Reader! You stand outside the walls of my thesis and two Great Beings guard the entrance.
One, a mighty demon of polished brass seven cubits in height and wielding a flaming sword, beats its fist against the right hand gate and cries with the voice of thunder:
“Take my path, foolish reader! For mine is the path of Religion and Science, of law that must be obeyed! No matter whether the law is of god, or of physics, you stand helpless before it for I am all-powerful and you are weak— a plaything of original sin, a mere genetic mechanism to be imprinted by circumstance. But I will give you power, for I will teach that there is no will but God’s will, and therefore all phenomena are mechanical, even your fellow beings. Nature is under your command to exploit for your good. Other people are no more than consumers of your product, so raise your price! Be the fittest to survive! Conquer all and leave a wasteland—for matter has no life and you have naught to lose! Reason is my standard, but Psychopathy is my secret name!”
The other, a mighty demon eight cubits high, clad in snowy samite and bearing a silver chalice from which an endless stream of milk is flowing, beats its fist against the left hand gate and cries with the voice of tempest:
“Take my path, wise reader! For mine is the path of Art and Magic, of laws made to tinker with and throw aside! I know you as a thinking, feeling being that will make up your own mind—so what can I do but invite you to the great adventure? Be one with nature and your fellow beings, trade your soul for meaning and stay hungry! Experience is not to own, but to eat. Taste life, don’t hoard it, and you will find love. Empathy is my standard, but Fellow Victim is my secret name!”
Choose, reader, choose!
I said CHOOSE! Damn you!
Oh well, if you must stand there dithering, then you might have time to notice that between the two great gates there is a little doorway with the door ajar. Peep in and you see a family seated round a hearth and the elder man smiles and invites you in for a cup of tea, saying:
“Well done! So you didn’t fall for either of those charlatans out there! Let me introduce myself: I was writing this book and got a bit bored with the intro so decided to repeat the opening argument in demonic form—no longer a self-help manual but a cosmic battle cry. Don’t worry about making choices at this stage, all that matters is what can be learnt from your own responses.”
•When I re-presented my introduction in terms of great powers, a choice of paths that could lead humankind into a world of nature and love or into a world of destruction and power, did it become more interesting to you?
• Or did it revolt you? That a thoughtful, if possibly misguided, thesis was being sensationalised in this obvious way?
• Or did you simply wonder what the author was playing at?
The first two responses are what I would consider to be superstitious: an over-reliance on demons to motivate us, or an instinctive rejection of them.
The third reaction is that of an awake human being, an explorer whose intelligence, alertness and sensibilities have not been altogether subjugated by a thousand years of religious and scientific cultural dominance. It is the response of someone who knows that a human being, not a sinner, nor a machine, is writing this book.
To those who chose the first two responses I say “have you forgotten that the author will receive a small amount of money, and an iota of kudos, every time a copy of this book is sold?”
Ah yes! And that would surely explain why I would want to sensationalise my thesis, in the desire to win more sales!
But no—for I know that many potential buyers would be put off by a sensational approach.
Ah well, that explains it—that is why you have now deflated the sensational approach in order to win more respectable sales.
The oh-so logical process of reason has just reached two diametrically opposite conclusions based upon an assumption that I am a mechanism seeking to boost sales of my book. The fact is that I, the author, am a total mystery except for one crucial fact: I too am a human being.
As a mystery I might want to boost sales, at the same time I might be addicted to unconscious self-sabotage, or I might want to prove how clever I am. I might want to teach you, or to help you, or to atone for deep feelings of childhood guilt. I may equally be a simple explorer of ideas, or an artist playing with words...
In fact I’m more likely to be all these things rolled into one and that would still be but a tiny part of the whole of me. And yet the whole pathetic structure of Western academic discourse is based upon the inane assumption that people should write what they mean to say.
“Science proves a connection between infertility and...” and we are supposed to believe it, rather than consider that it is a team of scientist who have made the announcement, human beings with individual agendas and in the pay of an institution with its own agendas. The papers are full of book reviews that blindly assume that, because the author makes an impassioned case, they must believe what they are writing.
And yet there is a ghetto for lies. The same people who reject homeopathy because it is “scientifically unproven” will go to the theatre and applaud when a man in tights pretends to be the King of Denmark, and that a few square metres of wooden flooring is a battlefield. They will go to an art gallery and see lovingly painted scenes of cruelty and destruction, without automatically assuming the artist loves cruelty and destruction. They will applaud a film portrayal of Nazi fanatics without assuming the director is a Nazi fanatic.
Indeed, the assumption that life, nature and our fellow humans are profound, unfathomable, mysterious and rich in meaning still survives in our culture. It is safely quarantined in a ghetto called “art”, and I am simply proposing to lead it out into the real world in the name of magic.
So, don’t be put off by those tired old gas-bags hired by the so-called “serious” media; the rent-aboffin acamediacs who decry superstition, the New Age, astrology and human gullibility; those dinosaur spokespersons of the Enlightenment who splutter at the least glimpse of shade. This book is about putting meaning back where it belongs and living magically.
Sure, mankind needs certainties in times of terror. There is a place for science and religion when we are living in the trees, or being invaded by Goths, or discovering terrifying new worlds across the ocean. But in a world where cyclists wear hideous helmets, where cars may only be parked at the owner’s risk, where packets of peanuts bear the message “warning—this product may contain nuts” and where teachers can be sued for allowing adventure in an adventure holiday—in such a world we have far greater need for art and magic.
Absolute truth, whether religious or scientific, should be celebrated for what it is—a crutch for epochs of lameness—and not become a burden in times of such agonising comfort as ours. Science and religion are a balm in times of uncertainty, but in an over-regulated world like ours we need art and magic to bring back the life.
In the prosperous nations today we do not seek marriage partners to huddle against the cold, or for mutual support in the battle for survival. Instead we marry for fulfilment, for romantic love. We marry to invite challenge into our lives, not to overcome it. We crave the excitement and will turn up the volume and wallow in films and tales of terror to regain that sense of being alive.
Do you really want to go on clinging to the skirts of science and religion and the flabby certainties of acamedia when you could be dancing naked on the heath by moonlight? Do you need the desperate diet of fake media frenzies—terrorism, paedophilia, cannibalism, murder and mayhem—to keep up the phantasy that we still live in a dangerous world and need religion and science to control it?
Or are you prepared to dance with dangerous ideas for a change?
Let me now introduce you to a different