The ability to transform potential energy that is stored in fossil fuels to the energy of motion by means of mechanically controlled fire, is Black Magic. Most of the modern political economy arose from the work of Black Magicians.
For virtually anyone educated in the west in the last seven or eight centuries, this characterization seems archaic or absurd - but it should not. This essentially medieval language powerfully expresses a simple truth that is hidden in plain sight; black magicians accrue power to themselves and control most of humanity by means of directing and controlling energy; and most human beings in the developed world move and breathe and have their being governed by images and implements that are the domain of the Black Arts.
In the context of the culture wars it is useful to for progressives and environmentalists to call out black magic for what it is, a force focused on its own gain and on the expansion of the material culture that is its work. Black Magic threatens the planetary life itself, and yet has become so ordinary that it is unremarkable.
By the middle of the Twentieth century, with the exception of the National Socialists, active control of the political economy that drives the global system we have come to think of as the West no longer belonged to the known hierarchies of the magico/religious elite - religious authorities and rulers by divine right. The elites who took power following the reformist and revolutionary movements of the 18th century had already thoroughly become engaged in the development of materialist culture through the acquisition of personal wealth, and had widely accepted the redefinition of human history as an inevitable progression from animal to some as-yet-unrealized post-animal super-being; the behavior and activity of whom could best be understood and advanced by science; and whose scientific improvements guided and shaped human development itself. Machinery extended (to use Marshall McCluhan's term)the human body's potential for action through powerful mechanical devices; and technology extended the influence of human intelligence over every aspect of the material world, penetrating and modifying it at will. In modern culture, there is no magic, only activity we have not yet explained or classified.
I propose that in sanitizing, demystifying,and scientizing western languages, we lose the power of analysis common to less sophisticated cultures, the analysis of magico/religious thinking and its rich vocabulary. We lose it in its entirety, retaining only the most elementary and binary vocabulary - Good v. Evil, God v. Satan. The sophistication of polytheistic and pantheistic ways of thinking about and analyzing cause and effect, interrelationships of all actions and activities are rendered useless, and whole systems of thought disappear under the power of a single system of thinking - observe, experiment, hypothesize, test, repeat - the scientific method. True, there is every reason to think that science will one day be able to explain everything - since by its nature intelligence itself is an implementation of language, theoretically every thing and every action can be described as it is reflected and stored as language; but as a language, science competes with other languages, and as a young language, is neither universal nor complete. It suffers from the arrogance of material culture, and because it is the language of the most powerful culture on earth today, its speakers generally have difficulty imagining they would ever need to know another one.
Multitudes of westerners continue to think unscientically - for the most part because they do not know or do not understand the language of science. Science is a factual language, and if not always perfect, it is at least self-regulating; but it is not complete. To the degree that people persist in denying facts, they can be proved wrong or can live in fantasies that in the physical world produce poor results. But to the degree that science is spoken - its content can be manipulated by its speakers. This is an elaborate way to frame what is happening in the exposition of the case for Global Warming. The facts alone are insufficient language to communicate the conciousness that the language developed to talk about Global Warming seeks to represent.
It is nothing new to lament the loss of mythos or the bankruptcy of religion - the New Age movement, counterculture movements, and scores of religious sects advocate one method or another to create or preserve nomenclature that permits expression of personal experiences that form the basis of a political economy and spiritual culture different from the one the West currently has adopted as its unifying personality. In this way science and counterculture, New Age adherents and your average teenager have come to understand a revitalized myth that at once personalizes and creates the transcendant or quasi-personal identity of earth as Gaia, the earth mother.
It is not new to attack industrialization or other forms of applied science or to try to separate from it or think of its progenitors as enemies of Nature - Luddites and Menonites and movements of all kinds struggled and struggle against it - the struggle is as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the earliest known writing.
But for this decade, resurrecting the essential argument of how we should collect and use energy is not only useful, it has meaning and consequences that are widely understood. Should we use the light of the sun for energy, as does every cell capable of photosynthesis? Or should we use the darkest energy stored over millenia and release the remainder into the atmosphere as deadly gas? Is solar energy White magic, or Black magic?
White and Black magic are not purely metaphorical in this regard, they are practical applications of forms of magic - a white magic that collects energy from the central sun of our system, the creator/destroyer star around which our planetary life orbits; and a black magic that acts upon carbons that are the corpse of the long since dead and whose energy, compressed in coal and oil like so many accidentally poisonous ghosts are released to the air in the fiery engines and chambers designed by magicians for that purpose.
It is not so important to equate White and Black magic to 'good and evil - it is more important to understand that these methodologies and forces (Black and White; Angel and Demon, Deva and Asura) operate in different spheres and have different goals. Humanity lives in the tension between creation and destruction, birth and death. All being lives in this balance - in our solar system, the sun radiates the energy that is the basis of all planetary life even as it consumes itself, violently creating and destroying while 'living' in the balance for millions of years.
A Soviet scientist quoted in Soviet Life used the phrase "we are engaged in the industrial processing of the biosphere." Indeed. The ability to transform things from one state to another by man-made means - this is Magic that has been out of balance in this century and the last - it has too much power and its adherents are blind to the consequences of it misuse.
When thinking about what to do about the chains of Black Magic and the black magicians that bind the entire globe in their power, I pose this question, a line best delivered by Billy Burke as Glenda the Good - are you a good witch, or a bad witch? Which witch are you?
Modern philosopy, which is the foundation of modern political economy, has a single reply, and one Dorothy Gale gave to Glenda: "I am not a witch at all; I am Dorothy Gale from Kansas..." and in that reply, the character perfectly states the essential western idea - who I am and what I do is entirely defined by my name, my memories, my situation, and the artifacts of my identity, and is not itself either a powerful nor a magical thing. This diminution of awareness is at the heart of the culture's failure to come to terms with the meaning of use-objects such as the internal combustion engine. As individuals who have no power but instead have only identity, there is no path or destiny or magic at all, only materials and memories.
Marx and Engels' Manifesto begins with a wonderfully potent phrase: A spectre is haunting Europe.. With the invocation of magical thinking - communism as a ghost-like presence, these two ostensibly atheistic materialists began an invocation that most modern minds think of as a call to a kind of ultimate materialism - the absence of deity in the daily operations of the world, and the actions of human labor as the essence of value of things and materials. Perhaps that is true enough; but in invoking the language of the spirit world, even these scientific materialists betray the nature of magical thinking and its power.
To break the chains of the hydrocarbon economy call it what it is: Black Magic, a path to destruction.