Clarke’s Third Law
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming hugely influenced me when I started up this non-profit in 2021. It was perhaps the reason I even began this project at all. And so, I named the non-profit the “Drawdown Design Project”. But after our first run of prints, I received a nice but firm email from a lawyer at Project Drawdown requesting I change the name. And so, it was time to brainstorm…
This quote by the sci-fi author of novels such as Childhood’s End & The Fountains of Paradise is what really led me to think about the name “Functional Magic”. Because, as described on the TV tropes website, functional magic is magic that works. I think of functional magic in movies and comics like a technology. Like a science. The way Dr. Strange creates glyphs with his hands or Hermione Granger has to say the right words + flick her wand just so.
But functional magic is not only "sufficiently advanced technology". To me ancient technology also seems like magic to us moderns. Ancient climate solutions like wildland protection, sustainable forest management, & regenerative agriculture are also a kind of functional magic.
And as pulp horror author Nathan Waard pointed out on our site last month, art itself is a kind of magic. Activist art is a functional magic.
When I mentioned all this to Nathan after receiving his post last month, luckily for us he had more to say. His response somehow combines Ursula K LeGuin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Huey Lewis.
From Nathan:
That quote by Arthur C. Clarke is from Clark’s Three Laws. There were two others:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
There are things you can do. The possible.
And there are things you cannot do. The impossible.
But you cannot know the impossible. You can only know the possible and the not possible yet.
When you go past the limits of the possible, it's magic!
(I guess you could have called the non-profit Scientifically Understandable Sorcery but SUS isn't a good acronym.)
Clarke's words address a subject of great interest in art and religion and science: belief. For example, in stories we refer to the "suspension of disbelief," the audience's willingness to go along with a fantastical tale, an agreement to believe in the truth of it, temporarily. Religious people speak of faith, a belief without proof. And we all "have faith" to a greater or lesser degree. A belief in friends and family, a belief in our own abilities, a belief in a collective desire to do the right thing. We don't always have evidence for these beliefs.
Science flips that script: we gather evidence and, over time, come to believe in certain explanations for what we see in our world. But "believing the science" is also a kind of faith: a faith borne out by our experience with the progress of science and technology over millennia. It's really a belief in ourselves.
Without that innate belief in ourselves—which we develop as little children—we could do nothing as a species. All of our accomplishments, past, present and future, begin with a belief in ourselves that says… We can do hard things. We can boldly go past the limits of the possible. We can do magic!
I wonder what percentage of Americans believe in magic? When I ask Google about it, the AI tells us "In a 2021 survey, 21% [of US adults] believe in spells or witchcraft, with women being more likely to believe. Additionally, 83% of US adults believe in a soul or spirit, and 81% believe in something spiritual beyond the natural world." Or, as speculative fiction master Ursula K. Le Guin put it:
This line is from Le Guin’s ethnography of the Kesh, a "people [who] might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California," from her novel Always Coming Home. A theme of the novel is that we are always returning to our ancient selves, across time. The Kesh, although they live in a distant post-apocalyptic future, have far more in common culturally with the ancient inhabitants of their home than us modern types.
Indigenous people all over the world still remember something that the modern era has forgotten. Human beings are not distinct from Earth, any more than trees and bees and bears. We are Nature, even if we behave like we are above or beyond it. And so among the mysteries of ancient people, like the Nazca lines or the pyramids, there is much that has been forgotten about caring for our world. This ancient science is functional magic to us; something that we can do if we believe.
