Superstitions

“…human solidarity… is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers…”
Richard Rorty

“When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer…”
Stevie Wonder

IN “THE ORACLE WORE A CASHMERE SUIT,” Episode 2, Season 3 of The Rockford Files, David Chase put Stevie Wonder’s song lyrics—quoted above—into a cynical music executive’s mouth. The episode tells the story of how Jim Rockford (expressly identified as a direct descendant of Free Masons in this episode) is set up – separately but at the same time—by a phony psychic and the cynical music executive. Spoiler alert: The cynical music executive ends up being the murderer.

The song by Wonder was written by/for guitarist Jeff Beck. The story of the song includes Jeff Beck being bored with music, ending playing a drum kit in a studio as Wonder enters, the “riff of the century” being composed on the spot—and promised to Beck. The story ends with Motown executives deciding to release the song by Wonder as a single before Beck’s version. As far as I can tell, it became a #2-spot hit for Wonder and stayed on the Billboard charts for 10 weeks in 1973 (#1 was Carly Simon’s ode de star de cinema à la Warren Beatyet al.).

In his song, Wonder mentions the suffering caused by superstition. But the mechanism of the suffering engendered by superstition is more deeply explored by David Chase in “The Oracle Wore a Cashmere Suit” by putting the lyrics of Wonder’s chorus in the mouth of the killer.

In so doing, Chase demarcates a space between the killer and the simple huckster spinning tales of extra—(super) understanding of perception—the psychic. Chase points an accusatory finger at what superstition really is: The capacity to objectify the suffering of another person.

A superstition, in this understanding, is any ideology that claims to give objective meaning to suffering.

Any ideology that makes suffering have significance beyond, or outside of, the objective suffering being experienced by a real biological unit, is a superstition.

Providing any external meaning to suffering is a way to “stand over” that suffering.

For the authors of the Enlightenment, working for the European absolute-monarchs of the 17^th-and 18^th-centuries ACE, any explanation of phenomena that did not conform to one of the three methodologies (induction, deduction and, most importantly for post-Copernican thinkers, abduction)—or the scientific method—was consigned to being called a “superstition.”

One of the first to use the word in this way was Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle in his essays equating Christian beliefs in “miracles” to pagan beliefs in spirits that were involved in moving or having power over physical processes.

But it was the late-classical Christians who first applied the word superstition to pagan beliefs. By the time that someone like Bishop Augustine uses the term in the era of declining Roman power in the 5^th-century ACE, it meant any ideology designated as being unsupported by the fully Christianized Roman Empire. Such a designation by an imperial authority, such as Bishop Augustine, meant that the followers of so designated an ideology could be persecuted out of existence by Imperial forces.

Before the Christians picked up the term, it was used by Roman thinkers to designate beliefs that led to “excessive religious devotion,” which they sometimes applied to early Christians and especially, to the Jews. The results of applying the term by pagans had similar disastrous impact on early Christians and, especially, Jews.

The Latin roots of the word has two parts: super and stare. The word super means “over.” While the word stare means “to stand.” Together they form a verb meaning “to stand over.”

But what is it that is being stood over, by whom and for what reason when it was used to by Romans to mean “excessive religious devotion?”

Lucretius, the Epicurean thinker of the 1^st-century BCE, wrote a treatise on the subject of superstition where he rails against excessive devotion defined as the seeking of inappropriate religious knowledge. In the rational tradition of the Romans, where religion and knowledge were all but synonymous, this was a standing out. And standing out led to ecstatic experiences. The word from the Greek, ek-stasis, literally means to “stand out:” ek = out and stasis = to stand.

For Romans in both the Stoic or Epicurean traditions standing out of the reality we experience, in full awe of the greater reality of the gods, was not seen as beneficial: Better to bear it—like a Stoic—or take as much joy as possible out of it all—like an Epicurean.

The contemporary English definition of the word superstition usually mentions something about it relating to a belief in irrational explanations for experienced phenomena.

Indeed, this is how Stevie Wonder uses the term in his song. The verses of his hit song are mostly a listing of different such explanations for phenomena. They include, “Ladders bout’ to fall/Thirteen month old baby/Broke the lookin’ glass/Seven years of bad luck…”

Enlightenment thinkers, it is well known, were waging a philosophical war against their medieval Scholastic ancestors. The Enlightenment thinkers “rejected” everything they saw as from the “Dark Ages.” Of course, this was nothing more than bluster as a way to excuse their taking over intellectual space from their ancestors.

The children of the Enlightenment did their best to explode the mythologies of the medieval Scholastics in order to, in their minds, jump start a journey into a new reality based on science and law.

Additionally, these children of the Enlightenment were descendants of people who had witnessed decades of bloody total war waged in the name of one or another interpretation of Christianity.

The children of the Enlightenment had witnessed how being allowed to objectify the suffering of others, one has a ready excuse to accept, ignore and perpetrate it. Superstitions allow adherents to engage in the inflicting of suffering without being directly connected to the consequences of the suffering.

Superstitions offer a plethora of excuses for the avoidance of working toward the relief of suffering. Since the suffering of others has no subjective meaning, one does not have to deal with it, one can just “stand over” and contemplate it if one so chooses.

Superstitions do an especially great job of removing responsibility for suffering caused by those privileged by social hierarchies. Of course, that is why those at the pinnacle of hierarchies fight so hard to impose and maintain superstitions.

All totalitarian ideologies—communism, nationalism, capitalism, and major religions—share this trait.

Does this mean that no suffering should be inflicted on other people? Highly unlikely.

But let’s not fool ourselves: We make other people suffer.

And to be truly Orwellian about it, let’s call things as simply as we can and not try to use language to cover “over” what we are doing.

If we are about to inflict suffering on another, let’s not – at the least – believe or say otherwise.

By being blunt-worded, we may be able to lose the sense that superstition now has —some pejorative term for religious belief—and move toward Chase’s interpretation lodged in a standard episode of a 1970s detective show: Superstition is any excuse offered to remove responsibility from those who can relieve the suffering of others.

This may provide us all a clear method to analyze and judge any ideology as a superstition or not.

As Charles M. Bow said, “One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.”