Would a world that relies heavily on magic have become stagnant to a degree?

[DAgent]

Let's say we have a fairly standard pseudo-medieval world, say around the early 14th century Western Europe in style and apperance, social norms, religion and technology like horse and carts, swords and armour, ale brewing, medicine and so on. The main difference of course is magic being used so much in so many ways that no one sees the point in trying to make any new technology as you can simply use a magic spell to heat water or cook food or simply use the old fashioned methods of campfires and fireplaces inside the home or blacksmiths and so on.

Assuming magic never goes away, is never banned, people are always able to access it, what would such a society look like by the time they've reached the equivalent time of the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution? Would their timeline have versions of the Victorians and Georgians in the same time period as the real world and would theirs be anything like ours were? What would their society look like around the 1960's, especially around the space race that was going on in real life?

 

[Astro Pen]

Assuming magic never goes away, is never banned, people are always able to access it,

A stunning piece of optimism there @DAgent
History suggests that that is impossible.
My guess is that the use of magic would become strictly controlled regulated by the powers that be, as it was during the witch-hunts. Its evocation outside the establishment criminalised. A world of sanctioned 'Magician Priests' and people living in fear.
Any form of science would likely be its enemy, since it carries an implicit threat to burst the 'power and control' bubble.

 

[Harpo]

Even the Discworld, the most magic-centred world in fiction, eventually reached an industrial revolution age - printed newspapers, post office, banking, railways, etc.

 

[Toby Frost]

I feel this is something a good writer could convincingly argue either way. There's a Dungeons and Dragons setting called Eberron, which uses magic to effectively push its world into the level of the 1940s, with extra elements of pulp sci-fi. It's just driven by wizards rather than industrialists. It makes sense, as much as magic ever does, by which I suppose I mean that the internal logic holds together.

A lot of fantasy worlds seem to have effectively stagnated anyhow: either technology doesn't advance at all, leaving the world stuck for thousands of years at one level (usually a "heroic" pre-gunpowder time), or else technological and magical progress is unrealistically slow (ie the steam kettle has existed for millennia but nobody has thought of the steam locomotive).

 

[KGeo777]

Interesting question.
I think there is an assumption with magic that it is only used by special practitioners and is not democratic.
Most of the peasants won't have access to it--just as mid-wives or blacksmiths would be a special trade for the few.

And the magic-users would likely want to prevent it from being in the hands of the many, thus they write magic spells in code etc.

IF magic was democratic, it might well end up destroying the society since people might use spells for willy nilly reasons.
You don't like your neighbor so you summon a dragon to burn the cottage down. But then another neighbor gets made at you for that so they conjure a windstorm to blow away your house.
Etc.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Everything is progressive. You can only 'magic' something that you know about. So for example you cannot 'magic' a steam engine if you don't know what one is or what it is used for. In the same way that the person who first learned to make fire didn't make a steam engine. Nor did the first person to boil water, to make a kettle, or to realise that steam could be used as a means of propulsion.

And taking a photograph isn't half as impressive as painting a picture. Buying a fastfood burger isn't as satisfying as making a 'proper' one, etc etc.

Magic helps in some respects, but for example a caveman with magical abilities would be far less advanced than a muggle living in the 21st Century.

 

[The Big Peat]

The simple answer to this is "it depends".

And it depends entirely on what you, the author, believes magic should be capable of and what people want.

I would suggest the general, more involved answer, is some variation of no. Because magic doesn't take away the urge to go "what if this was even better".

Let us use travel as an example. If you're sat on a horse taking multiple days to travel a 100 miles with the weather going on all around you, are you going to wonder "how could this be better"? Yes, absolutely.

So either you can in fact accomplish this with magic at which your pseudo-medieval world starts to fall apart a little.

Or, if you can't, you start researching magic to do it better. Can magic be improved and bettered? Can you simplify spells, make them more powerful, make them do more things?

