The Book I Never Wrote

(2020 note - found this on my hard-drive from waaaay back whenever - looks like I started to write a book and then forgot about it - thought I'd preserve it for posterity lol)

(ok just gave it a quick read-through. Paint me surprised, it's actually pretty good, as far as it goes. Well done past-me.)

I suppose this is the bit where I try to justify - to you, but more immediately, to myself - the writing of what amounts to that most pretentious of things: a book of philosophy.

I mean, for God's sake - I'm nobody, just some schmoe like you pretty much, with a house, and a wife, and some kids. I teach English somewhere reasonably exotic, and I'm middle aged, so perhaps that explains some of it. It started with a book, unsurprisingly on philosophy, that my Mum sent me one Christmas. Kinda bored me to tears but I persevered and eventually joined an internet forum. ilovephilosophy.com back in, I think, 2005.

It was fun, not so much the philosophy bit, but simply having the chance to talk about stuff with people smarter than myself that didn't concern work, what was for dinner and/or that thing that happened on the news that was just so terrible.

Whole new world.

In short, I was hooked - and this was back in the days of dial-up - so my telephone bill was just stupid. In fact, I think my wife and I had a row about it. Late nights spent typing red-eyed at the keyboard mad as hell at some guy who wouldn't see my point of view for the absolute genius it obviously was. Lol.

(It was also where I learned what 'lol' actually meant. And Rofl. And IMO. I did say I was old).

It's now about 15 years later - one more child and a whole shelf-load of books later. Books on evolution, books on neurophysiology, books on history - ancient, modern, political - you name it. Books on game-theory, complexity, cognitive science and emergence. Introductions to quantum physics, overviews of ethics, well - you get the idea.

I read a lot. And managed to give myself a touch of carpal tunnel syndrome to boot. And what did I get out of all this..? - Did all this make me happy..?

God no.

So, I thought I'd share my malaise, my cynicism, my general sense of doom and gloom with you, dear reader, that you may become as I: enlightened.

Jeeze - I'm not selling you this am I..? I'm also lost without smilies. Just imagine a few of those rueful-grin smiley-face things after "God no" and "enlightened" okay..?

Anyway, now that I've finished doing a sterling job of making myself sound like an asshole, read on.

The Big Guy in the Cinema

You’re in the cinema. It’s a film you’ve been dying to see. The opening titles are playing when someone comes and sits down in the seat in front of you. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big thing – cinemas are designed to cope with it.

However, this guy is big (you think it’s probably a guy – hard to tell in the dark), in fact this guy is huge. All you can see is the broad expanse of his back. Even the sound seems muted by his presence. Weird.

You lean forward and tap him on the shoulder – it’s like poking a rock. “Excuse me...” You begin, but then another face pops up from behind the back of the seat next to him. “Hi” says a voice “You can’t see the film right..?”

“Doesn’t matter – you don’t need to see it for yourself, we’ll tell you what you need to know okay..?” Then he sits back down. And you’re stuck. You can’t even get a refund, and all the other showings are booked solid. </p>

That’s God for you. It always starts with him, or her, or it. If you want to see the real world for what it is; if you want to try and work out how everything works, really works – then sooner or later you will have to find a way to get God out of the cinema. Otherwise, you’ll never be sure about whether or not what you think is true. For example, something really basic. Walking. You walk, everyone walks. You pick a foot up, move it forward, put it down, do the same thing with the other one and – wow – you went forward one step. Call the newspapers. But did you really move forward..?

Maybe you’ve played games on the computer – I’ve played a lot of shooters - you press the ‘W’ key and your little man/woman/gun-hand/whatever, moves forward until you take your finger off the key (or you bump up against an invisible wall). The figure you control never moves from the center of the screen. And that’s your clue. The central figure doesn’t move – just makes walking movements with its feet as the computer shifts the lanscape beneath them, constantly recalculating the view and displaying what the underlying logic of the game dictates would be seen from the point your character is plotted.

