Magic and Language

Arthur Clarke once wrote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."  So, for example, if you could travel in time and show a computer to a man from the Middle Ages, it would surely seem magical to him.

In fact, though we don't like to call it magic these days, to most of us a computer is essentially magic, in the sense that it operates by mysterious principles which we don't understand.*  You could extend the analogy farther by remarking how often the computer must be placated, pleaded with, even prayed to, so as to avoid as far as possible its unpredictable and sometimes malicious quirks.

But information technology, to use the current lifeless cognomen, has been around for much longer than computers, longer than adding machines and abaci.  I would argue that it began with the invention of writing, some 6000 years ago, which made it possible to transfer information across arbitrary distances in space and time.

To the illiterate, this was obviously magic.  How could a person learn of an ancient or faraway event from mere marks on stone, clay, wood, or papyrus?  There must be some supernatural power at work, either in the scribe or in the marks, or both.  Perhaps something of this feeling animates those who inscribe their names and doings on convenient walls, from ancient dynasts to modern graffiti artists.

Words, whether written or spoken, are at the heart of magic -- think of a wizard casting a spell, which derives from a Germanic word meaning "talk".  Glamour originally meant "a magic spell" and derives from grammar, which comes from the Greek grapho, "write".  If we stretch the definition of technology to include language itself (after all, language is certainly an acquired skill, or techne in Greek), this follows directly from Clarke's observation.

And it seems to me that there is something magical in language.  Think how radically words can alter human behavior -- a shout of "Fire!" in a crowded theater, a verdict of "Guilty", a declaration of love or war.  How can marks on a page, or pixels on a screen, or vibrations in the air, influence human actions?  Through the human mind, of course, and since no one understands how the mind works, it must be magic!

* Partly this is the result of abstraction. When I am writing a blog post, I am not concerned with the tiny voltage differences across billions of minuscule transistors which form the most basic level of the computer I am using, nor the CPU registers and microcode at a higher level, nor the event handlers and bitmap display software at a still higher level. All of that may as well be magic to me. If there were tiny imps and homunculi inside the computer case interpreting my keystrokes and painting pixels on the screen, it would work just the same as far as I am concerned.