On the Ubiquity of Magic

It really hit me a couple of years ago when I was waiting at my gate at Charlotte airport. 

There were wireless phone chargers built into the armrests of the seats. I took my phone out of its case and placed it on the little painted circle; the lightning insignia appeared. I picked up my phone, the charging stopped. No wires; how was the energy being transferred?

I waved my hand in the space in between, checking for the fraud, the way people test magicians performing a magic trick. 

As I looked around the gate, I was struck by a peculiar emotion. 

Nobody else was waving their hands around searching for invisible wires. Everyone was just doing their own thing – talking on the phone, listening to a podcast, reading a book, working, people-watching. 

Meanwhile, the seats we were sitting in were imbued with the ability to transmit energy through space. Why was nobody else giddy with excitement? Where was the awe? 

My mind expanded to consider the situation more broadly. Not only were we sitting in magical energy transmitting chairs, we were all waiting inside of a magnificent building made of concrete and metal and God-knows-what else. 

How did humans manage to mold the earth into this? 

To pass the time, people were talking into tiny plastic bricks that were somehow connecting to real people who may have been hundreds of miles away, or clickity-clacking on slightly larger bricks that were somehow registering those clickity-clacks as electrical signals passing through some kind of tiny silicon wafer (the element with 14 protons in its nucleus as it so happens; who would’ve guessed it?). 

And what were we waiting for? To board giant metal containers that would hurtle us through the atmosphere at hundreds of miles per hour. 

The realization struck in a way it normally doesn’t – we were surrounded by magical technology that was quietly embedded into the built environment. No pomp, no fuss, just providing wonderful services. 

And we were just taking it for granted. 

I wanted to simultaneously high five the person next to me and shake them violently out of their stupor. 

Celebration

In school, we learn about how the average pencil is actually an economic miracle. 

“Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it is made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make steel, it took iron ore. This black center—we call it lead but it’s really graphite, compressed graphite—I’m not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, this eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn’t even native! It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule? I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from. Or the yellow paint! Or the paint that made the black lines. Or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people co-operated to make this pencil. People who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met! When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar sending … out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum.” – Milton Friedman

Friedman, being an economist, emphasized the effectiveness and majesty of the socio-economic systems that could generate a modern pencil at such low cost. While I definitely appreciate the importance of those systems, I’m focused on something slightly different – the technology itself.

We have totally transformed our natural ecosystems to make our surroundings more suitable to our desires. For the average person growing up in the U.S., it is difficult to fathom just how different the built environment is from wild, natural environments. 

We are surrounded by seemingly magical technology.

And yet we barely notice it, let alone celebrate it; it is a mundane magic.

Some caveats are in order at this point. 

First off, yes, of course I understand that the production and scaling of this artificial environment has come at a tremendous cost to those natural ecosystems. We should work diligently to better harmonize our socioeconomic systems with the planetary systems. 

I am not suggesting we celebrate a rapacious plunder of nature. But I do believe it is possible to marvel at the ubiquity of remarkable technology while simultaneously acknowledging and addressing its externalities. 

The same mind can hold both feelings.

Second, I do think most people have their moments of heightened awareness, like I did, when confronted with some new technical capability. Spontaneous bursts of joy and appreciation when they download a new app, or buy a new gadget. The novelty sparks curiosity: “How did they pull that off?”, etc. 

However, the novelty wears off quickly - most people are not awed by their microwave, even though they don’t know the first thing about how it works. 

Perhaps it would be impractical. It would probably be difficult to run a society if everyone was transfixed by their thermostats, lost in reveries about how marvelous their car engines are, constantly calculating the delta between the technological affordances available to them and those available to pre-historic man. 

It is human nature to adapt to our circumstances. We digest the novel and turn it into the mundane. It is how we conquered almost every conceivable climate, and withstood every kind of trial and situation, to proliferate across the globe. 

After all, is not boredom the mark of mastery? 

Once we use something enough times, we become used to it. That is what frees us up for the next thing. 

