When I was a budding novelist, I quickly learned that the publishing world didn’t care about my aspirational goals. I had to conform to the publisher, not vice versa. As many positive thoughts I lavished on my first novel, it never saw print because it wasn’t very good.
Eventually I learned, over the 20-year process of writing three more unpublished novels, how to write fiction. It’s true that I probably wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t believed in raw talent worth developing. Positive thinking, while it bridged no gaps, at least provided a landing platform. But between the dream and the realization was a long stretch of hard work.
For some time now, I’ve had the feeling that our political class is marked, not by positive thinking, but by magical thinking. Psychologically, “Magical thinking” is defined as the belief that one’s personal thoughts, fears, and goals influence the outside world. Young children indulge in magical thinking all the time: a child who prays every night that his parents will stop fighting, for example, could feel he’s to blame when Mom and Dad stop the fights by splitting up. It’s normal for kids, but a grownup who indulges in such fantasies is called a schizophrenic. Or a politician.
You remember when Barak Obama, after winning the Democrat presidential nomination, inspired his followers with rhetoric about the day the oceans stopped rising. Or Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention: “I alone can fix.” Trump at least had actually built things with steel and concrete, while Obama had built nothing but his own persona. But both were overpromising based on a magical (or at least inflated) view of themselves in the world.
During the Democratic debates Elizabeth Warren brought the hammer down on mild suggestions that there was no need to overhaul the entire health care system. You gotta Dream Big! If she ever got the chance to enact her Day-One agenda, “Big” would have included cancelling the constitution as Step One, since much of what she wanted to do was clearly outside its parameters. Elaborate promises are nothing new in political campaigns, but the size and scope of this year’s Democrat vision is breathtaking. Bernie Sanders, likewise, seemed to think he could materialize his socialist dream by yelling about it.
DreamBig: the Next Generation is even farther out in the galaxy. Got Climate Change? Let’s just re-structure our entire civilization. We won WWII, didn’t we?
“If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it,” said everybody from Mohammed Ali to your kindergarten teacher. They never add that somewhere between Believe and Achieve is a lot of stuff: planning, coordinating, hard work, setbacks, tedium, failures, and thousands of details. Since we don’t dream in details, the gaps between here and there are too readily filled with know-nothing thought. And that leads to last-minute sloppiness and long-term incompetence, like the Obamacare website rollout and Iowa Caucus 2020.
A habit of magical thinking is extremely dangerous when a real crisis spills out like an escaped virus from a lab. Too much of the political class (I’m naming no names) has outsourced its brain to chosen experts and crossed its fingers and wished upon a vaccine that “the Economy” (whose breadth and complexity they never came close to grasping) will somehow survive long enough to a) snap back to its former glory, or b) surrender to a total makeover. It’s not likely that either of those things will happen. More likely is a dysfunctional hybrid. What can we do with that? I’m still thinking.
“Magical thinking” is not confined to the political class. It is a viral infection at least as insidious as a coronavirus, and it’s deep in the American population, including the Church. Well-intentioned but misinformed Christians think that if we can bring about political change, we can bring about the kingdom of God. Not so. In the liturgical calendar, today is Ascension Day. Ten days away is Pentecost. In Acts 2, Luke reports that 3000 were added to the fledgling Christian community. After that, however, I don’t recall that he continued to report numbers. The church continued to grow, and still grows, one lost sheep at a time. If I talk to another Christian about the place of Christ in my life, we may be mutually encouraged by one another’s faith (Romans). If my conversation partner is not a Christian, maybe the Spirit can/will use my words to bring about faith. Some years ago, Wendell Berry wrote an essay in which he exhorted “thinking small,” because “big solutions” only exhibited a problematic tendency to generate bigger problems. Be faithful, one at a time.
Bill,
This sounds right to me. In Culture Making, Andy Crouch includes a chapter called “Why We Can’t Change the World,” that pretty much makes your point. Culture, in his view, is made locally and incrementally, in a space where everyone has some degree of power and agency. We just need to learn to use our power and agency in the most effective ways.