Quick Sketch: Columbo is Why You Don't Want Magic To Exist

 "I'm writing a book on Magic." I explain. And I'm asked "Real magic?" By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. "No." I answer. "Conjuring tricks, not real magic." ~ Lee Siegal, Net of Magic at least by Dan Dennett's testimony.

I can't make a better case for watching Columbo than George Rockall-Schmidt:

 Columbo is not a "Whodunnit?" formulaic police procedural like say "Death In Paradise" or Agatha Christy Poirot story's but a "Howcatchem?" formulaic police procedural. Insofar as we the viewer know who committed the crime and how from the outset, we are much more engaged with the mystery because it has been spoiled, so Columbo if nothing else, when you independently come to the conclusion it is one of the best shows ever made, could cure you of your irrational fear of spoilers.

But once you see Columbo latch on to having to explain why a pipe is in a driveway, or why there would be fresh water beside a pool one can seize the opportunity to realize that our whole justice system is predicated on the singular premise that something had to happen.

I recently saw "Anatomy of a Fall" having done very little presearch before I agreed to go see it. I didn't know it was set in France and for a moment I got really uncomfortable that I was going to witness a court drama played out in an inquisitorial system. (See Amanda Knox on Netflix for Italy's Inquisitorial system and El Cuerpo En Llamas which I think translates to "The Body In Flames" for Spain's Inquisitorial system) A horrifying way to pursue criminal justice. France being a Catholic nation that speaks a romantic language, my stomach began to twist that I was going to have to witness another inquisitorial trial.

Turns out France is adversarial, if you don't know the difference, adversarial is where the prosecution tries to persuade a jury of guilt while being cross examined by defence in the presence of a Judge who is there to represent the law. Inquisitorial is where the judge trying the defendant is also the prosecutor who apparently can speculate openly and address the jury directly.

My relief was short lived because, and I don't know why the French do this...The last few French films I've seen, like Raw (2016) and Titane (2021) plus some Netflix shows about Mortality cults in a near future of immortals and people trapped in an automated house...here is the feedback I feel France as a population lack: France undeniably has made great contributions to intellectual culture - Des Cartes, Pascal, Montaigne, Voltaire, De La Rochefaucold, Camus, de Beauvoir, even the Post Modernists made important contributions despite their present state of being super overrated. But French people are not intellectuals, no more so than Germans, Mexicans, Britains, Japanese or Texans. That's just not how intelligence or intellectualism works. But France appears to have a unique conceit that their population is more intellectual than the next and it's frankly embarassing. Their screenwriters can write arguments about how murdering a cow is the same as murdering a man into the script of Raw that is embarassing and a proud French citizen should be embarassed that their public be seen to carry on this way.

I would have been convicted of murdering my husband if I had to sit through the trial of Anatomy of a Fall just because I would be constantly interjected with "Jesus!" and "What is this bullshit?" and "This is horseshit!" constantly when trial lawyers start attempting to deconstruct literature to make a case, I absolutely would have been fined a bunch of money for contempt of court because I would expect the Judge to at some point instruct the attorneys to "dial the Frenchness down from 11 could we?"

But Columbo, Columbo is none of these things. There is no interpretation of subtext and then debating authorial intent. If a broken watch indicates the person was murdered at 6.30 but the nearest payphone they could use was 30 minutes away, and the phone was inside a Gas Station that closed before 6.30 and the phone company has no record of a call being made, then Columbo deduces not that teleportation is real, but that the time of death couldn't be 6.30.

The respectable conservative movement, not really represented by political bodies labelled conservative today, is a bulwark against unintended consequences. That's why you want conservatives to exist, to protect us from our own exuberance and the Dunning Krueger effect. People who want the alignment of Chakras to prevent aging, or Raiki to heal cancers, putting objects under their pillow to cause people to fall in love with them or decks of cards to make financial decisions for them; well those people are fine so long as they want to discover a science of Yoga, a science of Raiki, a science of Wikka etc. and for the most part in so far as these magical things are effective that science is understood to be human psychology, maybe probability.

Typically though, if you want to wish that magic was real, you probably want a hard magic system, rather than a soft magic system. Yeah, Harry Potter solved some mysteries explainable through polyjuice potions, but really if people can have time rewinding stop watches - you don't want to be an Auger in the Wizarding World because you can't solve crimes when you can't rule anything out.

Reassuringly formulaic Death In Paradise, at least in the seasons I still watched had many a contrived scene where the DCI concluded very quickly that the murder pretty much always had to be committed by one of 5 suspects because nobody could get in or out. That's much harder with flying broomsticks, flue-powder, portkeys, pocket dimensions, invisibility cloaks. It's hard to Alibi anyone when you can put a animated talking portrait of yourself against a window for the neighbours to see, without even having to brew up any polyjuice. 

