Magic, Miracles and Image-building: Poetry-making and Policy-making (Part M)

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Part M of Poetry-making and Policy-making: Arranging a Marriage between Beauty and the Beast (1993)

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Summary

Such are the dimensions of the crises faced by humanity and the planet, that it is not uncommon to hear that "a miracle is required". Indeed, faced with the demonstrated incompetence and impotence of political leaders and their academic advisors, miracles seem just as likely to offer a way forward as conventional policy-making. At the same time, occasionally people experience gatherings which seem to offer hope because of the "magical" way they work -- without it being possible to identify how this happened. As a result some would say that "we need more magic".

Magic of course has a very bad press. Worse than that of poetry. Both are aspects of culture which the sciences have done their best to marginalize and ridicule -- and religion before them. Ironically, given the subtitle of this paper, even the Walt Disney movie Beauty and the Beast has been labelled dangerously evil by Christian fundamentalists -- together with fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons (Christian Broadcasting Network, 1993).

But the sciences and religions are now on the defensive. They have proven incapable of responding to the problems that they have helped to engender. In a sense they have provided a wealth of new tools to build a better house, but are incapable of using those tools to construct a house that it is a delight to live in. The qualitative keystone is lacking. Soulless "utility" dwellings and architectural monstrosities best describe the capacity of the sciences in metaphorical terms. And how are religions contributing to our current problems and our capacity to survive them?