The Secret

Yesterday at the store, Sethie was flirting with the woman at checkout, as he is wont to do. He tried to catch her eye, gave a shy smile pressing his cheek into his shoulder, and giggled when she squeezed his little socked foot. She was quite taken with him, especially his two little bottom teeth that have been very slowly coming in over the last month or so. As we were about to leave, she said, "Let me give you a little secret, something my grandmother told me. If you get an egg and write his name on it, then hide it in your house, the rest of his teeth will come in quickly. I did it. Worked for my son."

I smiled, thanked her, and left.

I'm a fantasy fiction fan--movies, books, you name it--and so I understand the appeal of the mystical, of the fantastic, of magic. I'm also a lifelong Mormon (minus a few years in college there...) and I have always believed in God and that there are mysteries in the universe that humans--no matter how technologically advanced we become--will never figure out. I suppose on the face of it that might seem to make me ripe for hiding eggs in the house in the hopes that somehow this will hasten my baby's orthodontic advancement. Instead, I'm okay with knowing that are certain things over which I have no control.

But I understand where she was coming from. Magic is the answer to helplessness. In fact, the less control we have over something, the more the idea of magic appeals. In fantasy fiction, magic can take many forms: personal powers, the enchanted sword, and so on, but there is usually an aspect that underlies it: its secretiveness. Secret magical orders, secret magical weapons, secret magical abilities. Why secret? Well, if it's not secret, then anybody can have it, and once everyone has it, it ceases to be magic. It becomes ordinary.

We're living in an age of unprecedented technological innovation that has rendered quite a bit of the world under our control. You can call anywhere in the world--talk to someone as if they were standing right next to you, even if an ocean separates you. We can fly through the air like birds. Diseases that once decimated entire populations have been eradicated with vaccines. Diseases that still don't have cures--cancer, AIDS, etc. now have such amazing treatments to fight them that they aren't always the death sentences they were even just a few years ago. These things should be amazing, magical even.

But they're not, not really. They're ordinary because they're ubiquitous. Now maybe income inequality renders some of these things more attainable for some than for others, but that's a discussion for another day. The truth is, the more control we have, the more we're bothered by things we can't control.

In fact, we seem to be tipping in the opposite direction. Despite the phenomenal success of western medicine and pharmaceuticals, there's a growing mistrust of standard doctors, standard treatments. It can't cure everything--people still get sick, people still grow old, people still die. Despite technological advances in agriculture that allow us to produce more than enough food for the entire planet, there are people still going hungry. And despite the tremendous wealth in the world, and in America in particular, there are still people who struggle to support themselves, who live in terrible poverty. And so we become disillusioned with our own power because it has limits.

Someone once said, the more perfect our world becomes, the more glaring its imperfections. If our own technology fails us--and it does, it fails us--then there must be some secret we're missing. Some people believe these secrets are actually known and a vast conspiracy of intellectuals, or government officials, or religious leaders, or name-your-group-of-powerful-collectivists is withholding them from us for some reason. Other people believe that someone somewhere has the secret and if only you could get a hold of their mailing (and send them your $100), you can be in on the secret, too.

The secret is magic and the magic is secret. Magic is appealing because it implies the fix already exists and if only we could access it, our problems would be solved. The truth is, progress is slow. It is agonizing. It takes years and the collective efforts of many people to come to fruition. And we will probably never fix everything. Humans are imperfect and so our efforts are doomed to be imperfect, too.

The idea behind conservatism is there are some notions/actions that have been shown to work and work well and that we ought to conserve these things. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be on the lookout for new solutions, but it also means the old solution isn't bad for being old, for being ordinary. And we should always be skeptical of the secret, of the promise of magic, recognizing that its appeal is in our own impatience to see a problem fixed. The old adage is true: there are no quick fixes.

So the only time I'll be hiding eggs around the house is Easter. Sorry Seth. You're stuck with babyfood for now.