it’s our considered opinion among the Pnictogen Wing that “rationalism” and “skepticism of the Michael Shermer / Neil Tyson sort have been disastrous for public understanding of the sciences. they promote an authoritarian model of scientific knowledge: there’s certain Authorities™ who have all the answers—Tyson, in particular, loves to posture as such—and the peons are supposed to believe everything they say. as a result, there’s been a dearth of popular education in the basic principles of science. oh, there’s a lot of hypocritical cant about the Scientific Method™ and empiricism, and people love talking about the philosophy of science...usually in a way that lets you know they don’t understand any of it. but the nuts and bolts of scientific inquiry? the fundamental concepts of the scientific disciplines? somehow these don’t find their way into popular discourse on Science™.
as a result, people have no general habit of inquiring into unusual things—wild claims, outlandish assertions, mystical insights, whatever—in a scientific and skeptical manner. they’ve been taught to believe that Experts™ or Authorities™, most of whom these days are mere propagandists like Neil Tyson or his chum Dr. Richard Dawkins, have already come to an officially approved and tried and tested explanation for all the world’s phenomena. folks in mainstream Western society “know” that astrology is nonsense (it isn’t) and that magical energy isn’t real (oh yes it is) because Tyson or Dawkins or Sam Harris or some other such celebrity has tweeted dismissively about it. and they wouldn’t lie, would they?
they wouldn’t, but neither would they necessarily know the truth. and I myself believe that claims about the potential of human magic can be rationalized, at least partly; I assert that there’s real physical and material forces at work. and I contend that this should in fact be obvious, because human magic is done with material objects and manipulations. the practitioner of human magic is doing physical things, and we ought to be able to study that. I don’t claim that science or “the laws of physics” can explain magic and magical rituals, but I suggest that one can at least study their physical components, and see that there’s something real going on here.
take, for example, this magical implement on my desktop: a sphere cut and polished out of specular hematite, about 15 mm in radius; I don’t know how much it weighs. but that’s a starting point: I can give minute and detailed specifications about the physical properties of this hematite sphere.
this object is not uniform; I can see slight variations in its color and luster as I turn it in my hands. I can intuit that there’s probably a grain structure in which grains of different materials, slightly different combinations of ferric oxide with other substances, have crystallized and intergrown.
in handling this object, I change it, very slightly. I impart the warmth of my fingers to the sphere. I get the oils from my fingers all over its surface, changing its interfacial chemistry just a bit. I expose the object to different light, different sounds—at all times the hematite sphere is subject to irradiation, and it’s to be remembered that “radiation” is a word covering an enormous range of phenomena. merely by talking to the sphere I “irradiate” it, with low-frequency audio waves carried through air.
the Shermer/Tyson style “skeptic” would never have gotten anywhere this far in analyzing a human magical tool. they’d have scoffed “superstition” or “garbage” or something else pejorative, and abandoned the subject entirely as beneath their lofty status and solomonic wisdom.
it’s wrong. they are wrong. they dismiss something they’ve never thought about at all, and they do not understand human magic.
there is so much that Neil Tyson and Michael Shermer do not understand.
~Chara of Pnictogen