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My co-blogger at Jim Kalb's Other Trads has a great post up on magical thinking. Bruce Charlton starts off his long blog post "Magical thinking in secular modernity" thus:
As I well remember from my own experience, moderns and progressives like to imagine that they are hard-nosed, rational, empirical. Yet magical thinking abounds.And he heads his sections with: Education, Immigration, Economics, and somewhere in the middle he writes,
The magical thinking of modernity is pernicious because it chucks out the natural spontaneous transcendentalism that is intrinsic to humans - chucks out the soul, gods or God, the reality of reality and The Good (objective truth, objective virtue, objective beauty) - regards these as so much arbitrary made-up stuff, disproven, left-behind, naive, silly, embarrassing...
Then modernity makes-up new stuff, lots of new stuff, ever more and newer stuff; a truly arbitrary and unfounded set of assumptions; then extrapolates unconstrainedly from these assumptions, and then builds systems which are insufficiently systematic to cohere - and then regards the end result, this random heap of constantly-changing nonsense, as real!
So modernity regards education, immigration and economics as real; and the common sense natural way of thinking of historical humankind and the majority of the world (even now) and the views of the non-intellectuals as being childish nonsense.
Modernity disbelieves in magic, yet establishes magical thinking as the unchallengeable core of modernity.