Translating deep thinking into common sense
From Magic to Reason: There and Back Again
By Sally Jane Driscoll
November 13, 2016
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In the days before Christianity came to Ireland in the 5th century, there was a belief in what we would call magic: there was no identity. Things did not remain themselves. Anything could change into something else; nothing had a stable existence. A wizard could utter a word which could turn a woman into a hawk, or a boy into a fallow deer.
What did Christianity offer Ireland? Christianity banished the hideous carrion Goddess. It did that not only by replacing her with a gentler and more powerful God, but by offering identity where there had been chaos.
This instability made human life dreadful. On the night after a battle, the opposing warriors would lie down on different sides of the battlefield with the dead and wounded between them. Carrion crows would tear at the bodies. The hideous Goddess of War tore the entrails from hated foes as well as beloved friends and brothers, fathers and cousins and sons. The warriors would not sleep, knowing that after they fell on the battlefield the Goddess would descend to feast on them.
Ireland was far from the Classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. The Roman civilization stopped at the west coast of the English island. But eventually Rome arrived as missionaries bearing Christianity.
What did Christianity offer Ireland? Christianity banished the hideous carrion Goddess. It did that not only by replacing her with a gentler and more powerful God, but by offering identity where there had been chaos.
The Christian God was more powerful than the most powerful wizard who could speak magic words to transform you into a stone. This new God was so powerful that transformation was ended forever. No more would a mother turn her head for a moment and look back to find that her newborn had grown owl feathers and flown into a tree. No more would a father hunting with his son find that the boy had become a boar.
Those transformations were real—in the mind. But reality was not yet real in the mind. The Christian God, the All-Seeing Mind that created the universe with a Word—that God created an orderly universe. And with order, reality became real.
We humans have trouble trying to connect consciousness to reality: connecting what is inside the head to what is outside. A variant of this difficulty was noted by the poet Byron, who said that reading Ancient Greek was like seeing in flashes of lightning. I have studied enough Ancient Greek to agree with Byron.
It was a great relief to have the powerful God-mind keep order. We can know this by reading translations of the early Irish literature. The emotion changed from bloody chaos and despair to security and joy in a calm natural world. Ireland accepted Christianity and the world stopped shapeshifting.
We humans have trouble trying to connect consciousness to reality: connecting what is inside the head to what is outside. A variant of this difficulty was noted by the poet Byron, who said that reading Ancient Greek was like seeing in flashes of lightning. I have studied enough Ancient Greek to agree with Byron. My first translations were so vivid and shocking that I abandoned the language. It was as though meanings were conveyed in strobe-light flashes, one disconnected impression after the other. As though there were only actions with no continuity in time: now—now—now—now—now— only the changes, the movements, but not a thing that moved purposefully as a unified, whole entity.
Abracadabra… Fast forward about a thousand years after St. Patrick. With the fuller emergence of reason based on identity in a God-built stable world, science had arisen. The human mind had identified enough of what is real to be able to change one thing into another, not in the magical way in which change takes place only inside the head, but change outside the head in reality according to the identity of things.
Coexistent with the birth of science, a new Christianity emerged, one with many versions: Protestantism.
Coexistent with the birth of science, a new Christianity emerged, one with many versions: Protestantism. No longer was a wizard-priest needed to interpret secret knowledge about what God requires in His orderly universe. “Render unto Caesar” became less important as people’s primary allegiance shifted away from superiors in the social hierarchy. A human with a direct relationship with the God of Identity has no need to bow to other humans. People could study the God-book to perfect their relationship with this God. God’s own human Son taught each individual how to achieve and maintain that relationship.
Through this personal relationship with the God that created and ordered the world, each individual gained a direct relationship with His creation—the world.
No longer was there full primacy of consciousness, in which the inside of the head was paramount, in which existence, like a dream, took place in the mind.
No longer was there full primacy of consciousness, in which the inside of the head was paramount, in which existence, like a dream, took place in the mind. Now there was primacy of existence—the reality of that which is real—via the God-consciousness which created the orderly, understandable universe; via the God-consciousness which offered the gift of identity to struggling human minds.