No! I contend boredom is not the mark of mastery, it is the mark of unconsciousness. For the true master in any domain, her appreciation for the beauty of her craft grows alongside her skill. 

And while I agree that a permanent state of astonishment may not be the optimal psychological condition for running a modern society, I can’t help but feel that we are a little too indifferent, a little too “lost in thought,” a little too ignorant of what is actually happening around us. 

Ancient societies would celebrate changes in nature. The shifting of the seasons, phases of the moon, or other cosmological events would be marked by collective celebration and religious rituals. 

Some cultures engage in reverential practices for their tools and weapons. Elaborate mythologies would imbue mundane implements with divine significance; for example, the Hopi people, who inhabited land in what is today Arizona, held the belief that their planting sticks came through a gift from the guardian spirit, Màasaw.

Of course, many of these practices would be motivated, in part, by fear of divine retribution. There were gods who needed appeasing, and these rituals were the way to do it. Those kinds of motivations won’t work for us moderns, we’ve outgrown such explanations. But I believe these rituals and festivals accomplished other purposes which we still need today.

Specifically, they provided moments for collective remembrance of the aliveness of our environments, the profound usefulness of our technology, and our inalienable dependence on them both.

Do we have anything like this in America today?

The events we regularly celebrate together as a nation are either remembrances of historical events, or mark turning points in the calendar, which are inherently arbitrary. What natural or cosmological event does New Year’s coincide with? None that I know of.

What might such a festival look like? And would it even be possible for modern Americans to engage with it authentically? Somehow, I feel that it would be a challenge for us. Imagine a modern-day American harvest festival on the banks of the Mississippi. 

What would we even do?

The solar eclipse and “the Yearning”

As fate would have it, America witnessed a solar eclipse while I was still writing the draft for this article. As I watched people around me excitedly prepare for this event, watched AirBnB prices soar as thousands rushed to secure a spot along the path of totality, I was forced to reevaluate some of the conclusions I had drawn about our culture.

In America today, and perhaps in the developed world broadly, we live as if disconnected from our environment. 

Jason Hickel, in his book “Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World,” writes about the “Great Separation” as an epochal turning point in the history of the world. It refers to a revolution in Western man’s “theory of being” where he began to see his mind as separate from his body (a la Descartes) and himself as separate from nature. 

Hickel argues that this sudden change in consciousness underpinned the expansion of certain kinds of economic systems that were more prone to rapacious extraction and harmful externalities. 

Somewhere, somehow, humanity developed a “disconnected psyche” and it completely changed how we built our civilization and related to nature, and one another. 

This disconnected psyche allowed us to create the built environment we have today, which is so different and so much more convenient than anything our ancestors could have dreamed of. 

It is common for those who are most troubled by our disconnection from nature to vilify our technology and infrastructure. We have extracted a huge price from nature in order to build it.

However, the same psyche that keeps us disconnected from wild nature also seems to keep us disconnected from that built environment, somehow unaware of just how amazing and unnatural it is. 

We take it for granted, pass through it, use it, without really appreciating what it is. 

But - and this is what the solar eclipse reminded me of - we want to be connected. 

We want to feel part of the cosmic play, the passage of history, the systems we are embedded in - part of something larger than ourselves. It’s just that nature, or society, has to do something really stunning for us to remember that nowadays. 

Perhaps our sense of disconnection is due to a lack of practice more than anything else. Perhaps we can practice our way of being just as we practice any other skill. And perhaps America could benefit from a few more annual festivals that explicitly celebrate nature or our technology. 

I’m not holding my breath though. A lot of things have to come together for a new social event like that to really grab traction at scale. 

But, as individuals, we don’t have to wait for a revolution in social consciousness to bring about a small revolution in our own. 

If disconnection is merely a problem of lack of practice, here’s my suggestion: take a pause in your day, every once in a while, and just look. 

See what is in front of you, the magic of the technology…and even the magic beyond that. Who knows, it might make you feel a little better, like the world is at the same time more magnificent and more like home than you had previously imagined.