The Science of Discworld II

seem to be types of human being in a different skin, and talk as a matter of course. We learn what the subtle adjectives mean from the actions – and words – of the creatures in the stories. Inuit children don’t have a ‘sly’ fox icon; their fox is ‘brave’ and ‘fast’, while the Norwegian iconic fox is secretive and wise, full of good advice for respectful children. The causality in these stories is always verbal: ‘So the fox said … and they did it!’ or ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.’ The earliest communicated causality that the child meets is verbal instructions that cause material events. That is, spells.
    Similarly, parents and carers are always transmuting the child’s expressed desires into actions and objects, from food appearing on the table when the child is hungry to toys and other birthday and Christmas gifts. We surround these simple verbal requests with ‘magical’ ritual. We require the spell to begin with ‘please’, and its execution to be recognised by ‘thank you’. 4 It is indeed not surprising that our children come to believe that the way to acquire or access bits of the real world is simply to ask – indeed, simply asking or commanding is the classic spell. Remember ‘open, sesame’?
    To a child, the world does work like magic. Later in life, we wish that we could go on like that, with our ‘wishes coming true’. 5 So wedesign our shops, our webpages, our cars to fit this truly ‘childish’ view of the world.
    Coming home in the car and clicking the garage open, clicking the infrared remote to open or lock the car, changing TV channels – even switching on the light by the wall switch – are just that kind of magic. Unlike our Victorian forebears, we like to hide the machinery and pretend it’s not there. So Clarke’s dictum is not at all surprising. What it means is that this ape keeps trying, with incredible ingenuity, to get back into the nursery, when everything was done for it. Maybe other intelligent/extelligent species will have a similar helpless early life, which they will attempt to compensate for or relive through their technology? If so, they will ‘believe in magic’, too, and we will be able to diagnose this by their possession of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ rituals.
    We can see this philosophy surviving into adulthood in different human cultures. In ‘adult’ stories like the Arabian Nights, an assortment of djinni and other marvels grant the heroes’ wishes by magical means, just like those child-wishes coming true. Many ‘romantic’ adult stories have the same kind of setting, as do many fantasy tales. Fairness demands we add that, contrary to popular opinion, modern fantasy stories don’t; it’s hard to get much tension in a plot when anything is possible at the snap of a wand and so the practice of ‘magic’ therein tends to be difficult, dangerous and to be avoided wherever possible. Discworld is a magical world – we can hear the thoughts of a thunderstorm, for example, or the conversation of dogs – but magic in the pointy hat sense is very seldom used. The wizards and witches treat it rather like nuclear weaponry: it does no harm for people to know you’ve got it, but everyone will be in trouble if it gets used. This is magic for grown-ups; it has to be hard, because we know there’s no such thing as a free goblin.
    Unfortunately, adult beliefs about causality are usually contaminated by the less sophisticated wish-fulfilment philosophy that we carry with us from the tinkly magic of our infancies. For example, scientists will object to alternative theories on the grounds that ‘if that was true, we wouldn’t be able to do the sums’. Why do they think that nature cares whether humans can do the sums? Because their own desire to do the sums, which lets them write papers for learned journals, contaminatestheir otherwise rational view. There’s a feeling of feet being stamped; the Almighty should change Her laws so that we can do the sums.
    There are other ways to set up beliefs about causality, but they are difficult for creatures immersed in their own cultural assumptions: nearly everything that an adult human being is required to do is either made magical by technology, or it is to do with another human