"So the person died at 6pm from a forbidden curse judging by the neighbours testimony of the blood curdling scream they heard. The penthouse is only accessible by elevator because the staircase triggers an alarm which we already checked has been active all evening, meaning the murderer was one of the 5 guests, does that sound right to you seargent?"

"No. We can't draw any conclusions, because fucking magic."

"Right you are sergeant. The scream could have been a recording, the body could have been frozen in time using a stasis field, the victim themselves may have been impersonated at the party using polyjuice by the actual killer who then transformed into an owl to fly off into the night, after receiving and planting the body on the balcony using the fireplace. Or anything fucking else."

Columbo in revealing the elaborate premeditated murders and the elaborate impulsive murder cover-ups demonstrate highly intelligent people (way beyond 2 standard deviations of the average Frenchman) knowing that everyone knows something had to happen and trying to fabricate an ironclad alibi, dispose of murder weapons, eradicate all trace of a murderer, change the scene of the crime etc. and generally what Columbo is doing is proving that the impossible is impossible.

Which is why I would also recommend reading beyond Frank Herbert's Dune, onto Dune Messiah, even if the box office of Dune Part 2 is great it will probably take a few years to adapt Dune Messiah and they might Hobbit it. So read the book. Because Paul Atreides big advantage in Dune is that he is prescient - he can see the future, sort of like Madame Web. Dune Messiah is focused on a conspiracy to bring down Paul and end his reign. The conspirators protect themselves by having their own prescient member, because if two people can see the future it means nobody can see the future. The conspiracy also appears to have popularized "Dune Tarot" which is never described in great detail except that it appears to either randomize human behaviour to render prescience difficult, or it imparts a degree of prescience upon the population at large blinding Paul's ability to predict the future.

Hence magic remains fun and games so long as it isn't real, and that was what Dan Dennett employed the quote from the book to highlight - real magic is fake whereas fake magic is real, which you can read either way suffice to say that what is possible is ultimately constrained by something like Newton's laws of motion.

So teenage girls who pick up a book on witch-craft, that I'll extend the benefit of the doubt that the author watched Teen Witch (1989) as a teenage girl, had her mind opened to hip-hop and received the message loud and clear about the pitfalls of compelling someone to love you or even transforming a frog so you can have sex with it; and subsequently the spells of the 75 that help someone "find love" do not involve compelling Johnny football hero to love them, but spells that say help you notice that asthmatic Dennis who is in your league might be someone you can form a loving attachment to. I have come across many examples of people flirting with taking magic seriously that demonstrate a duty of care to potentially naive and undiscerning clientelle - be it a crystal healer that told her friend that based on the alarming size of the tumour her son had, it wasn't time for crystals but maybe chemo, or the fortuneteller that told my friend that her ex boyfriend wouldn't call her back until she stopped wanting him to etc. Plenty of people in this space demonstrate conscious...

That said there's always going to be a distribution problem. the publishers of Teen Witch blurb their product:

With more than 75 spells for finding love, money and happiness...

It seems they have no scruples about selling the book to someone who might be seeking a spell to compell Johnny football hero to love you. The thing is, that if a book can help any highschool girl get asked to the prom by any highschool boy, then the spell presumably won't just work for you, but that bitch Tina. Furthermore, while you may pine for Johnny football hero or Aquamarine non-binary activist hero right now, hopefully you learn the same lessons as the girl from Karate Kid 3 and Teen witch that compelling someone to love you is ultimately a hollow victory, that means magic is most likely going to be employed most frequently by dark-triad individuals, people with PDs, psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, hystrionics and some of the time borderline individuals.

And now vet the spell book as to whether if this magic worked, the most repulsive person (maybe me) on earth could use the spells on you. Because as appealing as it might be to possess the power of magic, the idea of everyone else possessing the power of magic should appal you.

From which Columbo could probably deduce that any well written book on magic will have been effectively edited by natural selection to contain pretty much benign-to-inert descriptions of magic.

Think of it this way. A society like the United States can cope more-or-less with the existence of hand guns. If magic was real, society would organize around it, it might render things like women's independence and democracy impossible, just like portable fool proof killing machines are real and US society organizes around that fact. I would assert, nobody but the worst people, are jealous of the US' second amendment. I suspect that in the UK, Canada, Scandanavia, EU, Australia, Japan etc. are quite glad and un-eager to make hand guns available to the general public without quite rigorous regulation (as I believe is the case in Japan).

But moreso than just someone you hate being able to put the cruciatus curse on you, or even as much as you love Harry Potter but don't want Draco Malfoy to be a presence in your life, it is more so everything you would lose. Namely how it might take three or more victims to build enough circumstantial evidence that a violent male keeps killing his partners, he isn't just being stalked by a witch or wizard that is trying to frame him.

The fact that only a narrow band of things are possible, is something that makes building a community everyone can live in easier.