This was all set to be another post in my series about democracy. That will come. But, right now, I’m just not feeling it.
I mentioned in my last piece, I had a personal loss this week—although I don’t want to overstate it too much: On a scale of 1-to-genocide, my loss was in low single digits.
But, any good therapist will also tell you you can’t measure grief like that. In grief, objectivity doesn’t apply; much as it would be convenient for it to. As tragic and horrible as any death or loss, or physical, mental, or social destruction across our neighbourhood and globe is, we still can’t minimise even a seemingly minor source of grief in another person.
I’m afraid to say, that there is no easy Excel spreadsheet to help you calculate how much money you should spend on bereavement flowers, charitable giving, or your earnest time.
On the topic of grief though, here in Aotearoa we’ve also had a pretty rough awakening about the nature of our own democracy recently, with a new Frankengovernment elected by a narrow majority of people, mostly responding not to informed policy, but more to some murky sense of “necessary change”.
And, sure enough, we (for Democracy demands shared responsibility for an outcome) have voted—first—for the tobacco companies, the fossil fuel conglomerates, the landlords, the private contractors, the ute-manufacturers1, the gun lobbyists, the anti-vaxers, the big consultancy firms, the racist snowflakes, the authoritarians, the tax-avoiders, the cyclist-haters, the central-city villa owners, the private prison/hospital/school operators, the multi-national corporations, and the meritocrats.
And—second—for the pathetic trickle.
We, again, failed to vote to end child poverty, or for a unified vision, or for equal opportunity, or for global leadership in social and ecological spaces.
We, again, largely failed to demand those things were even an option for us on the ballot.
This has all added up to me struggling to grasp the edge of optimism, and pull myself back up on the platform to continue the work.
If you’re exposed to war, or the threat of despotic rulers, or censorship, or financial stress, or health concerns, I understand those are real problems. I don’t intend to minimise any of that. But everyone understands some of the weight that sits on you when you’ve lost something you loved—hope, a friend or family member, career autonomy, a special possession, innocence...
So, today, in disappointment and loss, I want to write in defence of small-o optimism.
I like magic.
Not because I get especially excited by beautiful, levitating, sequined assistants; or because I am fooled anymore by the daydream of a pitiful life being transformed by the discovery of some deeply-suppressed supernatural power. I can happily enjoy the distraction of all that “turns out, you’re a superhero alien/wizard/Jedi!” stuff; and can understand the transportive appeal when life seems otherwise out-of-control. But, suffice to say, for most people ‘magic’ is either escapism or a grift.
What I think we should like about magic though is how it can frame the way we think.
Magic is, essentially, the idea that some previously-unrecognised force can remake a situation. It takes all the certainty out of the restrictively-rational, sensible, and logical certainties of life.
It is the joy, or intoxicating-terror, of mystery, surprise, and unpredictability. And, in the best examples, these things are great levellers for the underdogs; things able to turn hopelessness into hope. Because, in simple terms, without rationality, the status quo loses its power.
However, because we are so conditioned by the popular magic of Las Vegas shows and Hollywood, we forget all that: We forget what magic is actually doing.
So, magic might not be what we think it is, but it is still a real thing. Real magic—the non-lightning-bolts-from-blessed-twigs type—just takes longer to work.
There’s a thought experiment, proposed by an economist called Robert Gordon, about a farmer in around the year 1400 who takes a nap on his way to the produce market but wakes up 300 years later.
He packs up his cart and carries on to the early 1700s market, barely aware of any difference in the world around him.
The next morning he naps again for just half the time, 150 more years, waking in 1850 to discover, despite sleeping through much of the Industrial Revolution, things still haven’t changed a lot for him. He still cooks over a fire, rides a horse, craps in a hole, and sells produce to people like himself at the local market.
But then, the following morning, his sleep is terribly interrupted and he only manages to get in just 613,200 hours (70 years) of shuteye. He wakes, a little dozy, rubs the sleep from his eyes and finds himself in a 1920s world of literal magic!
Flying machines, refrigeration, cars, skyscrapers, indoor plumbing…
Shocked and astonished, he faints into another deep sleep, being roused just 50 years later into a world with commercial jets stitching the globe together, plastic containers, motorways, television, pop music, the beginnings of digital computers, air-conditioning, nuclear energy, modern health systems, and men on the moon.
From the time-traveller’s perspective, this is undeniably all magic: Cast by a spell of time.
Gordon continues with his thought experiment, asking us to imagine the traveller asleep for another 50 years and waking in our time. His thought experiment asks, for all our bluster, what progress has humanity really made in recent decades—a flurry around communication, entertainment, surveillance, and finance perhaps, and some evolutionary changes in medicine, travel, and so on? What he questions is how significantly lives have really changed relative to the prior 50-year period.
