How strange then, to see, even in our world dominated by technology, that around mid-December, swathes of the population grant themselves permission to cosplay ancient dreams of a magical and enchanted world. Basically, for the whole of advent, the world is teeming with elves and wizards and winged creatures singing good tidings.

But it is not just modernity that supposedly sets itself against the enticements of the magical. For centuries, the religious establishment sought to destroy magic. The Bible, particularly the Hebrew scriptures, prescribed the death penalty (by stoning) for those meddling in the occult. To be accused of witchcraft and wizardry was to be assuredly burnt at the stake. And the Inquisition crushed all such nonsense. Today, conservative Evangelicals ban their children from reading Harry Potter. And some even attack Christmas itself. Too much Hocus Pocus.

Further reading

Christmas in Noah’s Ark

By Farahn Morgan

This ambivalence towards magic probably seems rather strange to the secular imagination — which deems religion to be the most powerful purveyor of magical thinking in human history: a fantasy world of dangerous ideas and superstitious nonsense. Yet there is absolutely a way of thinking about magic that is not dangerous or fanciful, but taps into some of our most understandable human concerns. As Joan Didion wrote 20 years ago in A Year of Magical Thinking, powerful life events — for her, the death of her husband — can create unexpected eddies of thought. As with the secular observing the religious, these might seem bizarre. But from within the experience of loss, they have an irresistible persuasion. Didion refuses to throw her husband’s shoes away, for example. Not for sentimental keep-sake reasons. But because she believes he will need them when he returns. On one level, she knows this is ridiculous: he is dead; he is not coming back. But holding on to his shoes, in the hope of his return, is an expression of the kind of magical thinking that captures exquisitely the depth and power of her grief. Sometimes, magical thinking is an expressive interruption of what is sensible and rational; it says things the sensible and the rational cannot begin to articulate. A baby in a manger, God come down to earth from heaven, angels singing “fear not”, kings following stars — perhaps all this, too, is an expression of hope. I trust it, but not in a way I can rationally justify. It’s magical thinking.

This is expressive magic; hopes and dreams magic; it’s white magic. And some justify this way of thinking by comparing it favorably with the more sinister aims of black magic. It was in the 16th century that Edmund Spencer first used the term black magic as something deceitful and dangerous in his Faerie Queen. Black magic is all about the thirst for power. It, too, seeks to harness the power of what we do not understand — but for personal advantage. Cast a spell and she will love you. Prayer will make you rich.

This is the kind of magic that Prospero has to relinquish at the end of The Tempest in order to become a decent human being again. “Now my charms are all o’erthrown, and what strength I have’s mine own.” It’s a bit like almighty God giving up his power and becoming a weak and pathetic child rather than an omnipotent super-deity. White magic, on the other hand, knows that the mystery takes the time it takes. White magic does not seek to overwhelm with its force. White magic is love.

Unusually, I hold the view that technology is the dark magic for our age. It is where people look for a quick fix and where they are prepared to accept things even when they have no idea how they work. I don’t understand nuclear power or Artificial Intelligence or crypto currency or metformin. No idea. If I use them, I have to trust that others are aware, and that they are using their enormous power for the greater good.

Just as the average lay person in the Middle Ages believed that so-called experts in the unknown — mainly priests — were using their power for good (and often they weren’t), today the man on the Clapham omnibus must trust our current high priests of science and technology. But I am nervous about all their raids into the unknown because their power can cross certain boundaries, interfering in things that are properly beyond our reach. My wariness is not because I do not “believe in” science, but rather because I do not believe in people. Just as there is black and white magic, so is there black and white technology.

Christmas says little that is interesting to science and doesn’t really try to. It’s a very different mode of thought that reaches for a different kind of truth. For the average semi-secular Christmas consumer, magic is part of the feel-good mood — a spiritual titillation, rather than pertaining to anything real. But might it be more than this? The dark streets, nights closing in — at this time of year we live more up close and personal with the unknown. This is the time for ghost stories, where the fear of the unknown is brought alive.

