RICHARD FERNANDEZ: THE RETURN OF MAGIC.
Too many everyday things are already indistinguishable from magic to the average man. Four centuries ago everyone knew how everything in their village worked. Even a hundred years ago an intelligent person could figure out how anything he would likely encounter, even the steam locomotive. But today people are surrounded by things about whose workings they haven’t a clue. Medical devices, synthetic pharmaceuticals, designer pathogens. The proportion of those who can explain the world is gradually shrinking.
Cell phones, robots, mesh nets, remote imaging, data mining, stealth, invisible lethal chemicals and contagious diseases exist cheek by jowl with ox drawn carts, subsistence agriculture, illiteracy and fanaticism around Mosul and in other global cities. You hear the chants in the video. “Let the missile hit the tank. Let the missile hit the tank.” Epistemologically they are found objects like the Palantir or mithril coat described in the Lord of the Rings, things made in the deeps of time by wizards still rumored to exist, some say in America, Europe or Asia for the wizards are so few in proportion to the planetary billions that most people will never meet one personally.
Nor is the cohabitation of primitive and advanced confined to the Third World. A recent survey found an increasing number of young American men now play video games instead of getting jobs. “Danny Izquierdo, a 22-year-old who lives with his parents in Silver Spring, Md., has found little satisfaction in a series of part-time, low-wage jobs he’s held since graduating from high school. But the video games he plays, including ‘FIFA 16’ and ‘Rocket League’ on PlayStation and Pokemon Go on his smartphone, are a different story.”
To the scene of a darkened North Korea beside a lit South Korea add the disturbing image of a young man employed at the low tech work and entertaining himself with a console of superlatively magic technology. The West has become a place of magic too. This alienation of man from his former world is reflected in Western politics. Too many when asked where food comes from will reply, ‘the store’. If quizzed how cell phones work they might at best explain ‘you get a subscription’. And who pays for health care? Even Bernie Sanders might reply ‘the government’ — so that the taxpayers won’t have to.
With magic multiplying rather than receding, the latest trend in progressive politics is to question why anyone should work or learn skills at all.
That will turn out well.