Today we are trending back toward magic.
What happened?
With the focus shifted outward, away from the mind, the role of the mind began to slip away so precipitously that the mind itself lost identity. Now only outside the head was real. It seemed that instead of reasoning, people reacted automatically to whatever stimulus bumped into them. The individual mind ceased to be important, so the individual ceased to be important. People became objects to be manipulated, like Pavlov’s dogs and B.F. Skinner’s animals. Like stones. Yet that conceit is only another misunderstanding of the relation of the inside to the outside of the head.
Logically enough, this materialism led back to a monstrous kind of primacy of consciousness. Why is that logical? Because the universe is indeed orderly. Because humans do indeed have a consciousness inside the head and we must also function in existence outside the head.
What arose was a different type of powerful God-consciousness to maintain order in the world.
In the 20th century order was maintained by the spells of powerful Wizards. They eradicated an estimated two hundred million humans who did not fit into the Wizards’ mental image of what reality should be, but is not.
Force is the inevitable alternative to magic. If what is outside the head cannot be controlled by spells, incantations, polemics that arise inside the head, the only alternative is to control by force. Humans who wield opposing ideas must be eradicated from reality by beatings, torture, murder, war.
Today we are trending back toward magic. People cry for a safe space where they can be protected from certain words, as if words are spells with the power to physically injure them.
Without identity, there is no order. There is no acknowledgment of cause and effect, no rationality. There are only heaps of skulls, as meaningless as heaps of stones. There is the return of the carrion Goddess in one of her many incarnations.
We have moved today to an explicit rejection of identity. New Wizards have arisen out of the combination of materialism and magic.
In the head, one can feel like “identifying” as a physical gender which contradicts the biology of the body in existence. One can feel like “identifying” as a “race” which does not represent the genetic makeup of the body in existence.
Note how the meaning of “identity” has been warped.
The automatic reaction to a stimulus now pertains not only to actions outside the head, but to emotions inside the head. Emotions have become materialistic and the fear of magic has returned. People cry for a safe space where they can be protected from certain words, as if words are spells with the power to physically injure them. Other people react to words they do not agree with as though words can bewitch them to commit acts against their will.
There are political and economic Wizards who believe that wealth does not arise from rational thought combined with external actions. There are scientific Wizards who pick and choose data the way storytellers pick and choose bits of reality to make a tale authentic. Except storytellers tend not to believe that Earth itself will obey them.
These are examples of magic. Or, as we might say if we were rational, they are examples of madness.
A new philosophy, less than a century old, emphasizes that reality, identity, and cause and effect exist with no God-consciousness to maintain them. Because reality is real, reason can be used to comprehend it, resulting in a valid relationship between the inside and the outside of the head. This is Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
The ancient wizards were innocent in comparison. Today, with information available to almost all the world’s population from the earliest records to the latest discoveries, there is no excuse for magic. Today magic is not only insanity, but willful insanity.
A new philosophy, less than a century old, emphasizes that reality, identity, and cause and effect exist with no God-consciousness to maintain them. Because reality is real, reason can be used to comprehend it, resulting in a valid relationship between the inside and the outside of the head. This is Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Objectivism is often derided, smeared and misunderstood, but it is not under attack the way that the Christian God is under attack. After two thousand years of development, that God continues to maintain order in the universe for countless people. Many Christians understand their religion in a way that enables them to live rationally, benevolently, while Objectivism is not yet well understood even by many of its few adherents.
Today the carrion Goddess has returned with new strength, while over much of Earth the Christian God still protects identity: the reality of reality and the proper inside-outside of the head. And that is why, in the view of new Wizards, Christianity is the enemy that must be destroyed.
This essay benefited from a 2016 lecture by J. Christopher Byrd, JD, on the influence of Christian thought on the emergence of the United States, comments on earlier drafts by Vinay Kolhatkar, and a reading of Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity by James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy.