Further reading

The enshittification of Christmas

By Aaron Bastani

Saying things about the unknown is a human compulsion. Of course, we risk saying things that are foolish, strange, magical. But however much science pushes back the boundaries, it cannot eliminate the unknown, and so whatever the advancements of science, we must live with it, paint a face on it, tell stories about it. As T.S. Eliot wrote, we have to make “a raid on a inarticulate”.

Letting the light in helps us illuminate the unspeakable. And we’ve been burning a lot of candles in our household of late. Hanukkah and Christmas both love all that light-in-darkness imagery. For Christians, it radiates from a child born in a stable 2,000 years ago. As we sing at midnight mass: “Yet in the dark streets shineth, the everlasting light. / The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” God enters our world and offers us a hope that pushes back against the terrifying darkness of Bondi, Kharkiv, Gaza…

After presiding over the coming of the light at that Mass, we clergy have developed a singularly new tradition. At 2am, during “Clergy Malt Club”, hundreds of knackered vicars pour a glass of whiskey and join in a moment of peaceful solidarity on social media. In the stillness of the night we sit at home, usually on our own (families in bed), reflecting on the extraordinary events of the past few hours. Thousands of people have been in church; but now we are alone with the magical message of the angels and the virtual friendship of our colleagues. How silently the wondrous gift is given.

These moments of communion remind how much I love the church of which I am a part, despite all that is thrown at it. And I am re-fortified — not just by the whiskey — to keep on fighting for that powerful white magic of love and peace. He is born. Happy Christmas.

The North American Scrabble Players’ Association has called for 238 “slurs” to be banned from the game on the grounds of their offensiveness — including not only the obvious racial epithets but terms such as “wrinklies” (offensive to old people), “papist” (Catholics) and “Jesuit” (apparently offensive to followers of St Ignatius of Loyola, though this seems to me highly questionable). “When we play a slur,” says John Chew, the association’s Chief Executive Officer, “we are declaring that our desire to score points in a word game is of more value to us than the slur’s broader function as a way to oppress a group of people.”

Suggested reading

The woke have no vision of the future

By John Gray

There’s no certainty yet that this daft idea is going to catch hold. The international standard of tournament play remains Collins’s Official Scrabble Words (which is what we used to call SOWPODS), and Collins haven’t indicated that they’ll start expunging words from that. (There already exists a bowdlerised version, the Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary, which up till now was reserved for children.)

But it’s not a sensible direction of travel. Ebi Sosseh, described in a news report I read as “a BAME player from Bournemouth”, was quoted as calling the move a “trivial gesture”. I’m with him. I’m not much for the N-word in Scrabble — not out of political correctness but because who ever has two Gs at once? And besides, it’s low-scoring and hard to play. But “wop” and “wog” are both pretty tasty in a tight corner (by which I mean the corner containing a triple-word tile) and Scrabble players would be the poorer without them.

More to the point, the meanings of the words used has never had the faintest bearing on a game of Scrabble. TI, KA, KI, TE, UT, MI, XU, NA, OE. Do you know what any of those words mean? I don’t — and I have played all of them many thousands of times in Scrabble games over the years. I have a dim sense that a GI is some bit of judo paraphernalia, but I may be quite wrong and it has never even crossed my mind to check.

More from this author

Are you a Scrabble sadist or a Cluedo nerd?

By Sam Leith

Indeed, it’s perhaps not so much the fact that I don’t know what those words mean that matters, as the fact that when I’m playing Scrabble the meanings of the words I do know barely impinge. Looking over the list of allowable two-letter words, it requires a conscious effort to recall that “EH” is an expression of surprised curiosity. When you’re playing, it’s just one of a handful of two-letter words that you know will often let you get an H on a triple-letter going in two directions at once — which is a creditable 24 points right out of the gate. Scrabble players are more familiar with QI than any new age mystic, and get through more ZA than a teenage mutant ninja turtle.

The serious Scrabble player does not take the slightest interest in the meaning of the words he or she plays. It’s closer to a mathematical exercise than it is to a lexicographical one. The English language and its morphology (all those plurals and comparatives and conjugations) just provides a convenient corpus on which to perform the game’s operations. The question of meaning — another admittedly more useful thing that language does — is neither here nor there. The insight by linguists that language is a “discrete combinatorial system” — an essentially mathematical insight — is what makes this possible.