It’s the same with the real world, or at least a real world with God in it. God can do anything, he has to be able to, otherwise he’s not God anymore, just another alien with technology way better than anything we can make, or understand – worthy of a little awe perhaps, but not all-out worship. If God wanted to, for whatever bizzare, unfathomable reason, he could be doing the exact same thing the PC does in games, for all of us, all at once. We might think we’re walking – moving our bodies forward through the world around us with our muscles – but equally, it might just be God slowly pulling the carpet of the world backwards beneath our feet. In the logic of faith, there is no way to disprove this isn’t the case.

But that’s just bloody stupid.

Yeah, sure, you’re right. It’s absurd. Then how about the textbook paradox instead: “Can God create something so heavy God can’t lift it..?”

The answer is ‘yes’ – yes he can create it; yes he can lift it anyway. There is no other answer possible without knocking God off his omnipotent ‘can do anything’ perch. And if you ask “How’s that possible then..?” The answer is pretty much ‘magic’. And that’s the problem – magical solutions to seemingly unfathomable problems; magical explanations for inexplicable events.

We’re asking the wrong questions though. You’ll have worked out by now that at some point I’m going to say “religion is wrong” or maybe, “our concepts of God are wrong.”, but that’s not the point. The real question is, if they are wrong then why does everyone have them..?

Differential diagnosis time people.

How bullshit beliefs help you do things you might not have had the guts to do otherwise, and also kill people.

  

Fear is the great immobilizer. Usually we’re told we have to basic responses to unexpected events – the classic ‘flight or fight’. But this is wrong. We have three. First we freeze, then we fly, or fight, depending on what we think our chances are.

Let’s say, a long time ago, three guys were out fishing. On the way to the boats one of them picks up a flower, maybe for his wife, or maybe for a girl he’s trying to impress back at the village, or maybe he just likes flowers, who knows. Anyway, he picks it up and puts it in his hair. His friends laugh at him. They’re still laughing at the memory of it out at sea, in their little canoes, when a rogue wave kills them all. Except the guy who had the flower in his hair. He limps back to his village, half-drowned. “What the hell happened..?” Says everyone. “We got hit by a rogue wave,” he says, “Everyone’s dead apart from me.” “You lucky bastard.” Says everyone. “And btw. – what’s with the flower..?” The guy looks sheepish, “Er, I plain forgot all about that – I put it there just before we headed out.”

“Hmm.” Says everyone, looking at the flower. “Are you going to give that to me..?” Says the guy’s girlfriend (aha – mystery solved) “Erm, no, sorry, I think I’ll just hang onto this...” He says.

From then on - no-one makes a big thing about it - but whenever anyone’s going out fishing, if they see one of those flowers, they tuck it into their hair, you know, just for luck. Some of the village women collect them, and give them to their husbands. Whenever one of the children asks them about it, they tell them the story of the guy who survived a wave the size of a mountain, because he wore the flower. Or was two mountains..? “Wow mum, is the flower magic..?”

It must be, because anyone who limps back into the village, whenever there’s been an accident at sea, has a flower.

You’ve got ot love self-fulfilling prophecies. It’s like Elephant repellent spray. I’ve got some here, I’m spraying myself with it now. Smells of vanilla. What do you mean..? Of course it works, do you see any elephants..?

If everyone who goes out is wearing a flower, then anyone who survives will be wearing a flower, and the one’s who died will be shark-food, flower and all.

The important thing though is that these flower-protected fisher-folk feel more confident about going out for fish in weather conditions that other - none-flower-wearing - fisher-folk think twice about. And so the flower-fisher-folk on an average, kilograms per year basis, get more fish, simply because they spend more time fishing, and less time watching the weather and sucking their teeth.  And more of their kids, well-fed with all those extra fish, survive to adulthood. And those extra adults take over more islands.

All thanks to the magic anti-death-at-sea flower. That never worked.

I don’t have to make these up btw. For example, in the British Isles, Whelby fishermen wore a hammer-shaped talisman, fashioned out of a sheep's bone, for protection against drowning.