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Fascinating, Sally. I’m afraid too many of our Objectivist friends have failed to give Christianity – and Judaism – credit where credit is due in regard to the development of objectivity in human life. It’s refreshing to see that put right.
Indeed!
Sally Driscoll has done a remarkable job in identifying the essentials of Christianity — those that matter to life, liberty, and happiness — without being sidelined by non-essentials.
Christianity is genetically Hellenic and has far more in common with Objectivism than Objectivism has in common with other brands of Atheism.
It’s a very ugly sight to see Objectivists — who should know better — knocking Christianity on trivial matters while missing and showing zero interest in Christianity’s enormous, constructive benefits and deeper, non-mystical, anti-mystical principles.
Sally’s careful scholarship has not fallen prey to such boring bigotry.
I’ve read through this essay 4 times now and have enjoyed it each time.
Savvy Street does it again! 🙂
What does Christianity have in common with Objectivism?
What are some of the “trivial matters” about which Objectivists knock Christianity?
What are some of the “enormous, constructive benefits and deeper, non-mystical, anti-mystical principles of Christianity”?
What credit is due to Christianity and Judaism in “regard to the development of objectivity in human life”? What fundamentals of Christianity made that development possible?
Given that Objectivism is Ayn Rand’s philosophy, what kind of credit where credit is due in regard to the development of objectivity in human life did Miss Rand attribute to Christianity?
Ayn Rand was always cognisant of the role of religion as an early attempt at providing man with a comprehensive metaphysical base. One example is from her letters in which she notes:
No, I have no desire to “replace the sign of the cross with the sign of the dollar.” The sign of the dollar is a symbol introduced by me in fiction to symbolize the cause of the particular group of men in my story. It would be improper to introduce a symbol for philosophy in real life, though it is quite appropriate in fiction. Philosophy does not deal in symbols and does not require them.
Perhaps I should add that I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one. This means that I am an uncompromising advocate of reason and that I am fighting for reason, not against religion.
I must also mention that I do respect religion in its philosophical aspects, in the sense that it represents an early form of philosophy.
I have the impression that you are a follower of Thomas Aquinas, whose position, in essence, is that since reason is a gift of God, man must use it. I regard this as the best of all the attempts to reconcile reason and religion—but it is only an attempt, which cannot succeed. It may work in a limited way in a given individual’s life, but it cannot be validated philosophically. However, I regard Aquinas as the greatest philosopher next to Aristotle, in the purely philosophical, not theological, aspects of his work.
If you are a Thomist, we may have a great deal in common, but we would still have an irreconcilable basic conflict which is, primarily, an epistemological conflict.
And from her article, Our Cultural Value Deprivation:
From a report on a television discussion in Denver, Colorado, I gather that one member of this movement has made its goal and meaning a little clearer. “God,” he said, “is a process of creative social intercourse.”
This, I submit, is obscene. I, who am an atheist, am shocked by so brazen an attempt to rob religion of whatever dignity and philosophical intention it might once have possessed. I am shocked by so cynically enormous a degree of contempt for the intelligence and the sensibility of people, specifically of those intended to be taken in by the switch.
For her it seems the importance of rationality and the acceptance of the primacy of existence has always been about the creation of a proper sense of life, hence she mentions:
A sense of life represents man’s early value-integrations, which remain in an extremely fluid, plastic, easily amendable state, while a man gathers knowledge to reach full conceptual control and thus to drive his inner mechanism. A full conceptual control means a consciously directed process of cognitive integration, which means: a conscious philosophy of life.
By the time he reaches adolescence, man’s knowledge is sufficient to deal with broad fundamentals; this is the period when he becomes aware of the need to translate his incoherent sense of life into conscious terms. This is the period when he gropes for such things as the meaning of life, for principles, ideals, values and, desperately, for self-assertion. And—since nothing is done, in our anti-rational culture, to assist a young mind in this crucial transition, and everything possible is done to hamper, cripple, stultify it—the result is the frantic, hysterical irrationality of most adolescents, particularly today. Theirs is the agony of the unborn—of minds going through a process of atrophy at the time set by nature for their growth.”
