Magical Thinking

I'd been thinking that I'm inclined towards "magical thinking," but I've discovered that I'm wrong.

What I do is retrospective justification (I'm making this term up, but doesn't it sound good?). That is, once events transpire as they do, I decide that I must be better off for them having developed the way they are, instead of the way I thought I wanted them to be. Thus, when something goes wrong, I fundamentally stave off disappointment and dismay by hoping (I'd like to say "concluding," but really it's just hoping) that something worse would have happened to me, had things not gone "wrong." The immediate wrong becomes better than the greater wrong from which I have presumably been saved.

The Jewish expression for this is, "gam zu le-tovah." It translates to mean, "also this is for the good," often in a long-suffering, yiddish-esque way of accepting bad. A more elegant phrasing might be: "everything is for the best" -- though that actually improves upon the "good."

It's a really hard case to prove, either way.

The official Magical Thinking comes in a number of forms. One friend misunderstood me to be talking about what I would call "wishful thinking." Her take is that if we can think it, then magic can make it happen. We can become rich and famous and thin and good and beautiful -- magic can make it so. Wikipedia (my favorite pseudo-source for this kind of inquiry) describes Magical Thinking in much more sweeping terms: it is the reasoning that looks for causal correlation between [things that are not obviously, scientifically, causally related]. Doing Act X will bring about Effect Y. Stepping on a crack....will it break your mother's back? Uttering "Lord Voldemort"....is it really dangerous (before it became a trap, I mean)? We may laugh about some suggested correlations, but then we must consider prayer. Prayer is less laughable (even for the non-believers amongst us). We may not be able to conclude that the healing that happens after we pray for healing was definitively caused by our prayers. But we similarly may not conclude that prayer has no impact. That's what's tricky about Magical Thinking -- the merely fanciful and the truly miraculous are likely to be muddled, since we aren't privy to a metaphysical perspective (all the more reason for me to subscribe to retrospective justification!).

The "anthropological sense" of magical thinking was made famous by Joan Didion, in her painful (but eloquent) book, The Year of Magical Thinking. Interviewed by the Boston Globe, she said, "It's the feeling that you can control events by wishful thinking: 'The volcano will not erupt if we sacrifice such-and-such.' 'John will come back [from death] if I don't give away his shoes.'" This approach is not far removed from "wishful thinking," but it seems specifically geared to avoiding bad things. The challenging aspect of Joan Didion's experience is that her magical thinking undoes the bad that has already happened. She writes through a year of grief, groping to cope with terrible loss. Eventually, she must give up the magic.

The advantage of my retrospective justification is that the magic of casting metaphysics in our own favor never fades.