Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (37 page)

This combination of too smart and obsessive is a stereotype Hollywood has not fully abandoned. It shows up again in the 1940s in a series of “Mad Scientist” movies, often produced by so-called Poverty Row studios and starring Boris Karloff or a down-on-his-luck Bela Lugosi.
¹⁷
These characters experimented with preserving their dead wives or restoring their beauty, for which they needed serum extracted from virgins or neighborhood dogs or gorillas. In some cases, they turned themselves into ape-men, skulking around the neighborhood under cover of night, murdering mysteriously. When they were finally caught, someone—either a reporter or a preacher—delivered the canned speech about science “going too far.”

The next decade—the 1950s—took the same fear of scientists to nearly comic levels. More often than not, scientists were portrayed as craggy, old, absentminded men with beautiful daughters who worked as lab assistants. (Just how these social incompetents might have conceived such daughters was never addressed.) The daughters did their utmost to steer daddy through the mundane chores of life, like remembering to eat lunch or pay the bills. The secrets these men transgressed were often nuclear in origin and usually resulted in an enlarged insect or spider (ants and praying mantises and tarantulas come to mind) roaming around the desert on the edge of a large city. The plot usually asked the question, “Has science taken us where no man was meant to go?” The answer was usually yes, which gave the special effects crew enough time with miniatures to delight a whole theater full of screaming kids on a Saturday afternoon.

Modern audiences know these themes and characters as well. They’ve seen them in films ranging from
Jurassic Park
to
Honey I Shrunk the Kids
. The list is long and the special effects just keep getting better. But in the name of family entertainment, we are also teaching that scientists as well as what they do are both weird and dangerous.
Back to the Future
(Parts I through whatever) may have offered some thrilling adventures, but the Christopher Lloyd character is a certifiable loony tune. Smart, out-of-control, and, most of all, unconventional. Not hemmed in by the sorts of rules and commandments that keep decent folks in their safe, predictable places. We give such scientists high marks for their entertainment value, but in real life we want to cut a wide swath around them. This is unfortunate. The basic attitudes of science confer some immunity to Caveman Logic and offer an antidote to many of its most obvious features. Yet, popular culture seems to delight in disdaining those carriers of the scientific method: the scientists, themselves.

None of this is helped by the fact that the quality of scientific education in North America is appallingly low. This ugly little secret has been getting more and more attention of late as the products of American high schools fall further and further behind their counterparts in Europe and Asia. We are leaders no more. As
Time
magazine asked in its March 6, 2006, cover story, “Is America Flunking Science?” The answer appears to be yes, which is doubly troublesome since these effects often take generations to reverse. There will surely be both intellectual and economic consequences. But documenting the patterns does not address why science seems to be so hard for so many of us. It becomes easier to avoid, even disdain science, when a culture enshrines such negative attitudes. But the roots of the problem were there well before our culture decided to consensually support ignorance. Which is easier to understand: Astronomy or astrology? Science or superstition? Geometry or ghosts?

There may be good reason for that. Science and math are new. For one thing, we are a very new species. For another, we have spent at least 99 percent of our existence on this planet without science and math. They are very new concepts and do not come easily to us. It is much easier for us to grasp astrology, superstition, and spirits. Those kinds of ideas have an extensive natural history. They are part of our Pleistocene thinking. Astronomy, science, and geometry? Not
impossible
concepts for our minds, but certainly difficult. Concepts that require concentration, attention, practice. Imagine yourself trying to get through to a room full of thirteen-year-olds who would almost certainly rather be any place but in your classroom. You’ve got an hour to reach them. Do you think you’ve got an equal chance to get them to understand the Pythagorean theorem or a ghost story?

The content of television both reflects and contributes to public perception. From either point of view, its treatment of science (and scientists) is very disturbing. We’ve come to set the bar pretty low as with series like
In Search Of . . .
and
Unsolved Mysteries
. It’s a bit more surprising when venues like the National Geographic Channel also dumb down their fare. Few viewers bother to read the written disclaimers tagged to the beginning or end of shows like
In Search Of. . .
. If they did, they’d see a clear denial of any responsibility to present a balanced view of the subject matter. It’s clear that these shows pander to the most unschooled and uncritical elements of the audience, stirring up their “Oh wow!” response and short-changing anything resembling rational alternative explanations.

Somehow we expect more of the National Geographic Channel. NGC is described by its cable and satellite carriers as offering “adventure, exploration, culture, and natural wonders.” It is further described as “educational.” So what are these “natural wonders” that NGC selects for its audience? Certainly, the universe is full of wondrous things. Will we use the telescope or the microscope? Will we look into the deepest recesses of space or peer into a drop of pond water? No. That stuff is too “sciencey.” Here, instead, is a sample of the evening programming running on NGC on a randomly selected weeknight (Monday, June 26, 2006) with start times between 6 PM and midnight. We have consecutive one-hour features on extreme sleepwalking, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, ghosts, ape-men, more UFOs, and more ghosts. The latter two are presumably reruns of the earlier broadcasts in case you were busy watching reality shows during prime time. You might also want to consider that these “educational” segments are sponsored by Jack Link’s beef jerky. A typical thirty-second commercial for this company’s product contains scenes of several male friends, who are probably not on the short list for a Rhodes scholarship, tormenting a Bigfoot they have found napping in the woods. You might also consider that advertisers study audience demographics carefully before spending their limited resources. In fairness to NGC, their approach is more balanced than that of many of their competitors. They do not emphasize wonder to the exclusion of skepticism or common sense. But the topics they select for treatment represent the lowest common denominator of interest in the world around us.

