Review : Religion And The Decline Of Magic (IV)

If you're just joining, I've been summarising Keith Thomas' incredible 1971 thesis Religion And The Decline of Magic. In part one I looked at the differences between religion and magic and the beneficial effects of magical thinking. Part two examined how magical beliefs sustain themselves, but also how they relate to and evolved into scientific methodologies. Part three looked at what happened when things went wrong : how witch trials got out of control, but also what brought them to an end, as well as how magical, paganistic ideas were, and are, extremely enduring.

The early modern period saw the development of a rationalist ideology (if that's not an oxymoron) that has persisted for centuries. Some aspects of this were extremely rapid cultural shifts. The witch-hunting mania of the 1650s gave way, in less than a single lifetime, to an era when magical beliefs in general became socially embarrassing, confined much more to something approaching a lunatic fringe than being the social norm. But fortune's wheel is ever turning, and there are no guarantees that this state of affairs will persist. Indeed in some ways the western world seems bent on regression to an earlier and nastier way of thinking. 

This does not mean, by any stretch, that we are abandoning science and rationality; by no means is there necessarily a slippery slope here. But it does seem pertinent to try and make sense of how the opposite occurred, how we came to reject ideas that had been seen as normal for most of human history and adopt a rational, evidence-based scientific approach in spite of all our natural tendencies.

7) Why did this happen ?

Let me begin by emphasising the magnitude of the change that happened here. The world view that emerged from the wreck of the old bore little resemblance to its predecessor, with a radically different cosmology and, as we'll see, a vastly different moral outlook. Even the conception of time had been totally reshaped. Why, for instance, do all those medieval manuscripts with illustrations of Greco-Roman stories have everyone in medieval garb ? Why do they have the walls of Troy as those of a 13th-century castle ? There's an enormously profound bit of reasoning behind this apparent bit of artistic foolishness : the notion of time itself had changed. 

Technological development was hardly at a standstill in the medieval period, but its visible effects were, Thomas says, somewhat limited. People lived and died much as they had done for centuries. Their houses were constructed in much the same way, they planted the same crops, caught the same diseases, died just as easily, suffered just as much. There was little reason for them to suppose the past had been significantly different to the present, because in many ways it wasn't : the glory that was Rome didn't affect the world of rural agriculture very much at all. But when you start getting inventions like gunpowder and the printing press, which have visible and powerful changes on everyday life... then any pretence that the world was unchanging has to give way. Astrology played a role in this by dividing time into periods, making the idea of change more palatable. But actual technological developments, more than abstract theory, drove the changing view inexorably forwards.

This view on time matters, and not just because of its significance in itself. In the both the medieval past and classical antiquity, there was a sort of "progressive conservatism" behind all proposed changes. "Make Rome Great Again" would have been something Cicero would wholeheartedly approved of; medieval equivalents would have worked just as well. The idea is quite simple : this change will make us better not because it's new, but because it's reverting us back to the ways of our glorious past. It's almost totally without foundation, obviously, but that didn't stop people believing it. Some still do, of course.

As scientific and technological progress, err, progressed, this way of thinking was no longer tenable for the majority of people. New inventions were unlike anything ever seen, so the idea that you had to hark back to the past to justify yourself fell by the wayside. What did the world of Caesar and Alexander know of Gutenberg and Newton ? Sod all. Now you could openly propose that new ideas were better in and of themselves, not because they'd restore any lost ideals. The appeal of ancient prophecies was fatally undermined by the present being so demonstrably different to the past. The two could no longer be held to relate so directly to each other.

One issue on which I think I will provisionally disagree with Thomas is that religion was self-confirming, that it couldn't have changed by its own volition and had to have been changed by external influences. For all the circular reasoning at work in the supernatural beliefs, the opening chapter does seem to make it clear that it was a change of religious belief that underlined the wider shift in philosophical world views*. True, it hardly went from a state of "everything is God" to "everything is atoms" – it was nothing at all like that. But there was that aspect to it : magical thinking gave way to something much more materialistic than had prevailed before, however messy and imperfect that change was in reality. 

*And indeed, the Protestant movement was branded very much as a reversion to a lost and more virtuous past, a way to overcome the contemporary corruption. Like later, political ideologies of the English Civil War, this had unintended consequences. Even if early Protestants were not actively trying to rethink the nature of reality, that was the end result.

Which is not to say that the circular nature of the old beliefs wasn't extremely important. It is, as the old saying goes, impossible to people reason people out of positions they hadn't been reasoned into. People often believe things simply because other people they know and trust also believe them; understanding of the issues isn't required. Thomas himself points this out.

