universe or by some kind of contract theyâd chosen before being born. Nobody said, âBe careful what you wish for because you just might get it,â as though we were living in a fairy tale where the mere utterance of foolish desires had the power to damn us.
I come from the children of poor people, sometimes poorly educated, but we didnât spread superstition. When we heard it, we laughed. We called it baloney or hogwash. To do anything else would have been ignorant, and that is something we never wanted to be. My family was trying as hard as we could to enter the prosperous, reasonable world that had so long been closed to our kind, but even as we struggled that world was changing. What we would have called childish imagining was taking hold. The latest resurgence of American magic started in the counterculture of the 1960s. By the end of the 1970s, it was already going mainstream.
In 1975, literary and cultural critic George Steiner declared that in terms of money spent, literature produced, and people involved, our culture was the most superstitious and irrational of any âsince the decline of the Middle Ages and, perhaps, even since the time of the crises in the Hellenistic world.â In that same year, historian Theodore Roszak found himself going to parties where he frequently heard tales that âstretch oneâs powers of amazement.â Somewhat to his own astonishment, he wasnât rejecting them. âOne listens through them to hear still another intimation of astounding possibilities, a shared conviction which allows one to say, âYes, you feel it too, donât you? That we are at the turning point, the kairos, where the orders of reality shift and the impossible happens as naturally as the changing of the seasons.ââ Some of those tale tellers became New Agers, and if that had been all there was to the spread of magical thought, magic might not be so important today.
In the 1980s, magic went even more mass culture. A deluge of self-help programs and positive-thinking seminars that could have been taken straight from the philosophies of the ancient magi began a fundamental shift in our concepts of who we are and what our relationship to reality is. Most people didnât make the connection to magic, of course, but the gospel of positive thinking says that a personâs intentions, his will, and his inner reality can change what happens around him. Thatâs purely magical.
Such thinking seemed utterly pie in the sky to me when I first began to hear it. I remember arguing vehemently with a cheerful salesman who was flirting with me one night. Our budding love affair never left the bar because I was so contemptuous of his soft-brained thinking. You canât think your way to success, I told him. You have to work your way there, against great odds, with constant awareness of your weaknesses and frailties. In fact, believing you will triumph is the surest way not to, I believed, although I was too canny to say that outright. I was Calvinist to the core, completely out of step with my times. What I didnât realize in my dismal pride was that I was operating out of the selfsame magical idea, but at the opposite end of it. I believed only in bad magic. To him optimistic thoughts were empowering; to me they were dangerous.
Next, magical thinking showed up in the explosion of self-help programs. The idea that progress is always possible is very American and is often linked to Puritanism, but the modern strain is built on a different base than the older versions. With the new kind of self-help weâre still trying harder, but itâs no longer because weâre Godâs unworthy creatures. Itâs because weâre uncovering our inherent potential, our inner wisdom. Weâre becoming all we were meant to be. Thatâs magical. Every bit of that is magical thinking. Magical theory, unlike doctrines that stress the inadequacy and weaknesses of
I come from the children of poor people, sometimes poorly educated, but we didnât spread superstition. When we heard it, we laughed. We called it baloney or hogwash. To do anything else would have been ignorant, and that is something we never wanted to be. My family was trying as hard as we could to enter the prosperous, reasonable world that had so long been closed to our kind, but even as we struggled that world was changing. What we would have called childish imagining was taking hold. The latest resurgence of American magic started in the counterculture of the 1960s. By the end of the 1970s, it was already going mainstream.
In 1975, literary and cultural critic George Steiner declared that in terms of money spent, literature produced, and people involved, our culture was the most superstitious and irrational of any âsince the decline of the Middle Ages and, perhaps, even since the time of the crises in the Hellenistic world.â In that same year, historian Theodore Roszak found himself going to parties where he frequently heard tales that âstretch oneâs powers of amazement.â Somewhat to his own astonishment, he wasnât rejecting them. âOne listens through them to hear still another intimation of astounding possibilities, a shared conviction which allows one to say, âYes, you feel it too, donât you? That we are at the turning point, the kairos, where the orders of reality shift and the impossible happens as naturally as the changing of the seasons.ââ Some of those tale tellers became New Agers, and if that had been all there was to the spread of magical thought, magic might not be so important today.
In the 1980s, magic went even more mass culture. A deluge of self-help programs and positive-thinking seminars that could have been taken straight from the philosophies of the ancient magi began a fundamental shift in our concepts of who we are and what our relationship to reality is. Most people didnât make the connection to magic, of course, but the gospel of positive thinking says that a personâs intentions, his will, and his inner reality can change what happens around him. Thatâs purely magical.
Such thinking seemed utterly pie in the sky to me when I first began to hear it. I remember arguing vehemently with a cheerful salesman who was flirting with me one night. Our budding love affair never left the bar because I was so contemptuous of his soft-brained thinking. You canât think your way to success, I told him. You have to work your way there, against great odds, with constant awareness of your weaknesses and frailties. In fact, believing you will triumph is the surest way not to, I believed, although I was too canny to say that outright. I was Calvinist to the core, completely out of step with my times. What I didnât realize in my dismal pride was that I was operating out of the selfsame magical idea, but at the opposite end of it. I believed only in bad magic. To him optimistic thoughts were empowering; to me they were dangerous.
Next, magical thinking showed up in the explosion of self-help programs. The idea that progress is always possible is very American and is often linked to Puritanism, but the modern strain is built on a different base than the older versions. With the new kind of self-help weâre still trying harder, but itâs no longer because weâre Godâs unworthy creatures. Itâs because weâre uncovering our inherent potential, our inner wisdom. Weâre becoming all we were meant to be. Thatâs magical. Every bit of that is magical thinking. Magical theory, unlike doctrines that stress the inadequacy and weaknesses of
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