But here, perhaps, I’m getting a bit too abstract. It’s worth remembering how little eliminating a word from acceptable vocabulary serves in any case to limit the availability of the thought or the sentiment it expresses. When the Spastics Society renamed itself Scope — in part in consideration that the word “spastic” had become a 1980s playground insult — children simply started calling each other “scopers”. During the Falklands War, British paratroopers were told to stop calling the Falkland Islanders “Bennies” (after the dimwitted, beanie-wearing character from the TV soap Crossroads). It’s said that a commanding officer later overheard one of the men calling a local a “still” and asked why. “It’s because they’re still Bennies,” came the answer.

Suggested reading

Why the woke can't make jokes

By Gareth Roberts

All words exist and have meaning in a context — and that applies to their offensiveness as well. Just as an image of a virus in a textbook, a virus on a microscope slide and a virus propagating in the human body are rather different propositions, so too are a word played in Scrabble, a word in a dictionary and a word hurled across the police lines at a protest march. The charge of offence does not inhere in the word itself, in an isolated phoneme or in a combination of letters. If we thought it did, among other things, we would have to rename Scunthorpe.

Take “jew”: quite inoffensive as a noun, but viciously derogatory as a verb. If a Scrabble player places it on the board, do they need to be cross-questioned as to what part of speech they had in mind and penalised accordingly? If they put down “scoper”, should it first be established whether the word as they played it meant “one who scopes” or “person with cerebral palsy (derog)”? Or “benny”, come to that: slang for a benzedrine tablet or slur against the genetic stock of the Falkland Islands? Is “slope” an incline or a racial insult? Is “faggot” a Lancashire lunch or a homophobic insult? Is “tranny” a radio? Making these issues the province of the Scrabble authorities is to make what philosophers call a category error.

Suggested reading

'Eugenics is possible' is not the same as 'eugenics is good'

By Tom Chivers

And there’s a wider point here, too, to do with the tendency of a certain strand in progressive thought to reach for the low-hanging fruit, for the showy symbolic victory rather than the systemic fix. I’m often reminded of Naomi Klein’s wise and rueful line of self-reproach in her first book No Logo — where she described how her generation (during the first wave of what was then called ”political correctness”) poured its political energies into arguments about language and signification.

They missed, she said, the way in which, while they were doing that, globalisation was marching on unopposed. The material basis of human thriving — workers’ rights, corporate accountability, the wages and safety of the poorest people on earth — was changing while well-meaning college kids argued over whether it was better to say “black person” or “person of colour”.

To think that words themselves have power extracted from their context — and to evince a superstitious fear of that power — is to return to a primitive form of magical thinking. It’s a form of magical thinking that is well represented everywhere from the Kabbalah to the works of Aleister Crowley and the 1,001 Nights — but it’s not really for grown-ups in the secular and rational world to which progressives are supposed to aspire.

Virgil, Aeneid.

Magic is a belief in short cuts. Whether it is turning lead into gold, making beautiful women fall in love with you, or transforming lepers into Olympic athletes, magic promises an instant route to where we want to go – quick as a flash, abracadabra. This fantasy of the philosopher’s stone appeals just as much today as it ever has, perhaps even more so.

That magical thinking persists in an age of science is not so much that people continue to be inexplicably stupid and superstitious, refusing to understand and accept the success of the scientific revolution; but rather that they continue to be, as humans always have been, wishful – a word that describes a point on the spectrum that slides dangerously between hopeful and deluded. At its core, a belief in magic is a belief in quick power. This is why magic is a ‘dark technology’. That is why magic is widely seen as dangerous.

In Marlow’s play, the ageing academic Dr Faustus – frustrated with conventional wisdom – summons a dark power in order to extend his life. He renounces his baptism and makes a deal with the devil. He has found a short cut. But this short cut is ultimately disastrous.

If Marlow were writing Faustus today he might make the hubristic academic someone like Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google. Kurzweil promises that the accelerating power of technology will one day conquer death itself. The day is coming, this modern-day necromancer insists, when we will be able to upload our core being into some cloud of software and live forever. We don’t think of this as magic because we have been persuaded that science is the very opposite of magic.

