> For reasons we’ll be discussing in a later post, rationalism suffers from an innate and lethal tendency to lose track of the difference between the abstractions that it contemplates and the universe that those abstractions are meant to represent. That confusion between representation and reality tends to increase over time as the rationalist movement defines its view of existence with more and more precision. It’s as simple as it is inevitable: the tighter the rationalist clenches his fist, if you will, the more of the universe of possible human experience slips through his fingers.
> Sooner or later, the things that have been excluded from the world by any given rationalist system will include things that can’t be ignored without putting the survival of the civilization at risk, and when those things are ignored anyway, as they normally are, the consequences are all too familiar from the historical record. That’s why rationalist movements in their final years, when it finally becomes impossible to ignore those things any longer, always end up making peace with the realms of magic, myth, and religion they‘ve previously spent so many years and so much effort denouncing. To put the same thing another way, that’s why the magic or the esoteric religion of a waning civilization ends up absorbing the heritage of that civilization’s broken-down rationalism, repurposing it to cope with the unmet needs of its time, and placing it in a context of practice that keeps it from blinding itself with its own abstractions quite so readily as when it’s given free rein.
> Magic, as I suggested in last month’s post, is the reset button for minds that have allowed their worlds, their representations, to get out of sync with the reality those representations are meant to describe. In all ages, that’s highly useful for individuals; at certain times, which recur with remarkable predictability in the lives of civilizations, that’s necessary for entire societies. We live in such a time, in case you haven’t noticed.