We've
Got Magic to Do
4/4/08
The
Bird her punctual music
brings
And
lays it in its place —
Its
place is in the Human Heart
And
in the Heavenly Grace —
What
respite from her thrilling toil
Did
Beauty ever take —
But
Work might be electric Rest
To
those that Magic make —
—EMILY
DICKINSON |
Sorry
it’s been so
long since I put up a new
essay, but I’ve had to spend most of my time in the last few weeks
calling up
classic-rock DJs who are pissed that Madonna got into the Rock and Roll
Hall of
Fame and explaining to them that she is more culturally significant
than any
pop artist except Elvis and the Beatles and Dylan, and that this is
still true
no matter how many slut jokes they make, and that it doesn’t
matter that she
didn’t write a lot of her good songs because neither did
Elvis, and that
classic-rock DJs are all just sexually insecure losers who are
terrified and
jealous of her.
And they didn’t
listen to me, because although they are not
smart enough to realize that I was right, they were at least smart
enough to
know that they had no self-interested incentive to listen to me because
I
can’t put a spell on them.
I say this because
the other
thing I’ve been doing
recently is reading Bertrand Russell’s 1938 tract Power. For
those who are
unfamiliar, it argues that the fundamental stuff of
sociology — analogous to
energy in physics — is power, and that all power can be divided
into four
categories: physical force, wealth, control over the law, and
influence
over
opinion (in other words, the only four ways to get people to do
something are to threaten them, to pay them, to make a law that says
they have to, or to convince them to).
Obviously, I was most
interested in the last type, and was especially interested in what
Russell
had to
say about smart people. He
points out
that, paradoxically, the more advanced a society becomes, the less
respect
smart people get within that society, even though the smart people are
the ones
who advanced it. Since
this certainly
seems true of our own time and place, and is highly relevant to The
1585's
project, I figured I’d do a piece on it and try to come up
with some solutions
(which Russell doesn’t propose).
First,
here’s the situation in Russell's own words (condensed down from a
passage a few
pages in length):
Oddly
enough, the power of what
passes for learning is
greatest in the most savage communities, and steadily decreases as
civilisation
advances. When I
say ‘learning’ I
include, of course, reputed learning, such as that of magicians and
medicine
men. […]
The intellectual, as we know him, is a spiritual
descendant of the
priest; but the spread of education has robbed him of power.
The power of the
intellectual depends upon
superstition: reverence for a traditional incantation or a sacred
book.
[…]
…although knowledge plays a larger part
in civilisation now than at any
former time, there has not been any corresponding growth of power among
those
who possess the new knowledge. Although
the electrician and the telephone man do strange things that minister
to our
comfort, we do not regard them as medicine-men, or imagine that they
can cause
thunderstorms if we annoy them. The
reason for this is that scientific knowledge, though difficult, is not
mysterious, but open to all who care to take the necessary
trouble.
The modern intellectual,
therefore, inspires
no awe, but remains a mere employee… he has failed to
inherit the glamour which
gave power to his predecessors.
The truth is that the respect
accorded to men of learning
was never bestowed for genuine knowledge, but for the supposed
possession of
magical powers. Science,
in giving some
real acquaintance with natural processes, has destroyed the belief in
magic,
and therefore the respect for the intellectual.
Thus it has come about that, while men of science
are the fundamental
cause of the features which distinguish our time from former ages, and
have,
through their discoveries and inventions, an immeasurable influence
upon the
course of events, they have not, as individuals, as great a reputation
for
wisdom as may be enjoyed… by a medicine man.
The intellectuals, finding their prestige slipping
from them as a result
of their own activities, become dissatisfied with the modern
world.
Those in whom the
dissatisfaction is least
take to Communism; those in whom it goes deeper shut themselves up in
their
ivory tower.
—(Russell, Power,
pp.30-31) |
Wow,
talk
about hitting the
nail on the head.
Everyone
got it?