Sometimes I think just how scary the first armored knights must have been, back in the days of isolated rural villages before the invention of the long-bow. Imagine, you are covered in metal from head to toe – someone hits you with a stick and you can just laugh it off. You have a great big sword, and they have at best, a leather jacket. You’ve a giant warhorse, and a bloody great lance. Chances are, you could trot into a village and massacre everyone there, without much more than a scratch. No wonder chivalry was invented.

Anyway, what’s metal armor got to do with anything..? Nothing really, but what if the armor was invisible..?

‘Sak Yant’ is an ancient traditional type of Thai tattoo which people believe, to this day, as having mystic powers. The designs inscribe Buddhist prayers called Mantras or Katas that will invoke supernatural powers. These magic spells used to be drawn on bits of cloth, and in the past, Thai soldiers would wear Yant-printed uniforms for extra protection in battle. After Buddhism became the adopted religion in Thailand, followers began to get Sak Yant tattoos. Even now, many Thai men believe in the power of these tattoos, and get them done in specialist parlors. There are also lots of stories of people with Sak Yant tattoos being shot at close range and surviving without a mark on their skins; or of them walking away from horrific car accidents without a scratch.

On the 8th of November 2012, according to the Bangkok Post, a bunch of local teens decided to try their magical tattoos out. Unsurprisingly, according to police records, all of them were injured during the fighting. However, that’s not the important bit. The important bit is that they fought, when other people, without the magic tattoos, didn’t. When you believe you cannot be harmed, then the fear of being harmed is less likely to slow you down when you are considering harming others. In combat situations, the time spent in freeze mode, or posturing, is lowered.

Rituals of manhood exist even today. Some modern day examples include land diving – jumping off a hundred foot platform somewhere around the age of eight with vines attached to your legs on an island called Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Circumcision, with variations, has been practiced without anaesthetics all round the world for as long as there have been records. Scarification rituals in the pygmy tribes of the Ituri Forest involve multiple cuts to boys’ chests, which are then rubbed with black mud. Boys of the Algonquin Indian tribe of Quebec, often placed in a cage to stop them hurting others, are sent on a hallucinogenic drug trip so traumatic that it is supposed to erase all memories of their childhood. There are many others.

The common factor in all these rituals is the aquainting of the pre-adult with pain and fear, in what I suppose is, comparative to actual combat conditions, a controlled environment. And since the ‘boys’ are going through a traumatic ordeal with a group of their peers, a certain degree of bonding is probably involved too.

So, in short, who would you most like to fight to the death..? Somebody with no real experience of pain, who has never had to develop any mechanisms to cope with fear and panic, who has never had to face a life-threatening situation before..? Or someone who was ritually tortured during their rites of passage, who prides themselves on their ability to bear pain and believes they are wearing magic armor..?

I know who I’d pick.

These magical beliefs and rituals are what you could call ‘enabling’ beliefs. They enable a group of people to do something – whether it’s collect more food, or fight better – that they wouldn’t be abe to do as well without holding those beliefs. And we’re talking a very long time ago here. Pre-history. Somewhere after the dinosaurs but before we started making beer - The earliest archaeological evidence of tool-making comes from the Koobi Fora section of East Turkana. The people who made them, Homo habilis are believed to be at least 2.5 million years old - So from then up until about twelve-thousand years ago, to put a ball-park around it. We’re talking about our long lost fathers and mothers. But before we wrap it up, there is one more thing to take into account – not just the nature of a belief, but the strength of belief on the part of the believer.

The placebo effect is a medical and psychological phenomenon in which subjects are made to believe in the positive effects of an actually completely ineffective factor – a sugar pill for example. And they work, many ill people who are given a placebo and made to believe in its medical value improve or get better. Many people who are told the ‘energy drink’ they are given is a cognitive enhancer, perform better in mental tasks. The part I want to emphasize is most easily seen in the cognitive trials. The participants are told about the properties of the ‘drug’ they are about to take, and they are asked, before they undertake the test, how much they believe the drug will boost their performance. Very usually the degree to which they believe the drug will help them predicts how well they do on the test in reality.

