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In The Year of Magical Thinking, [1] Joan Didion reflects on the aftermath of her husband’s death, over a year in which her daughter also suffers serious illness. This year ‘cut loose any fixed idea’ [2] she had about the finality of the division between life and death. Grief revealed jarring misalignments between her cool, objective beliefs about the world (and the power of language to articulate them) and the constant eruptions of magical thinking. Recalling the credo of her Episcopalian upbringing (‘I believe in the Holy Ghost…’) she realizes ‘I had never believed in the words […] I did not believe in the resurrection of the body’. [3] Yet this explicit disavowal of supernatural thinking brings no clarity or solace. The year is suffused with her failure to let her husband go fully into the world of the dead. She pores over the traces he left for the living in his death, and the traces of impending death in his life, revealed in the pencil marks, open books and inevitable other omens that intrude on bereavement. Material objects – his clothes, their crockery – await, even invoke, a resurrection that she knows cannot be. During the year, Didion’s avowal of her rational beliefs comes profoundly unstuck: if luck plays no part in our histories, for which we are properly accountable and responsible, then why is her daughter sick and her husband dead? Grief is profoundly unsettling not because beliefs are shaken, but because they are revealed, in all their complex contradictions.
Magical thinking is hardly the preserve of those in extremis. A training exercise for would-be therapists asks participants to write down the name of someone they love; then a time and date, not too far in the future. Beneath, they are asked to write down the manner of their loved one’s death at that time. The discomfort (impossibility, for many) of the task serves to demonstrate how porous the line between the normal and the pathological; between rationality and superstition. It is not only the bereaved or those with dysfunctional obsessive disorders who believe in magic. Eschewing the notion that our thoughts directly affect the material world has long been a defining feature of modern rationality: we moderns do not believe that writing can evoke the future, and few profess that they believe this. Yet traces clearly remain: something tugs (and tugs hard) at our desire not to tempt fate. The impossible task reveals something of the palimpsest of beliefs that underpin what we do, and what we cannot do. Some layers are buried deep: abject and shameful. Even legitimate non-rational beliefs, such as those which can be expressed formally in religious credo, articulate awkwardly with our more objective, empirical bodies of knowledge. Yet whether or not they are espoused, the remnants of pagan and religious doxa continue to structure the rhythms of our weeks and years, and erupt unexpectedly to infuse our moral reckonings with the contingencies of misfortune.
These other, less rational beliefs, matter as much to health and wellbeing as knowledge of biomedicine. An excess of magical thinking can become intolerable anxiety about controlling the world through actions; the revelations of the limits to rationality is one of grief’s many burdens. In more everyday contexts, beliefs about moral deservingness, luck and fate jostle with our understandings of viruses, genes and statistical probability in accounting for who gets a cold or develops heart disease. More knowledge does not erase other frameworks for understanding an unpredictable universe, but rather accretes in ways that are difficult to disentangle. These other frameworks, more or less coherent, or able to be articulated, are typically opposed to knowledge, and evidenced as such by their lack of empirical warrant. Concerns about beliefs come to the fore in biomedicine when they appear most divergent from medical consensus, and as barriers to people acting in ways congruent with biomedical advance. Failures to take up vaccination, or eat healthful foods, or adhere to medical regimes, have all been framed as, at least in part, the outcomes of unhelpful beliefs. Decades of scholarship on health beliefs has studied the links between what people think, what they do, and the health consequences. Such models attempt to elicit beliefs (about the likely risks and benefits of actions, about powerful others, about our ability to control our own health, for example) from answers to questions on surveys or interviews, accessing those most easily articulated and reported. Yet as Didion’s account suggests, such reporting may be a thin, and misleading, guide to the beliefs that matter. But if those that matter are only revealed to the self, let alone to an interlocutor, in the midst of crisis, how can they be known?