Smart
people were never actually respected
for their smartness,
but only because they used to go into the
mumbo-jumbo
fields back when those were the best jobs around and thus were
regarded as
wizards, i.e., as people who could actually do
something to you if you fucked with them. But
then as a result of smart people doing smart
things, people realized
that this wasn’t the case and transferred their respect from
the smart people
who had left the mumbo-jumbo fields behind them to the dumb people who
had
subsequently started filling those jobs, because mumbo-jumbo was the
only thing
people ever really
respected,
because
they were scared
of it.
Today,
dumb people are
free to regard smart
people not as wizards, but merely as illusionists — as people
who are not really right,
but only skilled
at making it appear
that they
are
right.
The
fingerprints of this
progression may be seen all over
contemporary culture, most especially in popular
entertainment.
The
magic possessed by the
protagonists of
sci-fi/fantasy, from the Jedi of Star Wars to the wizards of Harry
Potter,
seems strongly to be a symbolic stand-in for intelligence itself; or
rather,
for what it feels
like intellectual
superiority should
allow one to do
in
a perfect world.
This
is why nerds
identify with superpowered characters so intensely. The
problem, of course, is that in real life,
intelligence does not actually enable you to kick anyone’s
ass; it simply does
not translate into physical force in any way. It once
would
have, in the
case, say, of whatever genius caveman first invented the bow-and-arrow,
but
these days are long gone.
It
is,
perhaps, the trace cultural memory of the fact that smartness used
to translate into physical force
that makes us feel as if it still should.
Memorizing
the
State Capitals enables you to make lightning deer.
Wait
—
No, it
doesn't! Oh shit, I've wasted my life.
Take
the opening sequence of X2,
for example, in which Nightcrawler bamfs
holy hell out of the tightest
security in the history of the
world.
Smart people
cheer their asses
off at this scene, as if it is somehow an artistic representation of
nerds bamfing
holy hell out of
bullies — and
indeed, this seems to be an interpretation that the X-Men
films invite.
But
the
thing is, we’ve studied the issue, and it turns out that
having an IQ in the
160s — or even the 180s — does not
actually enable you to do this.
Even
that chick who figures out riddles in Parade
Magazine would almost certainly just be mowed down instantly.
And
it wouldn’t
even take dozens of highly
trained professionals with guns — it could be three or four
junior-high students
with sharp sticks.
Shit,
unless you are also
strong or
armed, even one
junior-high student
with a blunt
stick would present a
huge
challenge, no matter how smart you are (don’t bother trying
to trick him into
saying his own name backwards, because we used to try that all the time
and
nothing ever happens — he says his name backwards, and then you
stare at each
other for a couple seconds, and then he hits you with the stick a lot
and it
hurts).
Smart people are
still
indispensable to a nation that wishes
to win wars, of course — but weapons have long since advanced
to the point where
they are being developed in a lab, with government funding, to be used
by an
organized military comprised of tough guys.
There
is simply no way anymore for an individual
smart person to smartly
invent some smart thing in his or her own apartment using cheap,
to-hand
materials that enables them subsequently to waltz outside and make
everyone
their bitch — only to be employed
by an organization
that wishes to
make
everyone its bitch. Hence,
smart people
have become hired help, just like anybody else.
We
gotta live the rest of our lives like a schnook*.
*(If you recognized this as
a
quote from Goodfellas,
and the
title of the essay
as that of a song from the musical Pippin,
and knew that this is hilarious because early in his career Ray Liotta
once had
a disastrous audition where he sang that song, you are truly a Herald
of the Übermensch. Or
maybe you’re just good at trivia.
But
hey, same shit, right?)
But if the fact
that being
smart doesn’t actually enable you
to do
anything to anyone were only
hard to believe for us,
it
wouldn’t
be that big a problem. The
problem
is that dumb
people find it even harder
to believe. You
see, as self-reliant and
ruggedly individualistic as dumb people may claim to be, they are used
to being
taken care of. They
move directly from
having rules they don’t understand enforced by their parents
and concepts they
can’t grasp drilled into them via rote memorization by their teachers
directly to having
both these offices
filled by their precious “God,” and in all of these
cases, the dynamic is the
same: dumb people can’t actually comprehend why
they are supposed to follow these rules or believe these opinions (on
account
of, you know, the whole dumb
thing),
and so what it always ultimately comes down to is the fact that the
authority
figure is in a position to punish
them. And after a
while, it begins to seem to them
(i.e., the vast
majority of people)
as if the ability
to punish is, in
fact, what makes
someone
“right”
about something. If
smart people can’t
actually do
anything about the fact
that dumb people choose not to believe them, the dumb subconsciously
reason,
then they must not actually be right.