The more you believe, the better it works. In making people believe in the merits of something you can’t really prove, there are three factors involved. (a) How persuasive/impressive the salesman is (b) How convincing the sales-pitch and the product itself is, and (c) how gullible the person is who’s listening to it.

Suddenly having a good witch-doctor in the tribe, backed by a consistent and convincing set of myths lending them an impressive air of authority - all the better to inspire strong beliefs, seems like a good idea.

Let’s get back to prehistory. Let’s say there are lots of groups of humans spreading out of Africa around the globe. Some of them are natural skeptics; they don’t believe in anything that isn’t blatantly obvious. They have no mythology, no magic cure-alls for disease, no magic hunting rituals or anti-drowning talismans. Their warriors, if they would have needed any, only have their skins and a sense of how fragile they are. They avoid mood-altering and reality-distorting plant extracts. Other groups are steeped in mysticism, believe with great conviction anything their witch doctor tells them. They are covered in magic tattoos and scars from their rites of passage and commonly take drugs baked out of the natural flora around them that make them brave, focused and probably slightly crazy.

If you could have observed these two pre-historic groups either apart, isolated but in the same local area, or together in direct competition, who would you put your money on to survive the longest..?

I’m betting on the junkie S&M freaks.

I think that innate gulliblity - the physical capacity of our brains to believe in things without concrete justification, and our mental capacity to generate stories explaining the world in such a way as to bolster the authority of those convincing us of the veracity of a set of enabling beliefs, was a factor in our survival as a species. The humans who had this ability to form magical beliefs lived, and became our ancestors; and those who couldn’t, well, they died; or at the very least, became a teeny-tiny minority. Belief is in our DNA.

But that was then, and this is now.

Okay, so I’ve told you where I think magical thinking comes from, and why it was necessary, but surely, we should have grown up by now, and left all that magical stuff behind us..?

Rather than go into the details of ancient religions lets just think about population density over time. The world is a big place, and for a very long time there weren’t that many of us. I mean - a rough estimate of the world population for 8000 BC was about five million people. Considering the population of the city in which I live now is around 4 million and in March of 2011, London had an official population of 8,174,100, that’s very few people indeed. Fewer still in the days of the paleolithic.

Of course, though I said the world was a big place, in terms of ‘hey, this is a nice place to live’ it’s not as big as it looks. Most of it’s in the sea, some bits are just too damn hot, and other bits too damn cold. If we were all born in Africa and radiated out in waves, as we increased in numbers and/or were displaced in conflicts between groups, there were naturally some places where people would ‘stick’, and others where people would perhaps pass through, but not stay. There’s a great book ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ which covers these sticky places in depth. At the most basic levels these are places with water, building materials, wild crops – later to be domesticated – and the wild variants of what we now recognise as our domestic animals, to provide meat and pulling power.

The next thing to consider is Dunbar’s number. It estimates the number of people that can live comfortably together – everyone knowing everyone - in a group without splitting off into rival factions. It compares brain size and average numbers in groups of animals like chimpanzees and baboons to produce a ratio. For humans the number is roughly around 100-230 – usually averaged to about 150.

So lets imagine early life – humans start off in Africa, the group size increases beyond 200, and splits. Would there be fighting..? I don’t know, but one of the big things that make modern humans fight – scarcity of resources and living space – was not a problem back then. It would have simply been the choice between a familliar place and an unfamilliar place. Perhaps they all shook hands and one of the groups walked over the nearest hill and off into the distance. Still, I’m betting there would have been some conflict, and the losers were the ones that left to colonize elsewhere. You know what humans are like with the whole “Hey, this is my seat” concept.

In short, life would mainly have been in a creative cycle, small groups growing larger, isolated from each other with little of anything we’d recognize as war. Wars require two sides to stay within reasonable distance of each other, not for one of them to have the option of just moving away, never to be seen again, with no real penalty except having to rebuild a house or two and eat a slightly different diet; maybe even finding a better place to live than the one they’d been about to fight over. 

