That Magician Ain't Real!
Young Heretics
Spencer Klavan
4.9 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2024
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
These days we tell a tidy little story: once there was magic, now there's reason. But there's another, older story that might be closer to the truth: once there was fake magic, now there's real magic. In fact, not only is that the story that many luminaries of the scientific revolution told--it's also a story that extends back before the scientific revolution, to the days of Merlin and King Arthur in the Medieval chronicles of English history. Scientists, meet Merlin: you guys have a lot in common.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to Young Heretics, where this week I am going to be channeling that crazy plain lady from Tik-Tock and helping you to discern who is and is not real. All right, you guys remember that |
| 0:18.0 | Tic-Toc lady, it feels like forever ago, |
| 0:21.8 | but it really wasn't all that long ago. |
| 0:24.0 | She went viral because, I don't know, she was on a plane, and she was freaking out |
| 0:28.8 | over the fact that the guy next to her was not real. |
| 0:32.7 | Did you get pointy at him, saying he's not real? |
| 0:35.1 | And they had, I guess she left, and then people like |
| 0:39.7 | were speculating about what was going on. |
| 0:41.7 | I guess the guy sitting next to her was actually some kind of Satanist or something. He had like face tattoos and this whole weird demeanor and the internet for about five seconds was obsessed with what the mystery behind who this unreal guy was and I am not going to solve that mystery for you today |
| 1:00.5 | But I am going to talk to you about real magicians and fake magicians because last week I talked to you all about bad magic |
| 1:10.4 | what it means in the Bible but in the tradition of thinking about this stuff more generally |
| 1:16.0 | to be doing magic wrong or in a bad or sinister way because I've been arguing that our tech anxieties, our concerns about what's going to happen to all of this new digital tech, what are people doing when they put chips in your brain and they propose to make this |
| 1:34.3 | whole virtual reality that you can get absorbed into I've been suggesting that this |
| 1:40.6 | is actually a very deep anxiety to do with magic and with the uses and abuses of magic |
| 1:49.2 | that the people who inaugurated the scientific revolution |
| 1:53.7 | often understood themselves to be doing magic. |
| 1:57.0 | And now what I want to emphasize in particular |
| 1:59.6 | is that those people, and I'm thinking |
| 2:01.3 | for example of Francis Bacon, but also to some extent of Isaac Newton, |
| 2:06.1 | who had a fascination with alchemy, which was a major going concern during the period when modern science is really getting going. |
| 2:16.8 | You know, these guys did think that they were going to be able to deliver on the promises |
| 2:22.2 | that old magicians, old alchemists, had failed to deliver. |
... |
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