After
all, what kind of an orderly, God-created
Universe would allow that?
Now, reasoning like
that might
make it seem like the problem
is that the dumb people are optimistic
to a fault — that they simply cannot believe that the ultimate
power rests with
people who are woefully unequipped to enforce it (i.e., us). But
they are no such thing. Though
they never
tire
of
accusing us smart
people of being downers and killjoys, it is in fact
anti-intellectualism that
is rooted in the darkest pessimism
of
all. As previously
observed in
several paradoxes on the site (the paradox of who may call whom stupid
at the
dinner table in On the
Calling-Stupid of People;
the
“alternate types of truth”
paradox in the Relativist Liberal section of the Michael
Jordan
dialogue), in
order for dumb people to know in the first place whom they are even
supposed to
resent (i.e., us), they must actually agree
with us deep down — if they really
agreed with the people with whom they claim
to agree, then they would be under the impression that those
were the smart people, and resent them instead.
And
yet, they appear to believe that all
smart people secretly wish to do horrible things — this is why,
whenever we say
something smart, they call us evil and accuse us of wanting to kill
everyone. So, if
dumb people believe
that everything we smart people believe and want to happen is evil, but
also
secretly suspect that it
is true,
then this means that dumb people secretly suspect that evil things are
true,
which is pretty fucking pessimistic.
How can they be so
stupidly
optimistic and so stupidly
pessimistic on such grand scales at the same time?
It’s
called doublethink,
and it is the air that dumb people breathe.
The callow
theologian Roger
Olson, in that open
letter of his that I tore to shit
a few months back, accuses
atheists
of having
no counter to the idea that might makes right — which is
infuriating not only
because it’s not true, but because precisely the opposite
is true. Theists
back their faith-derived moral prescriptions not with argument that can
be
comprehended in terms of earthly ethical logic (though they
occasionally engage
in crappy efforts to make it look
like this is what they are doing), but ultimately only with the trump
card that
their God will punish those who disobey by sending them to Hell. They
are quick to add, of
course, that since
their God is inherently
right about
everything, this is not actually a case of might makes right, but only
of might enforcing
right. But
herein lies a paradox. You
see, just like
good
parents, any just God
would need to be right for a reason besides
“because I said so.” Even
if
an
explanation for the prescription is not obliged to be given, it must be
possible to figure out — i.e., the morals of God must make
sense, or else they are not
actually
moral*. And in all
the cases where religious morality
lines up with secular morality (e.g., “it is wrong to
kill”), it may be seen
that there are perfectly satisfactory secular explanations for the
precept, and
so appeals to faith are not necessary for the justification
(“because God said so”), but are merely icing on
the
cake in terms of enforcement
(“even
if the police don’t catch you, God will”).
*(This can be proven as
follows: ask a religious person what
he would do if God said that everyone had to jump up-and-down on one
leg for 45
minutes every Tuesday. He
will respond
“God wouldn’t say that,” which proves
that he believes on some level that the
prescriptions of a just God need to make sense for a reason external to
that
God. Otherwise, it would be impossible to discuss what God
"would" or "wouldn't" say.)
In short, if dumb
people were
actually right about the fact
that their God (i.e., the shit they make up) is right about everything,
then
there would be valid secular justifications for all the things they
currently
use faith-based justifications to support, and hence, no need for the
faith-based ones.