So, a group finds somewhere nice to live, warm, plenty of food. Throw away the birth control and multiply. Babies, and the ability to make them, are at a premium. Women are more important to the survival of the group, than men. This is probably why we have a lot of old statuettes and figurines of fat women with great big tummies dating from way back when.

Later, probably much later, as the ‘sticky’ areas close to the epicentre of humankind get filled up, and there is more conflict as waves from closer to the centre push outward, keeping a large group together – way past the limit of Dunbar’s number – would become a good way of ensuring your group doesn’t get booted out by the next bunch of knuckle-draggers coming over the hill. Keeping people together in extended social networks would take social skills, not something else men are renowned as being good at.

I’m guessing that in the deep past women, and the mystery of childbirth, loomed very large in belief systems. And when early farming became normal, the question of fertility, both of women and fields also became hugely important.

Once groups swell beyond a certain size though, you end up with hierarchies to keep everyone in their place. Queens and consorts perhaps. And when you have large groups in close proximity, neither wanting to move, if only because fields can’t walk, then you get war. And when war becomes important, so do men.

Competition / isolation / creative – fertility female / growth // switch to agression destructive male / hierarchy power legitimacy / ritualizer caste.

Small world attracters of guns germs and steel.

Sweeping generalization time. Let’s just put it this way: Back in the day, there were less reasons to kill people, and more reasons to make people. And keep the ones already in the group together for longer. Both areas – procreation and social, rather than violent, manipulation – in which women excel. So, equally reasonably you would expect groups that (a) valued children, and (b) gave social importance and power to women, would prosper to a greater extent than groups which did not.

Placebo /pain /first strike /degree of belief.

If you study ancient mythology you can roughly track how the need for magical solutions has changed with the changes in humankind’s way of life. If you look at people’s without any knowledge of how the world works at all – primitive tribal hunter/gatherers - you find their myth-cycles involve a very diffuse spirit world – with pretty much everything possessing some type of spirit - which must be taken into consideration when planning actions. No central, well defined God(s), just a generally magical environment. In later, small rural societies you get elementals that need to be treated with – rain-gods, sun-gods fertility Gods, Gods that govern the kind of natural disasters that farmers dread – droughts, famines, blights. Warrior societies add onto these pantheons, surprise-surprise, Gods of war. City-builders have generally what would now pass for ‘modern’ Gods – Gods that can generate floods, plagues and earthquakes and all the other disasters that come along with having a dense population stuck in one place with a poor grasp of sanitation and building codes living in areas of rich soils – like erm, alluvial flood plains and areas of volcanic activity...

Myths usually start with some kind of creation story, then sometimes something to explain why society is unequal (Hindu myths and the caste-system for example). Then you usually get a magical story explaining the progression of the seasons – ice giants kidnap the spring maiden, creating winter; someone heroic frees her just in time for planting etc. – and a whole system of ritual appeasements to prevent natural disasters. Warrior societies generate mythic inducements toward bravery and victory for their fighters.

Of course, however many rituals you undertake, natural disasters happen anyway, so myth-cycles evolve to explain why. Generally the Gods were angry at something, and boom, there was a flood/plague/whatever. Then the story explains why it won’t happen again as long as the populace doesn’t do X,Y or Z. And for a while, no-one dares do X,Y or Z. (Then someone does do X, and there’s another disaster. Or at least that’s what must have happened).

The whole idea is absurd. But we are surrounded by absurdity everywhere we look. Imagine showing someone from a couple of hundred years ago a TV camera. “This” you say, “is er, a mechanical eye. It looks at things – like your face for example – and throws what it sees all the way across the world to a mechanical artist in a box, who draws really-really fast so someone else can see it.” They’d laugh you out of town. Then you’d say “Yeah, and the mechanical artist guy doesn’t use a pen, he draws with miniature lightning...”

Now of course, with us being so modern and all, mechanical eyes that throw pictures and drawing with miniature lightning doesn’t sound absurd at all; we are perfectly comfortable with it. No-one is scared of what would’ve seemed like witch-craft long ago. Why is that..?

