January 25, 2007

Do You Believe in Magic? NYTimes article on magical thinking. Via Mind Hacks.
posted by homunculus 17 years ago
  • Here's a reg-free link which apparently exceeds 140 characters.
  • I'm typing this on my magical keyboard.
  • An interesting side issue is to wonder why parents encourage magical thinking for their young children. when my daughter was little, I encouraged her belief in Santa Claus because it let me give her cool stuff without having to take credit for it. The best I can do in intellectualizing that is that it brought back some good magic for me. Kind of like comfort food.
  • If we did not do the whole Santa Claus thing in our culture (I live in the US) but it was done elsewhere, we would no doubt condemn them for brainwashing children or giving them unrealistic hopes or expectations. When you really step back, the whole Santa thing is just nuts.
  • Ahem. The Santa Claus myth is, in fact, adapted from much earlier existing cultural rituals shared throughout much of Northern Europe, in celebration of the winter solstice. The celebration of winter festivals in December was pretty much endemic in pre-Christian cultures in the Northern Hemisphere , and almost all the modern rituals celebrating Christmas are entirely secular in nature. Indeed, Santa Claus is just the modern mutation of well-established earlier magical gift-givers, while the current incarnation and representation of Santa Claus is pretty much just a marketing program of Coca Cola, run amok . In Rome, the Winter Solstice was celebrated many years before the birth of Christ. It was a time of feasting and gift-giving. Why, even way out here, in the Pacific Northwest, the indigenous Coast Salish people spent a goodly part of their winter holding elaborate ceremonies; with gift-giving, singing and costumes a central part of the rituals surrounding the potlatch. Yet they were completely disconnected from Northern Europe, culturally pristine from such traditions. The celebration of the winter solstice as a transnational and non-denominational ritual of generosity and sharing is something which is well worth preserving . The whole point of rituals is to bring people together. The satisfaction we all get from the look on any child's face when presented with a gift is a spirit which we all share. It is part of what makes us human. Call that God, or magical, if you will. The more we understand how much we humans have in common with each other, the more likely it is that the spirit of generosity celebrated at Christmas, and the the teachings of Jesus, will find more actual presence in our daily lives.
  • That has been quite a question for me, for a long time. I've asked this to friends, family and acquiantances as they became parents: 'Are you gonna say them the same things our parents said to us?', regarding Santa (or the local version, the Three Wise Men), the fairy that gives money for teeth, etc. Quite heated arguments, and that's before getting to the religious aspects. What would I teach to my kids? Ah, tough question. Being honest and mantaining traditions while making them more honest ('No, theer's no Santa, it's us who give you this to make tou happy...'), but at teh same time, understand that, if they're gonna live in society, there are norms and concessions that will make their lives difficult if they don't adhere to them. Plus, and this comes from experience with nephews and other relatives back when they were little, yeah, giving presents can be so fulfilling, refreshing good memories.
  • The best I can do in intellectualizing that is that it brought back some good magic for me. That's sort of how expectation of any sort of afterlife looks to me. Satisfying comfort food if you can swallow it. Nevertheless, embracing *any* (ahem) peaceful, kind-hearted way of life is surely possible without an invisible old stranger in suspicious attire giving gifts to one's offspring. *admits to having perpetuated Santa myth but not god myth with own offspring*
  • Sorry- I didn't mean to abet in heading towards a religious debate, but having restrained myself 8 hours ago from doing so, and seeing it wander that way all the same... I couldn't agree more with this, though: The celebration of the winter solstice as a transnational and non-denominational ritual of generosity and sharing is something which is well worth preserving.
  • "...wonder why parents encourage magical thinking for their young children." Maybe they have some intuitions about what classmates, schoolteachers, police, and the rest of society does to kiddies who announce that common rituals are superstitious nonsense and who subsequently attempt to defend themselves from assaults by those who are offended. Until a child has learned hypocrisy, any contempt he has for the rituals of Mohammedans, "Christians", psychotics, psychologists, and other groups regarded as inherently holier than he will be revealed and punished.
  • When you really step back, the whole Santa thing is just nuts. The secret is not to step back.