Of course, in the
case of, say,
a debate between a smart
person and a dumb religious person (or P.C. relativist, or
what-have-you) who
is sufficiently well-spoken and manipulative to make what he
says appear
plausible to
an untrained mind, the masses are not equipped to distinguish in strict
conceptual terms which argument is superior. The
choice that the masses make in those
situations, then, is simple pragmatism: “if I don’t
listen to the smart person
and he turns out to be right, nothing will happen to me because the
smart
person is powerless, but if I don’t listen to the dumb person
and he turns out to
be right, I will go to Hell” (or be “a bad
person,” or what-have-you). Add
to
this, naturally, the fact that the
dumb person’s ideas frequently match up with what the masses
already wish
to believe.
Naturally, the
masses in this
instance have a short-sighted
view of what “nothing will happen to me”
constitutes (e.g., if the smart person
is not listened to, great amounts of moral attention will continue to
be
lavished on trivial matters, which will prevent the real problems from
being
solved, which will affect everyone), but the deck of human nature is
stacked
against changing this fact. What
must
happen, then, is for it to appear to the masses that it is in their immediate self-interest
to align
themselves with smart people.
And apparently, in
order to
achieve this, we have to make
them think we’re magic.
But how may we
achieve this
without compromising our principles
as smart people? Here
is a refresher on
what we’re up against, laid out as six brief concepts:
1.
As
smart people,
we know what is true or not true.
2. This
is valuable
because it can be used to combat what is dishonest/false. 3. This
should be
done because dishonest/false things have bad results. 4. In
order for us to
be successful, people have to listen to us. 5. No-one
will listen
to us unless they think we’re magic. 6. Making
people
think we’re magic would be both dishonest and false.
Our first idea out of the gate
was for smart people simply
to adopt the trappings of magic. We
could, as suggested in The
Requisite Girls
Gone Wild Essay,
start wearing capes, and all
future
printings of Camille
Paglia’s Sexual
Personae
could be
rendered in special “musty scroll” form.
But instantly, I
realized this
was nerdy, and thus
counterproductive.
So apparently, what
we must use
is something that does not merely
evoke magic and that we do not allege to be magic, but which for all
intents
and purposes is indistinguishable from magic. Those
readers familiar with 1960s Flash comics
will doubtless suggest that we use science from the future, but
unfortunately,
we do not have any science from the future*.
And
with the way things are going, we had better
think of something fast
if we want there to even be
science
in the future.
*(Also: if Abra
Kadabra’s magic is actually just science
from the future, how come it works on Superman when he fights Superman,
since
only real
magic is supposed to work
on Superman? By
that logic, if Superman
had come to Earth long enough ago in the past, someone from the present
day
would be able to go back in time and kill him with a regular gun, when
obviously this would not be the case.)
Luckily, there are
things besides
science from the future to which
people respond as if they
are magic. We can
think of one that will
get the job done, but it’s going to take some doing. For
you see, our only course
of action must be
to strive after an impossible hope — a fool’s hope,
if you will — the dream of
which has been for two-centuries-plus crushed by what has seemed to be
an
unbreakable national curse.
Smart people in America
must become cool.
I’m afraid there
is
no other option. Yes,
many will call you mad — mad — for
suggesting this, but to this you
must respond “Fools! I’ll
destroy them
all!” And
besides, it may not be so
impossible for smart people in America
to become cool. It almost
happened in the early
’90s, but it was derailed because we went
too far in the direction of equating intelligence with depression. We
got as far as
transmuting the archetype of
the nerd into the archetype of the smart rebel, but then it started
looking
like smart rebels had to kill themselves, and since no-one wants to
kill
themselves, everyone just said Fuck it and bought that Hootie and the
Blowfish
album and we were back to square one.
It
almost became cool to be smart in the '90s,
but
it turned out people missed happiness—
Who
knew people
liked happiness
so much?
Plus,
it didn’t help
that the chicks wore those fucked-up
chunky high heels instead of real high heels. You
would be like How about you wear some real high
heels and they would
be like No that’s what my mom would wear and you would be
like Well then can I
bang your mom.