This whole idea is not new. It's put succinctly in Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
But, because Clarke was a science-fiction writer, it often gets conceptually wrapped up in things like space travel, Van De Graaff generators, and super-conducting magnets. When really what it demonstrates is believing in magic just requires the right perspective.
That can be hard to find in grim-seeming times.
The point is, the time-traveller’s experience is not just indistinguishable from magic but, with the spell of time, it is magic.
Technology is an easy one. But to a gay man in the 1950s, our cultural progress to date would also look magical. My parents, married for nearly 50 years through children, financial stress, sickness, temptation, and loss, is a kind of magic. An idea that forms in a brain and can be turned into a symbols that put it into the brains of strangers all over the world, is magic.
None of these things are the touch of Midas, turning water to wine, telekinesis, or laser eyes. None of these things happen in the finger snap we expect from popularised magic. But all are capable of remaking a situation.
You may have spotted the stray fingernail in the salad already: You can of course be equally surprised by the remaking of a situation for the worse. And, that’s fair—I often think back over the past decades of my life and wonder about the kind of dark magic that has resulted in unaffordable houses, tenuous work, mind-boggling wealth inequality, and social division.
But the one certainty in life is the future remains unpredictable. No technology will ever give us a view into the future because it would be like Schrödinger's cat; you can’t know it until it is observed, because the one trait humans cannot escape is our sense of justice, so anyone seeing any future will react to it, starting a chain that will inevitably change it.
This, incidentally, is not undone by the nihilistic belief that our lives are pre-determined and lacking “free will”. Because any argument for pre-determination is still based on triggers. Those that argue against the existence of free-will will claim neurological triggers give us no choice but to react in specific ways to prior stimulation. Only, glimpsing into a future of a world without free-will, would alone be enough to disrupt the timeline
This is all to say, in the face of a seemingly hopelessly-grim, pre-determined, future, you should still believe in magic.
Looking at time—optimistically—as a “spell” does demand some critical thinking about what sort of magic we might like to cast. What, for example, technology would we need to replicate the civilisation-busting progress of the Industrial Revolution? Or, even more, the first half of the 20th Century?
If the benchmark is cars, skyscrapers, airplanes, combustion engines, electrification, synthetic fertiliser, air conditioning, computers, germ theory and cost-effective steel manufacture, we'd be looking at things like fusion energy, teleportation or true presence-shifting, nano-robotic blood cells, and domestic food synthesizers.
And beyond technology, what might be the future social equivalents of globalisation, civil rights, marriage equality, the 40-hour work week, or acceptance of the word “fuck” in ordinary conversation? Especially given we’re apparently not in universal agreement that even those things are universally good.
How do we magic inclusiveness into our spells? Can we do it using our current democracy? Can we do it using our current economic system?
How do we ensure the spell is not just cast for apocalypse-bunker-dwelling billionaires who are intent on living forever?
Right now, we can’t even agree that city-dwellers being able to get to their local shops or the bus stop in 15 minutes or less is good!
The optimistic part of this is, we don’t have to feel powerless just because things are not going our way right now. We simply need to reframe our spells as needing time to work.
Time is the underrated source of most power. Privilege and opportunity are, after all, no more than a little more power and time. That’s the message for humanity in that story of the time-traveller, but it’s also the open secret responsible for how equal and inclusive the world of humanity is or could be.
Let me leave you with one quick story.
A few days my teenage daughter went to a birthday party, nervous because it was mostly with other girls she wasn’t (yet) close friends with. Apparently, the thing to wear at these things is “jeans and a T-shirt”, but it was a warm day so we were determined that a) jeans would be hot and uncofortable, and b) our daughter had a nice summery dress she should make use of.
Of course, my daughter freaked out—ridiculous-teenage-style—about not fitting in. She was panicked that the other girls would wonder what she was wearing (as if a summer dress was such an insane thing to wear to a late-spring afternoon birthday party!)
But we encouraged her to be brave, because bravery is what it takes to cast magic spells.
Sure enough, every other girl at the party was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.
But our daughter was the only one who returned home from that party, having received a bunch of compliments on what she was wearing. And, next party, those new friends might even brave a summer dress themselves because of that little spell.
In a world of frustration, loss, and tragedy, we can’t forget there still exists magic. It just needs us to be brave, be patient, and cast a spell into time.
-T
Will try and dredge up some optimism after this crazy week and the crazier media coverage of it. Have you read Robert Gordon's book - is it worth a read?