Further reading

Who wants to live forever?

By Nigel Cameron

This assumption seems patently obvious to people. As the sociologist Max Weber claimed, the modern, scientific world-view is one in which:

“…no mysterious forces are in play, eluding calculation, and that our calculations can (in theory) master everything… We need no longer to rely on magic as a device for mastering spirits or pleading with them – unlike the savages for whom such forces used to exist. Calculation and technical equipment do the job.”

It is a telling passage, for while it imagines magic as being overthrown by “calculation and technology” it also accepts that they “do the [same] job”. That is why the futurist and science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke was correct when he claimed: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

To be fair, the persistence of magic in an age of science has nothing to do with proper science or proper technology. Rather, it has to do with our over-inflated expectations of their power. Most of us non-scientists now rely on things for our everyday existence that we do not begin to understand. When we text our friends, surf the web, take a flight, or even turn on a light switch.

Further reading

Why flawed science should concern us all

By Tom Chivers

Some of us have a sketchy idea how these things work. But for most of us muggles, we rely on that which is beyond our understanding. And so we get used to the idea that there are forces beyond our ken that have this massive power to fix things. We end up trusting in the (to us) mysterious to solve our problems. We don’t know how it works but we believe it anyway. We end up believing in magic.

Perhaps the most dangerous form of magical thinking today comes when it is claimed that technology will be able to sort out the existential crisis of climate change. As scientists agree, the world has warmed up by 1.5 degrees since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, that coalition of technological ‘advance’ and international capitalism. The magical thinking of technology is that we can continue to dig for coal, fly on planes, eat meat; that we can continue to go on living beyond our environmental means, and that it doesn’t really matter because, one day, someone will come up with some (magical) technological fix. This is wishful thinking.

Our culture has surrendered unquestioningly to the power and promise of technology. It has become the omnipresent grid by which we chart our way in the world – chips with everything – offering us salvation from the threat of the unknown. Through technology we imagine ourselves to be masters of the universe. And that we are more advanced than those Weber called the “savages” that went before us. Technology flatters us with the fantasy of our specialness. We are now a super species, approaching the power of the gods themselves.

Further reading

Have our scientists run out of steam?

By Peter Franklin

Forget Harry Potter. The place where that magical thinking is flourishing today is within the world of technology. The lead magicians of our times are fêted as public figures. They work in NASA and Apple and Tesla. Elon Musk imagines we can evade human extinction by founding a colony on Mars. Post-humanists imagine Homo sapiens evolving into some entirely new species; stronger, faster, longer-lasting.

Algorithms curate our reality, determining our online experience, knowing us better than we know ourselves. Technology in agriculture will provide more food for the needy. Artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, promising potentially limitless solutions to the human condition. DNA wizardry imagines it can create life itself in a petri dish. “Thy kingdom come,” we all intone. As with magic, we are mastering the unknown. There is no need for us to be afraid of the dark any more. Technology is the new sacred, the new salvation. All hail!

Technology, once a means to an end, has now become an end in itself, and an object of worship. And woe betide those who question this new realm of the sacred, for they will be met with the same angry reaction as those, throughout history, who have dared to question the gods: “All criticism of it brings down impassioned, outraged, and excessive reactions,” as the great Jacques Ellul wrote in The Technological Society.

Further reading

All hail the AI dictatorship

By James Bloodworth

Why is magic so dangerous? Because it refuses to accept the existence of limits. Faustus is a morality tale about a man who transgressed the limits of what it is to be human. Likewise, climate change is turning into a morality tale about a planet that has transgressed the limits of sustainability. Both are tales of human hubris: and with climate change we have become like Icarus, flying too close to the sun.

Real science rightly pushes against the boundaries of human ignorance. But there are certain boundaries that it cannot wipe away because they are the constituent conditions of what it is to be a human being. The boundaries Faustus perceived to be a limit were, in fact, the defining features of what it is to be human. Think of it a bit like this: Faustus pushed over the walls of his existence, thinking they imprisoned him, not appreciating they sustained the roof over his head. This is how magic destroys us. And why, for centuries, people have been afraid of it. Remember: some things are just too good to be true.

From the same author

Why we need more superstition

By Giles Fraser