If it can't then you start looking at technology. If magic can't stop you having to ride a horse into a gale anytime you need to take a message, you will start thinking of other things unless there is some other reason.

And this carries on in many different ways. To me, wanting things to be better is one of the most basic human impulses.

Now there's a ton a writer can do about that, with simply shrugging and ignoring it a move with a lot of pedigree. But if you are trying to create a plausible world, magic superseding technology and leading a static world doesn't make sense unless accompanied with a lot of supporting structure. Not unless that static world is at a level of utopia we would turn utterly green in envy at.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Though it can, magic doesn't have to promote peace or stability. There is also the question of black magic and white magic which running at the same time could create personal conflicts or group conflicts. Quite often change comes out of conflicts, either by continual interaction (arms race) or by one side or the other temporarily overcoming the other. Seemingly stable societies based on magic practicing an unofficial official truce look very stable but are actually balanced on a knife edge. Apparently resistant to change but they can be disrupted by bringing in a person, an outsider, who doesn't fit in and can't be pushed aside.

Seven Days In New Crete by Robert Graves is one such story. A magical society has found stability as well as stagnation by having only certain groups able to perform certain actions, magic included. An ordinary Englishman is brought in from the past, thrown into the mix, and promotes disruption of the status quo by a series of seemingly insignificant events. If the practice of science were viewed as magic that is limited to just a few people being able to do it, Zardoz would be an example of a ordinary person disrupting an entire society that had also stopped developing after achieving lofty goals with everyone following assigned roles.

 

[Toby Frost]

I think there is an assumption with magic that it is only used by special practitioners and is not democratic.

That depends on who gets to be magical, which could go a lot of ways. As soon as magic is inherited or passed down in families, and can't just be learned, you've got women and poor people being able to practice magic and the (stereotypical) medieval social structure quickly falls apart. It would be like handing out guns to random people. A society might order all wizards to be trained by the government, and might try to control the practice, which would probably force unlicenced wizards underground. Which would generate some interesting story ideas in itself. It could go in loads of ways.

 

[The Big Peat]

That depends on who gets to be magical, which could go a lot of ways. As soon as magic is inherited or passed down in families, and can't just be learned, you've got women and poor people being able to practice magic and the (stereotypical) medieval social structure quickly falls apart. It would be like handing out guns to random people. A society might order all wizards to be trained by the government, and might try to control the practice, which would probably force unlicenced wizards underground. Which would generate some interesting story ideas in itself. It could go in loads of ways.

See for me, inherited magic makes keeping a medieval social structure easier, because then it's the families with the most magical mojo that become the aristocracy. That becomes even truer if you go for a form of magic based around spirit control, so families can hand down spirit pacts and lock out others from the most powerful magic.

To me a setting where anyone can learn magic potentially, depending on how easy it is to learn, disturbs the social order more because the medieval period wasn't exactly one of strong state control and it's quite easy to see occasions in medieval history where a group of wizards could have set up a school to serve themselves and be all "what you gonna do about it".

Which just goes to emphasize that pretty much whatever the author wants to happen, can happen.

 

[KGeo777]

That depends on who gets to be magical, which could go a lot of ways. As soon as magic is inherited or passed down in families, and can't just be learned, you've got women and poor people being able to practice magic and the (stereotypical) medieval social structure quickly falls apart. It would be like handing out guns to random people. A society might order all wizards to be trained by the government, and might try to control the practice, which would probably force unlicenced wizards underground. Which would generate some interesting story ideas in itself. It could go in loads of ways.

There's also the question of how magic works.
I am thinking of magic being based on spells and incantations, not something hereditary or from a wand.
I can't imagine a baby or toddler being able to summon up magical phenomenon and then someone saying "send this kid to wizard school!"

Thus in my thinking, that's why it couldn't become widespread because it requires special knowledge and discipline.
If it could be widespread, then I can't see how the society would survive. Especially if the magic involved changing weather and making things disappear and transform. It would become chaotic pretty fast.

