How to See Real Magic

This is as much as what Tumblrites call a "signal boost" as it is a commentary. I'm really enjoying Henry Dampier's Quick Reactions blog. He's approaching neoreactionary thought in a similar manner as myself, with an eye towards the moral and the non-rational.

From his post, Magic: More Real Than You Think:

If magic is a way of perceiving the world, then it may be more ‘real’ than the enlightenment-rationalist method of pretending as if the many things that we don’t understand accord to natural laws that we only pretend to be familiar with.

I didn't realize it at the time but Chesterton's Orthodoxy had a profound effect on me. On the first reading, I recognized the feeling of searching the world for a philosophy that made sense to me and then arriving upon the Christianity I was raised with. The rest made sense only on the surface.

The second reading jimmied some cracks in my mind. Chesterton presents the point that faith allows us to see the world as being as magical as it is. It took some time for it to sink in.

I was already down that path. I realized that the best way to approach the world is to picture oneself smaller and smaller within it--that is, that the world was getting increasingly bigger around me.

It started as a response to the artistic-types with whom I had surrounded myself. Most of them came from comfortable backgrounds and the rest had recklessly charged into the world, unconcerned with consequences--they had experiences that I envied. But as I heard them talk, I realized that their experiences were badges that they wore, not events that shaped and changed them.

I can explain it this way:  I imagine myself and the individuals I envied sitting in a Roman piazza, sipping espresso. My eyes would be wide, trying to take everything in, trying to imagine it hundreds of years before, trying to incorporate all the historical figures who'd been there, trying to understand the architecture, the people, the atmosphere and my reaction to it. I'd be a tiny child on an enormous playground. The people I met--who had been able to make these kinds of trips--sat there thinking, basically, "Hey, check me out. It's me, in Rome."

(Lest you think that I'm just guessing at my reaction, I was lucky enough to travel to India for a couple of months at the end of the last century. This is an accurate description of how I felt, with the addition that everything was a mystery to me, having no grounding in Indian history.)

But the entire world is this way, even the path from your door to your car. I wrote a bit in this direction in my piece about polyamory. Traditional marriage is one of those magical phenomena in the world. Even the concept--it's a human discovery rather than a human invention. It seems to exist in our collective psyches without anyone making it up; after all, nearly every culture has some variation on the union.

Our world is filled with these. The novel, for example--was it invented? Or is it an outgrowth of our natures, a knotting of language, imagination, our need for narrative and our ability to manage complexity? Wasn't it inevitable, not the creation of one individual but a diamond that only needed to be unearthed?

When one looks at the world with an understanding that it is more strange and wonderful and complicated than you can know, that it all exists outside of you, when one understands that there are dynamics at play of which one only sees shadows--well, it's a lot happier place to be.

That's why the post-Enlightenment, pseudo-rationalist progressive worldview is repugnant. It's not a matter of maintaining ignorance, like one burning astronomy books because one wants to believe that stars are the candles of angels, but a matter of knowing that our struggle to understand is like emptying the ocean with a teacup. The progressive tells us that the ocean is only an inch deep and a mammoth teacup will be here any day.

Take, again, Diana Adams' relationship philosophy. Her perspective was that humans have some finite number of needs/desires that need to be checked off to become happy or satisfied. Her particular set of needs could not be satisfied in a relationship with one partner, so she expanded.

Adams and her Yale-educated brain were bigger than the human phenomenon of relationships--she could map and diagram all the gears and controls and engineer a relationship(s) that fulfilled her needs.

That's not what relationships are and that's not how the world works. So much is unknowable--and if we do learn something, you can bet that there's another mystery right behind it.

Western Civilization has struggled with male-female relationships its entire existence--Adams and her comrades believe that the problem is that there weren't clear rules. Not only that, they believe that clear rules are possible and that they will cover every eventuality. I say that's madness.

Tradition, not speculative logic, is the method of handling the mysteries of the world. We can map the path through the forest, but only once we've gotten through it.