(Roughly) Daily

We live in ontologically challenged times, what some call a “metacrisis“:… but then we humans mostly always have. Peter Kauffman reviews an important new book, Carlos Eire‘s They Flew, that explores our capacity to believe the unbelievable…

This past July, the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Associated Press published the results of a May 2023 poll. Of the 1,680 American adults whom they interviewed (a representative sampling of the population at large), 69 percent said they believe in angels, 69 percent said they believe in heaven, 58 percent believe in hell, 56 percent in the existence of the devil, and 50 percent that spirits from the dead can communicate with the living. Reincarnation? The power of prayer? Astrology? Karma? Yoga as a spiritual practice? The idea that spiritual energy can be rooted in physical objects? Just six percent of us believe in none of these things. With this poll’s margin of error at plus or minus four points and other national polls over the years indicating much the same thing, it’s safe to say that 90 percent of all Americans today believe in something supernatural.

There is so much that is urgent for us to learn from what the social sciences call the dynamics of belief. Belief in things that come without any ostensible proof or evidence—that presidential elections are stolen, that horse tranquilizers cure COVID-19—is a root cause of the epistemic chaos that we find ourselves in today. How timely, then, for this extraordinary new history of belief to appear, even if the author seems to be focusing on the 16th and 17th centuries. And what a time that was. One accomplished British historian of the period, Keith Thomas, tells us, in his 1971 study Religion and the Decline of Magic, that most people back then were, by our contemporary standards anyway, “exceedingly liable to pain, sickness, and premature death”—also to poverty, “sudden disaster,” and “utter despair.” There was, understandably, a concomitant preoccupation, among the general public and elites alike, with the explanation and the relief of human misfortune; devil’s curses and God’s possible antidotes thus played a supersized role, especially before the so-called Age of Reason and Enlightenment learning started to take hold. The natural world of that time, Carlos Eire tells us, “constantly pulsated with the possibility of the miraculous.” It’s a patch of human history that seems very long ago. Yet today, under the existential terrors of climate change, a global pandemic rivaling the medieval plagues, and media that bombards us with news of one catastrophe after another, yesteryear has a familiar ring.

Eire is a master storyteller…

What the past can teach us about our troubled present: “Trances, Ecstasies, Raptures, and Levitations: On Carlos Eire’s ‘They Flew’,” from @pbkauf in @LAReviewofBooks.

Apposite: “This Simple Philosophical Puzzle Shows How Difficult It Is to Know Something” (read to the end).

* The Red Queen, to Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass

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As we ponder pondering the imponderable, we might recall that today is the Feast of Saint Nicholas (in Eastern Christian countries using the old church Calendar). It celebrates Saint Nicholas of Myra, an early Christian bishop, who attended the First Council of Nicaea; because of the many miracles attributed to his intercession, he is also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker. His legendary habit of secret gift-giving gave rise to the traditional model of Santa Claus (“Saint Nick”) through Sinterklaas.