Advancement in scientific thinking and technological progress, however, undermined the need for magical thinking at a base and emotional level. People believed in magic in part because they needed to : it fulfilled an essential social role that could not be met in any other way. It allowed people to make decisions about issues they could not decide rationally. But when thinking advanced to the point those issues could be understood rationally, magical thinking faded away. When complex issues can be predicted quantitatively and reliably, when you can demonstrate irrefutably that things happen simply due to the physical nature of reality, then the need to moralise everything vanishes.

That moral dimension is crucial to understanding the change that occurred. The unifying factor between religion, astrology and magic was that they all had morality as one of their key features. They all held that bad things happened to people who deserved it. They denied the very possibility of random chance : there was, in effect, always someone to blame, and if that someone was God, then you must surely have deserved whatever befell you. Medieval society was not a meritocracy, but in some ways it believed it was one – or perhaps more a sort of "moralocracy" : the king's on top because he's an innately better person, the serfs are at the bottom because they're a bunch of shitheads.

The change in thinking was to be able to demonstrate that this wasn't the case. Not perfectly and not evenly (there are still monarchists today, still those who idolise celebrities, and of course still those who believe in astrology and other bunk), but still... something changed. Profoundly, and in some cases rapidly, as per the rapid decline in witchcraft trials; in living memory, normal magical rituals became the stuff of open ridicule and mockery. When you can show that things happen for entirely natural causes, you simply don't need to give them any kind of moral aspect. When you can better protect people from fire and flood, you don't need to pretend that they had it coming when their village was burned down or washed away. When the state can provide for the poor and destitute, communal solidarity is no longer needed, and the mad old cat lady need not be feared for being a social deviant.

The decline in magic is not quite mirrored by the rise of science. The former occurred well before the latter, in some cases centuries before, says Thomas. He suggests that the age became experimental before it became really successful : enough answers were being found to have faith that eventually other answers would be found as well. Instead of needing to plug the gaps with magic, the mindset became one of sufficient confidence to accept the unknowns. What is a mystery today, the thinking goes, might be understood tomorrow so long as we keep investigating. Just as the medieval mindset had cause to doubt individual wizards but not magic itself, so did their descendants come to doubt individual scientific claims but not the fundamental method of inquiry. 

In a way, says Thomas, it was more the loss of magic that led to the ascendency of science rather than the other way around. Science didn't overturn magic so much as a loss of faith in magic allowed science to flourish. The Protestant diminishment of everyday magic wasn't out of some inherently more rational world view, what with ascribing absolutely everything to God. But it did facilitate the development of such a view, because again, people needed tangible answers, and if magic was out, then science had to step up. Again, not evenly – there were even violent movements against mathematics because of its arcane symbols – but it did happen.

Today, we still place faith in the scientific method even when its results are manifestly wrong, says Thomas. In that sense, magical thinking is likely to always be with us, a deep-seated aspect of the human psyche. Just as paganistic reasoning survived the arrival of the (so-called) monotheism of Christianity, so too do many of us persist in our little rituals. It's just human nature to believe in things. Which is why I get very cross with people who insist that we should simply stop doing this, as though it were something we have any control over. We don't, not really.

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I have to end with a brief attempt to learn some of the lessons of all this. Why are we backsliding ? Thomas' analysis would suggest it's because our emotional needs aren't being met. "God is dead, and we have killed him", perhaps, but we still have gaps where we can't make a rational judgement yet the gap needs to be crossed for us to make a decision. If we have no clear moral preference and no rational judgement then something comes forth to get us across. And if it helps us, then we believe in it.

I doubt there's a single global root cause here; as per the witch trials proceeding quite differently in Britain and Europe, the same outcome might result from a multitude of reasons. Still, I think I should try to at least sketch out some possible contributing factors. Whether these are enough to explain my exasperation with the current state of affairs I don't know; I think a least some of these will be significant, but I won't attempt to guess which are the most important. I'm also acutely aware that an attempt to rationally understand a loss of rationality may be a fatally stupid thing to do, but I'm going to try anyway.