 

[Swank]

However you want to write it. There is no magic so any theory you have is wonderfully untestable. Enjoy your wonderfully inventive or romantically stagnant world to your hearts content.

 

[Toby Frost]

I can't imagine a baby or toddler being able to summon up magical phenomenon and then someone saying "send this kid to wizard school!"

I can imagine that happening pretty easily: weird things happen around the child, the local inspector is called and, depending on the setting, he suggests/orders that the child goes to wizard school/is registered as magical/is banished to Magic Island etc, or just burns the kid at the stake. Wizards might end up like a kind of organised priesthood where, in order to join, you have to perform a genuine miracle.

Apart from the (cynical? realistic?) idea that humans will try to get the best for themselves out of magic, I agree that this could go in almost any direction provided it's written well enough.

 

[Tirellan]

I can't imagine a baby or toddler being able to summon up magical phenomenon and then someone saying "send this kid to wizard school!"

I think that would depend on 1 - how rare magical ability is 2 - how organised the practioners of magic are.

 

[BAYLOR]

A world in which magic dominant . What would it be like? I can think of one example, Altair IV , right after the Krell turned on their great machine.

 

[Judderman]

Often there is a negative side for magic users. So industry is a relatively low risk way to improve or develop. There could be loss of mind, being sucked into a warp, accidental murder of spouse or others, causing fires, destruction of land, rivalry, ostracism etc.
Maybe best to forget all this magic nonsense in the modern world

 

[Swank]

Let's say we have a fairly standard pseudo-medieval world, say around the early 14th century Western Europe in style and apperance, social norms, religion and technology like horse and carts, swords and armour, ale brewing, medicine and so on. The main difference of course is magic being used so much in so many ways that no one sees the point in trying to make any new technology as you can simply use a magic spell to heat water or cook food or simply use the old fashioned methods of campfires and fireplaces inside the home or blacksmiths and so on.

Assuming magic never goes away, is never banned, people are always able to access it, what would such a society look like by the time they've reached the equivalent time of the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution? Would their timeline have versions of the Victorians and Georgians in the same time period as the real world and would theirs be anything like ours were? What would their society look like around the 1960's, especially around the space race that was going on in real life?

If all this is true, why is it like 14th century in the first place? How did castles survive, or social castes?

I think there's an underlying assumption that the 'progress' has a particular shape and that things like the industrial revolution or going to space have a kind of inevitability for humans. But they really aren't, and an emphasis on life sciences or even social sciences could have taken us down a totally different road - without something as revolutionary as magic playing a role.

Really, the glue that holds traditional fantasy together is that magic is rare, limited in reach and power, and is best avoided by people that want to maintain their sanity or virtue. And that allows the rest of the denizens of such a world to live like people, not wizards. You're suggesting a world where anyone could superheat the water trapped in a castle wall and bring down a fortification - and that means castles don't exist. And maybe ironwork also doesn't exist. Or advanced irrigation methods. Or medicine.

 

[BAYLOR]

If there was really magic in the world , it could also be a wonderful thing too.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

Consider Maslow's Hierarchy of needs. If magic can fulfill all of the physical needs, or at least shortcut those physical needs, what technologies are really required? Why develop grain farms if you can reliably grow other crops when you need them. Grain's usefulness lays primarily in the ability to grow and store an abundance for times when fresh food is scarce. But grain is land and labor intensive.

Why develop weaving if there are magical substitutions to stay warm. And so forth. We look at 14th century technology because - fairy tales.

If everyone could use magic simply by learning some complex hand gestures and chants then everyone would be using magic. The greatest disability would be a speech impediment - stuttering, slurring, etc.

why develop tools we don't need?

 

[Judderman]

Some of the tech on Star Trek is almost like a level of magic. Why use your energy on magic when you can go and grab whatever you want, or teleport.