Speaking of which,
the other
day I heard some dude in a
porno say that intelligent girls are always the most perverted, and
that seems
like a good place to start. In
order for
society to move forward, the terms “genius” and
“hot girl” need to become
equivalent to each other — and there is, happily, already some
precedent on which
to base the hope that this is possible, as our research has revealed
that it is
a not-uncommon phenomenon in American high schools for the girl who had
always
been the smart girl and theretofore exclusively worn airbrushed unicorn
t-shirts tucked into khakis to suddenly decide in October of senior
year that
she wants to be the sexy girl too and show up to school one day in a
vintage
carhop uniform with backseamed thigh-highs and one of those knit
flapper caps and
makeup that is all various shades of dark purple.
Obviously, this
trend is
brilliant, and needs only to be
more widely adopted and retained into adulthood.
But
for the plan as a whole to come off,
smart boys
need to start being cool
too, and this presents more of a problem, because a young male is
infinitely
more likely to encounter opposition in the form of physical force
should he
attempt too quickly to transcend his prescribed social
boundary — i.e., if you
are a smart dude and suddenly come to school one day in leather pants,
someone is
just going to beat you up. It
may be
possible to walk into high school transformed into Madonna and take the
place
over, but if you try to walk into high school transformed into Prince,
there is
a good chance you won’t be walking back out.
Now we
encounter another paradox: in order for the
dumb to stop hating us, we need to become cool, but the dumb will do
everything
in their power to stop us from becoming cool, because they hate us. At
this early stage, the
best plan may just
be for the smart girls to become cool first, and then once
that’s taken care
of, the smart boys can start being cool and it will be okay because
they’re
with the girls. (NOTE:
this plan
requires the smart girls to not ditch the smart boys for cool dumb guys
in the
interim period.)
But of course,
there are ways
of becoming cool (“magic”)
besides sexiness. And
as I’ve pointed
out before, sexiness itself needs to be viewed as only one
component of a general program of overall awesomeness. Sexy Geniuses of The 1585 are Artists
with a capital “A” above all;
we are cultural creators. And
the saving grace that
lights our endeavor
on its way is the fact that, ultimately, it is this power to
create — and not
merely to kick ass or destroy — to which humanity will always
respond as the true
magic. It was in
the winking wizard
Prospero that Shakespeare saw himself, and not in his many
blood-drenched
warriors, inspiring as they also are.
And in terms as
real as
possible without retreating from
reality, this website is magic. It has created,
though all it does is
tell the
truth; it has kicked
ass, though it has done no violence; it has fucked
your brains out, though it has
never touched you (unless you
are one of
the people I have actually touched, in which case, that was fun and we
should
do it again).
Over the course
of so
doing, here is what I have
learned: that smart people have to stop retreating and start engaging
reality
harder than anyone. If
you are not hot
yet, become hot instead of deciding that hotness is for dumb people. If
you are a writer, try
writing about
something that’s actually important instead of about how sad
you are. If people
fuck with you, beat them in
arguments and rank-outs to their face instead of waiting for them to
leave and
talking about how mean they are. If
there’s stuff you wish you knew, learn it.
If
there’s stuff you wish you could get
away with wearing, wear it. If
you sit around stoned talking about what
you are going to do someday,
stop
sitting around stoned and do it now. And
if you go to stupid
conventions dressed
up as a goddamn Jedi, grow up and try becoming the closest thing there
is to a
Jedi in real life, because it’s a lot better than pretending. Trust me, writing essays
where you take apart
real-life bad guys is a lot more satisfying than pretend sword-fights
where you
take apart pretend bad guys (and you wouldn’t want to be in a real sword fight, because you
would just get killed). Awesome
music
might not start playing out of nowhere when you sit down at the
keyboard, but
at least you’re doing something real.
So remember: in
order for smart
people to win, other people
have to want to be us. And
there’s no
way they’re going to if we spend all our time wishing we were
someone besides
ourselves. In other
words, real fake magic
is to be preferred to fake real magic.
Ezra Pound wrote “I
cannot make it cohere.” I think he wasn’t trying hard enough, but
what
do I know? I’m
just a crazy
scientist from the future.
|