Broadly there are two categories to this. The first is how we process information :

• The obvious one in a simple information deficit. Anecdotally, there are certainly plenty of quite extraordinarily stupid people out there, and a poor education system must surely have some role in all this. Some people have been left behind, not so much materially but informatically : they have never subscribed to the wider modern world view but persist in much older, largely religious, delusions*. The Overton window has shifted how these people express themselves and what's socially acceptable, but hasn't actually altered their system of thinking very much.
• A bigger factor, I suspect, is the opposite : information overload. It's now all too easy to sink into the first emotionally-rewarding explanation one comes across. I don't necessarily mean "thing that I already agree with" here, that's a different issue. Nor do I blame people for being lazy and not seeking out better sources, which are often far more complex – even with the best outreach content available. No, the pressures of modern life, though incomparably different to the medieval era (and in some important ways vastly less) are nonetheless real. For people to reach to an immediately emotionally-satisfying answer, rather than one that's more powerful but less intuitive, isn't something I can raise issue with.
• Outright misinformation should not be underestimated. I doubt it has much of a role in in convincing people. Instead its main role is secondary, to cause confusion rather than conviction, to sow fear, doubt and mistrust of the other side. Bribery and corruption among the wealthy oligarchs is a major cause of this.
• If we don't experience a change directly for ourselves, we have to believe it's a good thing to support it happening to others. If we perceive a positive development as negative, then we're convinced the system is failing by apparently making things worse, in spite of the truth. We then start to look for alternatives, however irrational those may be. You can't feel something if you don't experience it, so you rely heavily on how people report it.
• If we do experience things directly, then a force may be perceived as good only if it causes improvements rather than merely maintaining the status quo – even if the status quo is actually quite nice. In Thomas' period things were visibly changing and improving as a result of scientific progress. In the modern era this is still (make no mistake !) happening, still a good thing... but it isn't causing such direct improvements any more, at least not ones that so inescapably change and improve our daily lives. Better cancer treatments matter a great deal to those benefiting from them but they don't directly affect the vast majority of people, at least not regularly. In short, we've come to take things for granted, and therefore don't see scientific gains for what they are, or even appreciate that it maintains our lifestyles or recognise just how much worse things could be.
• A happier factor may be a "regression to the mean" effect. Swathes of people, having become already very rational indeed, can't very well become even more rational, but can easily become at least a little bit more unhinged.
• We may have stopped seeing spiritual gains from rationality. Things have sometimes hardened into a nastier, more binary, less tolerant sort of logical thinking, "if you don't agree with my PERFECLTY REASONABLE conclusions then you're obviously a twat". This is the essence of New Atheism. By forcing people to conform, like the medieval communities, it may have exactly the opposite effect. By permitting no tolerance whatever for minor and harmless beliefs, it may drive the much worse ideas it seeks to suppress. As with misinformation I suspect the main impact of this is secondary, in that it becomes easier to tar all scientists with the same brush.
• It's probably also worth remembering that a lot of people do participate in the irrational stuff purely for its ceremonial value. They like being with their friends and singing songs; they don't actually believe much of what they're saying at all (this is how you get Christians who don't like Jesus). This doesn't make it any the less damaging if they vote in accordance with their community, however. They really do believe it's going to Church, not practising Christian teachings, that matters. For the MAGA types it's all very cult-like, if not towards particular figures (though this often happens, believing in Trump himself rather than in anything he says) then in effect making a cult out of their community : whatever their community does must be correct.

* Regular readers will know of course that I don't mean all religion is delusional. I'm thinking here larger of the American Bible-thumpers, who are quite, quite different from the parish priests of rural Britain.

The second category may be more important than all of these combined : materialistic concerns. The need for tangible gains was evident throughout the whole work, and as Thomas points out, it sometimes wasn't the arguments that changed, only their circumstances. Just as with information, it may not be enough to maintain the status quo for us to see it as a good thing : things have to improve. Now in many ways there have been huge material improvements in recent decades, but in others, there haven't. We haven't seen a substantial change in working hours in decades. Housing prices have skyrocketed. Wages have increased, but not so much in real terms. It feels like we're being asked to do more and more for less and less, especially given the poor state of public infrastructure – and with less and less guarantees for the future.

As for the solution, I leave that for another time. There's a quote going around that you can't get a fascist out of office peacefully, but I draw some hope from studies which show that this just isn't true.

I'm going to end on a more long-term note though. The magnitude of the change in world view from the medieval to modern periods was truly staggering. Let's suppose that shift was, as seems likely, broadly positive, getting us a little closer to understanding the world as it truly is, or at least in ways more useful to us. I think that's basically the case, that the scientific approach is a better way of reasoning with the world. Now extend that forward. Might we eventually change up or replace the modern scientific method completely ? Maybe our own current views, not just the details but the fundamental basis of it, our conception of reality, our cosmology, our very methodology, will all look similarly backward to our descendants as medieval magic does to us. Personally I rather hope so. And perhaps our descendants will be charitable enough to remember that while our views may have changed, we can still appreciate the old ways, still enjoy the old stories, and most importantly of all, remember that we're not as different as it may first appear.