Most of it is simple familiarity. Okay, it’d be nice to say that we all know about the physics underpinning the technology we use every day – electromagnetism, thermodynamics, quantum theory and etc. And that that knowledge extinguishes our fear of all this technologic wizardry, but we don’t, or at least I don’t anyway. And neither for that matter, do pre-schoolers – a demograph not famed for its depth of technical expertise – and yet, they don’t run around screaming every time the phone rings because, shock-horror, they have no understanding of electronics. So it’s can’t be simply a matter of understanding bringing a feeling of security. It’s familiarity, and social example. The ‘Dad isn’t afraid of the telephone so I don’t have to be either’ effect.

As we spend time growing up around technology, or anything for that matter, we learn its limits. We learn that the telephone rings, but does not explode. We learn that cars move forward and back, and round corners, but never up. We learn the water goes down the plughole, but never climbs the wall. We learn that the things in this world are consistent: They always do this; they can do this too sometimes under extraordinary conditions; but they never, ever do that. And from this we learn to move through the world around ourselves without fear. We cross the road without worrying overmuch about being suddenly crushed by the tonne or so of speeding steel and plastic hurtling towards us, because we know it won’t be able to reach us before we’ve gotten to the other side, even if the guy behind the wheel is a psychopathic killer. We allow for acceleration and driver inattention. Well, usually anyway.

We fear the unknown not because we don’t understand how it works, but can’t predict what it will do.

This fear also induces a kind of paralysis, a ‘rabbit in the headlights’ effect in the face of this unknown object/person/whatever, simply because when we first witness it up close – close enough for it to reach out and strangle/maim/disembowel us – we don’t know what kind of action on our part might suddenly set it off on a killing spree, ergo – we do nothing, and sit there like frozen yoghurt. Which is bad.

Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt so much as a relief from this paralysis. Familiarity is the great enabler of humankind. It allows us to function. Which gives us a problem when we’re around things which have no precedents in our experience, or are so infrequently met with in normal life that there is nothing consistent cause/event-wise to become familiar to. It’s then we have to become Sherlock Holmes and deduce what happens, produce explanations, guess limitations without testing them.

I don’t know about you but I love old vampire movies. “I vant to drink your blood. Lizten to ze children ov ze night, vat vunderful muzic zey make.” Love 'em. However, I’m guessing, when we didn’t have streetlights, or streets either for that matter, the night was a scary ole’ place, because people sometimes did die out there, just beyond the circle of the fire, where the black began.

When I was younger, soon after I'd gotten my first job, I suddenly had more money than I knew what to do with, and the freedom to spend it on any old stuff I fancied. One of the first things I bought was a good reflex bow, and a bunch of sexy black carbon fibre arrows. I lived in an empty farm house at the time - a old renovated serf's cottage. There was a large field out back, laying fallow. I lugged a couple of hay bales (note - surprisingly heavy for a bunch of dried grass) and set them up, pinning a target to a couple of layers of cardboard and sticking it up to shoot at.

I lost the first arrow I ever shot. Not because I missed, but because the arrow struck the target squarely in the blue ring, and went right through, presumably to bury itself completely in the soil somewhere beyond. I never found it. The arrows were blunt tipped - rounded, and the bow itself was only a 40lb draw target bow, not the heavier 70lb hunting type, and yet, the arrow, from 25m away went through the paper, 3 layers of cardboard, about 2 feet of straw, and still had enough energy left to bury it's 60cm length in the loose soil.

Interesting fact, if you want to pierce bullet-proof glass, use an arrow.

Imagine it’s a very long time ago and you're hungry and tired, hunting at dusk. You hear a noise, and loose an arrow. You hit something. Unfortunately you find that the something involved is some poor guy leaking from an entry and an exit hole in his neck, and no arrow in sight. After fruitlessly scouting around a bit, you decide to scarper back off to your village, and keep quiet about the whole thing. The ground is loamy, and that night there's a light shower of rain, enough to soak away the blood, but a rain which is dried up by the morning.

So - In the morning a body is found, white as a sheet, with two clean holes in its throat, and no blood to be seen anywhere. Scary.

