I heard this quote (from Arthur C. Clarke) for the umpteenth time today, and while I think there’s an important insight here, the saying irritates me.
The important insight is that advanced technologies might be able to wow the superstitious mind.
The truth is that the technology doesn’t have to be all that advanced. Imagine visiting a group of people who don’t have writing. The ability to send a message with some scribbles on a piece of paper might seem like magic.
Here’s what I don’t like about the saying.
- “Sufficiently advanced technology” sounds too much like the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.
- He hasn’t defined magic.
- People react differently to unexplainable phenomena. E.g., some said it thundered.
So while I don’t dispute that there’s a legit insight here, there’s so much wiggle room and ambiguity that it strikes me as a bit arrogant and condescending.
Or maybe he just meant it as a pithy and generally but not absolutely true insight on how humans react to things, but not something so precise or universal as to be subject to the kind of specificity and precision you’re trying to hold it to.
I think another point to be taken from it is that we as “technologically advanced” people think we’re so much smarter than the people who believed in magic, but functionally, our use of advanced technology isn’t really any different from how pre-modern people approached magic. 99.9% of us have no idea how swiping our fingers across a screen makes anything at all happen, let alone some of the very complex things that apps let us do, but we trust that it does. We might as well be waving wands and uttering incantations, on an individual level. Yes, the people who really know how it works exist, but that’s what ancient people thought about sorcerers and shamans. *Those* people might be smarter (at least in some ways) than people who believed in sorcerers and shamans, but there’s no real reason to think that the rest of us are. We just believe what we’re told about how things work.
I’m not saying the use of technology is *really* no different from magic, just that most of the time, on a practical level, for the average person, our interaction with it is “indistinguishable” from what using magic would look like.
It would be interesting to try to define the differences between a modern person’s reliance on / belief in technology that he doesn’t understand and a primitive person’s reliance on / belief in magic that he doesn’t understand.
There are certainly similarities, but there is one rather large difference. Technology works reliably and predictably. Magic doesn’t.
If you believe that magic works reliably and predictably, you will act as though it does. And you will probably convince yourself that it does. And in the average person’s experience, the reliability and predictability of technology are not absolute. The tech guy can come along and explain why your internet is down and why that was absolutely predictable given the effect of certain circumstances that came to pass, but for you, you could not have predicted that your internet would be unreliable last Tuesday (unless your ISP had sent out a maintenance alert in advance).
Again, I’m not saying there are no differences. But most of us can’t actually “distinguish” the differences on a practical level. We can intellectually assent to the existence of differences and understand the reasons why there are differences, but we can’t really perceive them on our own.
Also, the belief in natural forces or “energy” (as commonly understood – or misunderstood) a belief in some sort of magic.
The effects of magic are dependent on the wills of gods. You make sacrifices to the god of your tribe in order to gain favor in a battle with thle enemy tribe, but that tribe makes sacrifices to their god who is more powerful than yours. So your tribe loses the battle, even though your god did all he could. If magic doesn’t work for you, you need to gain favor with more powerful spiritual forces (which are actually indistinguishable from natural forces).
Another factor that comes into play in the belief in magic is that people seem to have a tendency to note the instances in which it “works” and to forget about the ones in which it doesn’t. You see this with modern-psychics. People of small intellect will be extremely impressed by their “successes” without considering their overwhelming failures. A broken clock is right twice a day, but those two times are decisive for the unreflective mind.
Sometimes magic is reliable. Every year on Holy Saturday, the Patriarch of Jerusalem goes to the church of The Holy Sepulchre for the “Holy Fire”. Supposedly, they say prayers and an unlit torch magically/supernatually lights on fire and then the flame is spread out over the Orthodox world. There’s all these claims about it. Some Orthodox say that they’ve tried it on the holy saturday of the western church (when it’s on a different day) and it didn’t work…so it proves the Old Calendar is the correct one and all this other stuff.
Now, I think the only two that go in the inner place are the patriarch and a helper. So, only two people know what is really going on there. Do they have matches? Does the place have a natural source of potassium permanganate and they bring some glycerin and voila? Is there some other kind of natural phenomena there? Or, is it really supernatural?
But, every year like clockwork it happens. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-holy-fire-miracle/