David Starkey’s ‘Magic’

Recently, the historian David Starkey reflected on how politics has been captured by ideological thinking that routinely deploys words that don’t correspond to anything in reality. He’s made this point numerous times before, and when doing so generally takes aim at the notion of ‘universal human rights.’ (As Nigel Biggar demonstrated with his excellent book, What’s Wrong with Rights?, the whole post-war rights-based moral paradigm does indeed stand on thin ice.)

This time, however, Starkey used a particular phrase to describe the proliferation of phoney ideas: ‘magical thinking.’ But it’s not clear what he means by ‘magical.’ The term can mean any number of things. It can mean the astrological and intiatic arts whose adepts in the ancient world were called ‘Magi.’ It can refer to Hellenic or Iamlichan ritual. It can also mean the degraded pursuit of spiritual control, often termed ‘goetia.’ 

What I think Starkey has in mind, though, is the Protestant conception of ‘magic.’ This is the view that any suggestion that ‘dead matter’ can possess spiritual powers is just mumbo jumbo, precisely because matter is judged to be mere purposeless stuff. This conception of ‘magic’ led 17th century Puritans to coin the phrase ‘hocus pocus’ to mock the words of eucharistic consecration, ‘hoc est enim corpus meum.’

Interestingly, it is the Christian belief in the eucharist that Starkey highlights as the epitome of the kind of ‘magical thinking’ that, in his view, now sadly dominates public life. Indeed, in the conversation in question, he compares the traditional Christian belief in eucharistic real presence to transgenderism: 

There’s a rather close resemblance between [transgenderism and] the sacrifice of the Mass. From transgenderism to transubstantiation, is… clearly a hop, skip and a jump, or smaller. If you say ‘hoc est corpus’ and the bread and the wine suddenly transform themselves into flesh and blood, it’s an essentially magical… a magical way of thinking.

He then causally connects sacramental Christianity to the dismal state of our contemporary politics: “The reason so much has gone so desperately wrong in our politics is that we believed in magic.”

Granted, there is an analogy between the Catholic conception of confecting sacraments and certain ancient conceptions of magic. After all, the sacramental realism of which St Thomas Aquinas was a key defender denied that, when the priest said the words of consecration, Christ directly produced the sacrament. Such a view would amount to saying that the priest’s words and gestures are the mere occasion for transubstantiation (a theory popular among certain theologians of the Franciscan School). Rather, Aquinas taught that at ordination, the priest was himself imbued with the power to confect the eucharist by personally sharing in Christ’s priesthood. Basically, the priest didn’t simply provide the occasion, but was himself an efficient cause of the sacrament. The traditional phrase used for this view is that the priest is ‘in persona Christi’—he stands in the person of Christ.

For Aquinas, then, the material world is not a realm of dead matter, but a world infused with, and animated by, spiritual powers—itself emanating from, and participating in, God’s creative act. On this cosmology, the whole sacramental structure of the Church was built. 

Of course, if you don’t believe that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of God, that he established a new priesthood, offered himself as a sacrifice for mankind’s redemption, which could then be realised in every age for the theotic transformation of humanity by that very priesthood, then you’re not going to believe in transubstantiation. So be it. But for Starkey to suggest that such a sacramental theology is equivalent to the voluntarism of transgenderism is to ignore that very sacramental theology. Starkey seems to think he’s being terribly clever, but he’s just making the remarkably trivial point that transubstantiation and transgenderism are two things he doesn’t believe in—oh, and both have the prefix ‘trans.’ That isn’t exactly profundity.

I think, however, that there is a profound reason why Starkey wants to group together the transgender movement and Catholicism, and why he dislikes both: the former exposes the irrationality of his own peculiar lifestyle and the latter condemns him for it. Let me explain…

The reason why transgenderism was included in the acronym ‘LGBT’ is because that community’s identity is based upon a particular philosophical claim. This claim is that, whatever the evident telos of the body and its parts, there is an interior ‘self’ whose self-realisation may require the violation of that telos, by perversion or mutilation. Hence, whilst ‘L,’ ‘G,’ and ‘B’ stand for sexual inclinations, and ‘T’ is distinct in standing for an eccentric self-identity claim, they nonetheless belong together because all four rest on the same philosophical claim. They are all expressions of an extreme type of Cartesianism: persons are made up of two substances, body and self, and the latter may need to violate the former to be truly itself.

Catholic Christianity traditionally endorsed a hylomorphic anthropology which holds the soul and body to be co-related principles of a single substance, the soul being the life of the body. Consequently, it has rejected the dualistic anthropology that underpins much modern confusion. Hence it disapproves of the world of disordered appetites and mutilations that constitute the LGBT identity.

It turns out, then, that the entire LGBT movement rests on the kind of ‘magical thinking’ that Starkey purportedly reviles. That ‘magical thinking’ denies the apprehensible telos of the body, favouring a concealed homunculus called the ‘self’ which no one has ever encountered independently of the body, with which it is supposedly only accidentally related. 

Starkey dislikes transgenderism, as a growing number of homosexuals do dislike it, because its association with them exposes the ‘magical thinking’ on which homosexuality depends. And he dislikes Catholicism because it condemns all such ‘magical thinking’ and its effects. So, it is convenient for Starkey to denounce them both together, in the hope that no one will notice that Starkey himself believes that he possesses—according to his own definition of ‘magic’—a magical, ahem, body part; indeed, one that transforms into a sexual organ by his belief that it is so. (Starkey has eye-wateringly described this for us.)

Alas, Starkey’s magical body part seems to underpin so much of his ‘conservatism.’ He greatly fears a religious revival in Britain. On many occasions he has said that any conservatism of the future must not be bound up with a religious revival. In fact, this was a theme of his National Conservatism speech in London in 2023. I remember it well. (Unfortunately, it cannot be found online because the NatCon team pulled it down—why? you’d have to ask them.) 

Starkey doesn’t want a political, cultural, and moral renewal rooted in the religious tradition that formed this land and its peoples, that punctuated the landscapes and cityscapes with church spires, that gave us our ceremonies, our hallowed language, our stories and poetry, our music and architecture—our very sacraments, the reception of which were judged necessary by King Alfred for belonging to the English nation. Starkey likely thinks that any such religious revival may frustrate the appetitive pursuits on which he and others like him have based their conception of meaning, and he may be right.

Starkey wants a ‘conservatism’ of loud blazers, horn-rimmed spectacles, decent claret, and the occasional gay orgy. He wants a ‘conservatism’ that will make it the 1990s for eternity. If that’s not magical thinking under his own definition of the term, I don’t know what is.