What people do in disrupted times provides some evidence. The global COVID-19 pandemic was, for many, a disruptor. Everyday competence - in how to manage acceptable norm of hygiene, or social interaction - was thrown into chaos, as both experts and laity scrambled to learn to live with a virus and its impact. A certain hysteresis accompanied slippage between habitus and new, uncertain, fields of practice, and anxieties about false beliefs proliferated alongside viral replication. Rumours and fake news were positioned as, in themselves, threats to the public health. As anxieties collided around the uncertain promise of medical science and trust in governance, one particular set of beliefs, ‘conspiracy’ beliefs, became a particular concern. A study [4] in the UK found that greater use of ‘unregulated social media’ correlated with likelihood of believing conspiracy theories about COVID-19, and that these in turn correlated with less likelihood of conforming with evidence-based risk reductions. Conspiracy beliefs were evidenced by agreement with statements such as ‘The symptoms of COVID-19 seem to be connected to mobile 5G network radiation’. Faulty beliefs were evidenced by the lack of scientific warrant for their truth-status and the lack of credentialed authority for their provenance – and framed as a risk to the public health.
Yet in chaotic times the ever-porous boundary between knowledge and belief becomes even more treacherous. Normal science moves slowly, and typically only settled consensus is widely shared across public discourse. Pandemic times are not normal; science speeds up, and it moves under the public gaze. In the COVID19 pandemic, the uncertainties of virology, epidemiological modelling and therapeutic evaluation were revealed in real time, with high levels of media scrutiny. Before scientific debates coalesce into stable knowledge, the usual rituals of legitimacy – the evidential warrants from peer review, for instance – fail to reassure. In such contexts, argued Collins and Evans [5], scientific knowledge becomes public currency, with everyone entitled to a view, and questions raised about the legitimacy of expertise. If knowledge claims conventionally rest on justification and evidence, these may be in shorter supply than usual. Believing 5G causes infection may not be a warrantable claim, yet credentialed scientists were also calling for caution in the face of limited evidence on the safety of 5G roll out [6], and scientific consensus about the original triggers for the spread of a coronavirus had not stabilised. What were at one point irresponsible conspiracy beliefs – that the virus was circulated in Europe way earlier than officially thought [7]– later became legitimate scientific hypothesis.
If studying beliefs as a precursor of behaviour in the COVID19 pandemic remained largely the preserve of psychologists, earlier pandemics drew in the expertise of those trained to look at belief as meaningful rather than faulty thinking. Anthropologists working in west Africa during the 2014-15 Ebola epidemic [8] noted the dangers of simply taking conspiracy beliefs as indicators of misinformation or culture, rather than as expressions of political and social realities. Who is seen to be leading on disease control matters – in terms of legitimacy and trust, and congruence between rival national and local political administrations. Rumours (of political parties utilising disease to kill rival supporters; of colonial masters stealing blood) may be beliefs as lacking in empirical evidence as that of the role of 5G in virus spread. But they represent robust knowledge of the social order, and need to be taken seriously as such. Anthropologists studying Ebola were, however, largely working away, not home. At home, it can be harder to recognise that (others) beliefs can be truths about something, even if that something is not immediately manifest.
What constitutes evidence of a belief, and what constitutes evidence of its status as belief rather than knowledge, is malleable. Beliefs may be revealed in crises, but this is when their status as belief not knowledge is most unstable, and their referent remains most opaque. In more normal times, those beliefs that shape our responses to misfortune, and our ways of sustaining wellbeing, remain deeply buried, unrecognised even by the believer. Didion notes her motivation for documenting her year of magical thinking: ”I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only to myself” [9]. Even for a writer of Didion’s skill, this is a challenge. To articulate the unsayable, and often unknowable, requires more than scientific method.
1. Didion, J. (2012). [2005] The year of magical thinking. London, Fourth Estate.
2. Ibid p7
3. Ibid p149
4. Allington, D., Duffy, B., Wessely, S., Dhavan, N., & Rubin, J. (2020). Health-protective behaviour, social media usage and conspiracy belief during the COVID-19 public health emergency. Psychological medicine, 1-7.
5. Collins, H. M., & Evans, R. (2002). The third wave of science studies: Studies of expertise and experience. Social studies of science, 32(2), 235-296.
6. John, Frank (in press) Electromagnetic Fields, 5G, and Health: What about the Precautionary Principle? Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health
7. Davison, C. (2020) Lay epidemiology and the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cost of Living Blog. June 8th. https://www.cost-ofliving.net/lay-epidemiology-and-the-early-days-of-the-2019-2020-covid-19-pandemic/
8. Wilkinson, A., & Fairhead, J. (2017). Comparison of social resistance to Ebola response in Sierra Leone and Guinea suggests explanations lie in political configurations not culture. Critical Public Health, 27(1), 14-27. doi/full/10.1080/09581596.2016.1252034
9. Didion, J. (2012). [2005] p8
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