The Magic of Macroeconomics
Magic, anthropologists have always known, is about what people throughout the world do when faced with uncertainty, catastrophic damage, injustice, illness, suffering or harm, while ritual (also magical in its logic) is performed to forestall or prevent these very things. Magic is not about deficient logic, childish mental mistakes, clever priestly illusions or other mistaken technologies. It is the universal feeling that what we see and feel exceeds our knowledge, our understanding and our control. Can we deny that the infusion of 700 billion dollars into our banks is a magical act designed to make our banks rain credit again? Has it worked yet? Are we discarding our belief in banks and credit as a result? Magic is a method for deploying modest technical means to address outsize ethical challenges. Human beings have always done this and always will. We might as well have a grown-up word for this set of practices. [...]
In much of the world, magic is not just about miracle and mystery, it is also about questions and answers, means and ends, suffering and healing. It is not just about “what’s up.” It is about “how to.” And magical practice is primarily about the management of risk and uncertainty.
Even anthropologists, experts in the language of ritual, have lost the forest for the trees. Ritual is not primarily about sticks and stones, about making the fields yield grain and women yield children, about making boys and girls into men and women, and about assuring that troubled elders became contented ancestors. It is not just about boundaries and margins, the cycle of the seasons and the passage of human beings through the stages of life. It is about these moments and rhythms, indeed, but it is mostly about risk management. Magic is humanity’s oldest tool for managing the myriad ways in which things can go wrong. We have reduced magic to ritual and ritual to etiquette, to a set of mechanical procedures for lubricating the traffic of social life. Nothing could be a sillier view of magic, which is not about the big things that govern human life. Magic is the set of techniques that human beings have assembled to manage those risks which appear in the zone where the big things meet the little things, and when that meeting goes wrong.
Continue reading at The Immanent Frame.
Image: Uri Geller.
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