Or imagine a different scenario that same night. Some guy's drunk as a skunk, weaving his way through the darkness back home. Unfortunately, he runs into the end of a pointy forked branch, right at throat height. Manages to sever a carotid. Bleeds to death on that same bit of loamy ground, and is washed down by that same shower. Doesn’t matter.

The whole village begins to talk about it. Then someone’s crazy old granny remembers a story she heard, ooh way back - happened to a friend of a friend's uncle in the old country. About monsters who sucked the blood of people caught alone in the dark. “Holy-moley” says everyone, “so that's what happened to that guy. Vampires. Oh boy we are screwed now.”

But then granny also remembers that garlic was supposed to drive them off.

Vampires are bullshit. Along with fairies, werewolves and ghosties and ghoulies of all kinds. However, they are useful bullshit, enabling bullshit. Because they offer cause. And much more importantly, they offer precautions.

 Garlic. Wolfsbane, silver, secret signs, chants and ritual movements. The unknown killer in the darkness which cannot be stopped by any means becomes the (however falsely) known killer in the darkness, which can be dealt with. Whip out your garlic necklace and you're safe as houses - wanna go for a walk in the nightime..? Go right ahead.

Nothing has changed. Some people will still go out into the dark and never come back. But the important bit to remember is, the people who believe in vampires, will still be able to go out in the dark if they really need to -whereas the ones who have no explanations at all, won't. Any explanation is better than none.

[basically here I want to say that spurious explanations are useful]

I sometimes watch a program – a very talented magician goes out onto the street and does magic tricks. I saw him walk across the Thames river in London, and levitate in front of the statue of Jesus in Rio. How staged were the reaction-shots of those watching him I don’t know, but looking at the faces they all have a common expression – somewhere between delight and fear. The best example was the face of a woman in the Barrios. The magician had put a piece of wire between his hands I think, and in a couple of seconds drop the wire to the ground. When the woman picked it up, the wire was bent, in looping itallic script, into her name.

When she stopped looking at the wire, and looked at the magician, you could see the happy amazement and outright wariness, fear, battling it out on her face. Part of her was delighted at what the man had done for her, and part of her was downright scared of the guy, even though she probably knew it must be just a trick. I don’t blame her, I’d be a bit scared too. I’d want to know how he did it, just for my peace of mind.

Still, who cares, only a bit of wire. Entertainment.

I read a news report once, I forget where, it might have been Fortean Times. It was about a picnic that went horribly wrong. A lovely day, families eating together on long tables in the park. Kids playing. Shouting, laughing, sunshine, nice green trees. There’s one kid chucking twigs, or stones maybe, at a cat stuck up a tree; trying to get it to come down. Eventually I suppose he must have hit it because the cat suddenly shoots off around the other side of the trunk and disappears. The kid follows, going around the base of the tree out of sight. Suddenly there’s a child’s scream, one that brings the adults running.

False alarm. The kid running round the tree tripped over some old guy snoozing against the trunk in the shade. The cat’s nowhere to be seen. Scared the bejesus out of kid though.

“The cat.” Stammers the kid, “The cat turned into an old man !”

If this were the Disney channel, then here’s where everyone would burst out laughing, someone would ruffle the boy’s hair, and say “Don’t be silly little Timmy, cats don’t turn into people...” then laugh some more.

But this wasn’t the Disney Channel. This was a place where a belief in sorcerers was commonplace. When someone got ill, it wasn’t because of a virus going round, or bad food, or bacteria. No, it was because a sorcerer had put a curse on them. If they walked into a lamp-post and broke their nose; it wasn’t because of clumsiness or distraction, it was because a sorcerer had put a curse on them. When granny died of old age, it wasn’t because one of her organs had finally given out, no - you got it, it was because a sorcerer had cursed her to death. Sorcerers could be anywhere, look like anything - animal or human – and were absolutely lethal.

And so, the adults in the family who had come to the aid of the kid, beat the old man to death with sticks.

The end.

Magical thinking...

Which God is the one to worry about..?

Strange question, I agree. There’s only supposed to be one right..?