character. Once their initial premisses are accepted, no subsequent discovery will shake the believer’s faith, for he can explain it away in terms of the existing system. Neither will his convictions be weakened by the failure of some accepted ritual to accomplish its desired end, for this too can be accounted for. Such systems of belief possess a resilience which makes them virtually immune to external argument.”
There are not a few atheists and apostates that would argue that the legacy religions of the world fall right into this box, although (just to point out the complexities of faith) the heyday of the belief in magic ran right alongside an equally fervent faith in Christianity during this period of English history, and the Church had been borrowing freely from pagan beliefs and holidays for many centuries prior in order to ease the conversion of new acolytes. Humanity has over the millennia proven itself to be, if nothing else, both easily beguiled and frustratingly illogical.
Looking at the challenges and difficulties now facing America, ones compounded by a refusal by many to accept that their political, cultural, and social beliefs might be hastening disorder and decline, it is hard to escape the possibility that our supposedly modern opinions and attitudes, which we deem to be firmly grounded in the modern secular religions of science and psychology—and, therefore, beyond all challenge—are no less illogical that those found among Londoners who were convinced magic would protect them from harm in the early 1600’s.
I do not, I must quickly point out, mean to denigrate either science or psychology. The blessings of modernity that scientific research and application have bequeathed to us have immeasurably improved our lives, and we can all be glad that trepanation is no longer the treatment of choice for those plagued by overwhelming emotional distress. However, it is also true that progress in both of these areas has been a mixed bag at times—and the misuse of each has caused irreparable harm to many. Whether we are busy pursuing a fool’s errand with electric cars or convincing ourselves that pumping children full of prescription drugs will turn them into happy adults, we are no less credulous than those who, a few short centuries ago, were paying a witch to ensure an easy birth or a good harvest. Sometimes we seek protection at our own peril.
Given that our extraordinary cultural polarization has produced values and policies that are often diametrically opposed to one another, there are only two certainties as we sail forward into the perilous years ahead: A lot of people are going to be proven to be dead wrong, and they aren’t going to like that at all.
The disconnect between the government-run utopia we have been promised for generations and the current implosion of our country is going to make this year’s elections particularly important because nothing is working in America today. Whether we are talking about maxing out our personal credit cards just to survive our withered yet inflationary economy or our agencies of government running up multi-trillion dollar deficits every year, America is stretched to the financial breaking point. Our major cities are turning into dystopian centers of crime and addiction. Our public schools are failing to adequately educate most students, and our colleges and universities are staring into a fiscal and enrollment abyss. We are staggering under a historic influx of illegal immigrants that is driving up costs while bankrupting our cities and states. We are funding a meat grinder war in Ukraine that is putting us perilously close to direct conflict with Russia, China might decide now is the best possible time to invade Taiwan, and the Middle East is turning into a slaughterhouse. We live at the sufferance of judges, experts, and bureaucrats who seem to find our traditional America freedoms insulting and annoying—and are angry when we refuse to obey.
As for our current crop of self-centered and self-aggrandizing elected officials, we must realize it is a cruel truth that sometimes people seek office for reasons that have little to do with working for the benefit of our nation and its citizens.
Sadly, many voters and the officials they have elected are going to ride their ideological biases to the bitter end because admitting error is both brutally difficult and very frightening for most. This approach is fraught with peril because it is clear that a great many of the problems and controversies now dividing and destroying our nation are not suited to compromise. Going “halfsies” is just not going to work when it comes to crushing government debt, uncontrolled illegal immigration, inadequate national defense, handcuffed law enforcement, imperiled freedom of speech, the entrenched culture of mediocrity in our public schools, the wildly expensive and impractical schemes of the climate cultists, and our hopelessly corrupted tax code that fails to reward success and continues to subsidize failure.
Mr. Thomas also pointed out in his book—and this should be no surprise to us “sophisticated” moderns—that is was common practice to tell true believers exactly what they wanted to hear in order to comfort and control them, and ritualistic group fantasies we today find absurd provided an illusory path to protect themselves from harm.
To be honest, not much has changed in 400 years.
The Biden administration, for example, is now touting a 50-year low in violent crime in America, which is sending sending true-blue Democrats into paroxysms of Woke joy regarding this “success” of liberal law enforcement. However, the reality is that 37% of our nation’s police departments (including those in crime-ridden cities such as New York, Baltimore, and Chicago) have simply stopped reporting their data to the F.B.I. Voila! Ignorance will keep us safe, and defunding the police works!
Let no one tell you that confirmation bias is not real, or that our belief in sorcery (in this case, the magic of misleading statistics) does not still assuage our fears.
We had a stern dose of these peculiarly bewitching comforts and controls during the Covid-19 craziness that engulfed our nation. Experts told us that wearing a mask over one’s face (even when driving alone in our cars), staying at least six feet away from other human beings when we stepped out of our homes, slathering hand sanitizer over the exposed surfaces of our bodies, and getting experimental jab after jab after jab would save us.
Anxiously and slavishly following contradictory and confusing recommendations that played on our fears to imprison us, Americans were assured that sending our children to school or a playground was deadly, but home pizza deliveries, lining up to buy weed at our local marijuana dispensary, and sexual liaisons with strangers (as long as we remembered to wear a mask, of course!) were A-OK. It was all utter nonsense, and we wrecked our lives, economy, and country by listening to our 21st century wizards and shamans brandishing their latest bits of absurd fear mongering, fake facts, and crystal ball expertise on our television screens, but a great many Americans apparently found comfort in cowering.
Perhaps we should now not, therefore, be so harsh or dismissive regarding the follies of our ancestors who were wearing talismans to protect themselves from the demons squatting in every corner. Instead of smugly laughing at the ignorance of the past, we should resolve to stop placing our blind trust in those who today seek profit, privilege, and power by preying on human weaknesses that have been with us from the dawn of civilization—and start to think for ourselves rather than being sheep.