  • Benefits of Santa/Tooth Fairy/Easter Bunny/Arbor Day Lumberjack, etc. for Parents and Children: 1. Giving and receiving anonymously is fun, but we don’t want to teach kids that it’s OK to accept gifts from any old stranger 2. Fooling gullible kids is good clean fun, and they get some swag out of the deal 3. It lets adults have the fun of keeping secrets and hiding stuff without feeling guilty 4. When the kids are old enough to know that SC/TF/EB/ADL aren’t real, it’s a good teaching moment about the value of giving just for the pleasure of it 5. When the kids are old enough to know that SC/TF/EB/ADL aren’t real, it’s a good teaching moment about when it’s appropriate to tell a white lie in a good cause 6. Playing Santa Claus keeps Grampa off the streets and in the mall every year, and he gets a kick out of it. I think if I ever had kids, I’d make all the cool presents from me, and put all the mittens and underpants and stuff in their stockings. Let ‘em resent Santa for giving them dull, practical shit.
  • The most frequent magical thinking I see in adults relates to computer problems.
  • However, I must admit to an overwhelming urge to stroke the side of an airplane and wish it good luck before I embark. This started in the late 1990s, when I was flying a lot for work, and it borders on OCD behaviour now.
  • *whacks monitor*
  • 2. Fooling gullible kids is good clean fun, and they get some swag out of the deal I recall one comic strip, 'Mafalda', in which the parent, after carefully leaving toys near his kids' shoes in the dark, returns to bed and thinks, 'One feels like a terrorist of happiness'.
  • Santa Claus is like God--watching you all the time, rewarding good behavior--but not nearly as bloodthirsty. I'm off to the Church of Santa!
  • BEHOLD! The power of magical thinking! (youtube video, SFW) Derren Brown demonstrates the power of unquestioning belief with a new age believer by apparently influencing and manipulating her behavior in a very striking way.
  • I certainly retain a belief in this, though fairly attenuated. My suspicion is that physics will eventually be able to explain the subtle interactions between mental processes and the physical world - a distinction which is anyway false in classical Buddhist philosophy. I wouldn't expect crude sympathetic magic to be a real phenomenon, but nor would I be surprised if it turned out the intimations of childhood are true; I just prefer the explanation of the impression that we can construct reality through mentation given in non-Western philosophical systems - concepts like dependent arising.
  • a distinction which is anyway false in classical Buddhist philosophy. How so, A_C?
  • I was thinking primarily of Nagarjuna and the abhidharma Pete:
    One particularly unique doctrine of Buddhism in its attempt to thematize these issues was the theory of no-self or no-soul (anatman) and what implications it carried. In the empirical sense, the idea of no-self meant that not only persons, but also what are normally considered the stable substances of nature are not in fact fixed and continuous, that everything from one's sense of personal identity to the forms of objects could be analyzed away, as it were, into the atomic parts which were their bases...These theories prompted sharp and deep questions and criticisms, such as, "if the things and persons of the world are nothing more than atoms in constant flux, how can a person have an orderly experience of a world of apparent substances?"... Answering such questions intelligibly for the inquiring minds of the philosophical community were a number of distinct schools which came collectively to be known as schools involved with the "analysis of elements" (abhidharma).
    but I'm very much an amateur with all this and probably have completely the wrong end of the (non-substantial) stick.
  • And since you got me searching, blow your mind with The Five Great Madhyamaka Lines of Reasoning Used to Establish Voidness, man, where we learn, "dependent arising" (rten-'brel-gyi gtan-tshigs), is the king of reasons (rigs-pa'i rgyal-po), used to establish the lack of true existence of all phenomena. The classic example is, "The subject, functional phenomena, cannot be established as having true existence, because it dependently arises."
  • I'm very much an amateur with all this You have beginner's mind!
  • /tries desperately to maintain straight face while mindblowing philosophies are being discussed, but... "dependent arising" hee hee hee. Guess I'm spending my next life as pondscum... AGAIN
  • The mobile phone strategy was genius.
  • Whoa, that's a good article, H. Good enough for an FPP both here and on the blue.
  • I prefer not to post to both front pages at the same time, but I posted it on the blue with links to the studies the article references.
  • Yay! One thing about that WP article though is its terrible title. "could alter public policy" should not appear in any headline, makeee snoozeee.
  • Gads, Story! I'm just happy if there's content! Don't even THINK about style and language.
  • That's a fascinating article, h-dogg. Thanks, as always, for bringing the brilliant linkage.
  • "Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true." A thumbnail portrait of our current political climate. John Kerry shot himself to get a Purple Heart!
  • And I like my placebos, too!