Sally Jane does an awesome job of pegging the pervasive “whim” worship and the emergence of the “new” primacy of consciousness out there. I think the throngs of adherents of the whim worshipping “spoilt brat” genre logically follows the decades of subversion at the hands of the Alinsky mandate (via the Public Screwall System)
It is the left who have been programming these brats that all their needs can be magically “materialized” via government proxy and the democratic mechanism. Of all their needs, the desire for and addiction to that smug “pseudo” self esteem it offers appears to be the major psychological need that this kind of merit-less parasitism from the left fulfils.
P.J. O’Rourke nails it with this quote:
I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the levelling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit.
Hilton when are you going to pay the court ordered refund for my electric wheelchair that instead of fixing and returning, you sent to Italy to another client? . So basically you stole it from me.
Well done! Now I want to reread How the Irish Saved Civilization.
It was Whisky Mercia..they saved it with Whisky 🙂
You Kool-Aid drinkers don’t get it. Rand came closer to magical thinking and ritualizing than you would willingly admit because she created Objectivism as a form of theater, where you look and act in certain ways for spectators, like that foolish woman who cosplays as Rand and now runs the Atlas Society. Rand did not create her philosophy as a serious project to make our lives better, despite what your propaganda says. And this makes sense in a way, considering that Rand came from a background in stage in cinema.
That explains why Rand spent her life attacking safe targets where our elites don’t feel vulnerable: government regulations, fiat money, taxation, central banking and the welfare state. No one in power retaliated against Rand by trying to suppress her freedom of speech, causing her to lose jobs or pressuring her to humiliate herself publicly by renouncing her beliefs. In other words, Rand strategized her play-acting at defiance of the powerful in a way which wouldn’t inconvenience her life.
And you Rand cultists have followed her example by sticking to your safe spaces. Meanwhile, our elites continue to enslave us through their damaging and childish utopianism regarding race, immigration, feminism and sexual degeneracy, but you generally avoid addressing those issues, often phobically so, because you know that venturing into that arena can have real consequences for your comfortable lives. You can propagandize your philosophy for its “courage” all you want, but in practice you have chosen the coward’s way of defying our elites.
The idea of a world manifesting regular patterns that are accessible to the human mind has certainly resulted in a calmer, saner world than the unstable universe controlled by the Carrion Goddess. However, Christianity is a sword that cleaves the world into two domains, one accessible through reason and one accessible only through faith. Much of mankind’s history is a border war between these domains. That battle most closely resembles the First World War where millions died over a few hundred yards of real estate between the warring countries.
Ms Driscoll reminds us that although much progress has been made, the demise of the Carrion Goddess cannot be taken for granted. The return of magic words that provoke the forces of evil is an ominous development for sure, but hopefully, this is more the death convulsions of the magical world view than it is a harbinger of a terrifyingly irrational future. Christianity, for all of its good effects by acknowledging that at least part of reality can be understood by human beings, is also the purveyor of an apocalyptic worldview that awaits the ultimate evil before salvation can be had. This tendency to see every tragedy as a sign of the “end times” is just as powerful a force within Christianity today as any belief in the efficacy of the mind. Although contained primarily within the souls of individual Christians themselves these border war battles are the most important.
“With the focus shifted outward, away from the mind, the role of the mind began to slip away so precipitously that the mind itself lost identity. Now only outside the head was real. It seemed that instead of reasoning, people reacted automatically to whatever stimulus bumped into them.”
Ms Driscoll makes the wonderfully insightful point that obsession with the outside world did not strengthen contact with reality but actually diminished it by denying to the mind any quality not extant with that of inanimate matter. The subsequent rise and fall of Behaviorism and Pavlovian conditioned responses bodes well for the emergence of a psychology based on contact with reality and on the capacity of humans to choose how to live.
I had no idea of the benevolent effects of Christianity on Celtic tribes at the time of the Roman Empire and wish to thank Ms Driscoll for providing a fascinating explanation of how Christianity improved the lives and worldviews of the Irish.