Maybe that’s
why
they choose these things and why their more measured approach is of some value. But if NGC can enlighten its audience by actually suggesting that there may be simpler explanations for Bigfoot or alien abductions, then why can’t they also introduce their audience to some of the more legitimate wonders of the world around them? Just how many times can you dredge up the same tired tales from Roswell, New Mexico, or Loch Ness, Scotland? At some point merely giving these topics any more coverage, even if it offers some semblance of balance, offers them a continued legitimacy they might otherwise lose through attrition.

How about this for a network TV show for next season: Call it
The Skeptic
. Actually, that might be a risky way to start. The word
skeptic
has taken on a negative connotation, like
grinch
. Skeptics are boring people who doubt things that are either holy or fun. So maybe let’s call the show
The Quest
or, better yet, name it after its hero. Give him a catchy Anglo-Saxon name like McGlower or something macho like Manning. Anyway, let’s give him a business card to display on-screen like Paladin did on the old
Have Gun Will Travel
TV series. The card features just his name and the word
Skeptic
. Then let’s cast a young (late-twenties/early-thirties) guy. Make sure he’s very sexy and very cool. Give him an assistant who’s drop-dead gorgeous. She’s smart and savvy and obviously very attracted to him. Let everything emphasize just how cool and with-it and desirable he is as he goes about his business of doubting supernatural events.

Our hero is a professional debunker. Every week someone brings him a new case: some sort of psychic fraud or supernatural charlatan or UFO hoaxer. We begin by witnessing a demonstration of their scam. This should be as effective as possible. In fact, if this were any other show, we might be persuaded to believe that it’s legitimate. But here we’re not taken in; for the next hour, we’re going to think like real skeptics. Because it’s cool. Also because all of these agents of the supernatural are portrayed as uncool, physically unattractive, and predatory. They do their job well, but they are cheats, living off the gullibility of uncritical believers. You make their gullibility understandable—after all, most of the audience would have shared these beliefs in the past. But here the gullible target has suffered a recent loss or death of a loved one. He is vulnerable and is targeted by a professional scam artist. The highlight of each weekly episode is watching the good-looking, cool, skeptical hero with the gorgeous girlfriend/assistant debunk the slimy scam artist while the cameras are rolling and everyone is looking. Skepticism is sexy. Debunking is debonair. Critical is cool. The supernatural is silly and associated either with pathetic, uncritical victims or cynical, manipulative con men.

If the show is well cast and well written (as, say,
The X-Files
or
Medium
) it might go a long way toward making critical thinking seem desirable and wide-eyed uncritical acceptance seem foolish. Perhaps these attitudes will spread. As we know, success breeds imitation in the entertainment business. This is not so much about education as it is conditioning. All is fair in the culture wars and it’s been a while since the good guys had a victory in their column.

A film called
The Dead Will Tell
starring Anne Heche and Kathleen Quinlan appeared on the CBS television network at 9 PM on October 24, 2004. The film dealt with a woman who probes the death of the original owner of her antique engagement ring. She believes the woman is trying to “tell her something.” This was not written, filmed, or presented on the Trobriand Islands where, we assume, superstition and ignorance are widespread. It was a strictly urban American product. Similarly, one of the major success stories of the 2005 television season was NBC’s new entry called
Medium
, in which an ordinary housewife hears and sees the dead and uses these contacts to help the Phoenix district attorney’s office.

The series’ success may rest more in the excellent weekly performance of its star, Patricia Arquette, as she struggles to come to terms with her not altogether welcome “gift.” The series is actually quite well written and acted, so I do not lament its success. But the whole “talking to the dead” thing has become a cottage industry. Hot on the heels of
Medium
, CBS announced a new entry in its fall 2005 schedule called
Ghost Whisperer
. The advertising tag line for the new series was, “Do you believe in ghosts? Because they believe in you.” Like
Medium
, the show is based on the adventures of an everyday housewife who acts as a “social worker for the dead,” in the words of one reviewer. The appearance of such a show might not be surprising or particularly distressing (after all, networks
do
chase trends) were it not for the fact that we are told that it is based on the life of a “real person.” In other words, this isn’t entertainment; it’s a documentary. Mary Ann Winkowski, a former dog groomer from Ohio and the basis for the CBS show, makes a distinction between spirits who have already “passed over” and those who are still hanging around. It’s only the latter group she can exchange information with. It’s nice to know there are some ground rules affecting her work. But even with these limitations, there are still enough talkative spirits out there to support a weekly series and a thriving ghostbusting business for Winkowski.

It’s hard to know just where all this nonsense started. Plainly, death has never been something most humans took kindly to. Thus, stories about people who “came back” or could communicate with the dead have usually spelled success. Whether sitting around the campfire back in the Pleistocene or reading Victorian novels, there was no surer way to captivate an audience than pushing back the boundaries of death. You’d like to lay it all at the feet of Bruce Willis and his influential box-office hit
The Sixth Sense
, but the trend started long before Willis and his youthful patient who could see dead people. Almost as soon as there were motion pictures, there were films about denying death. The first version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein legend appeared in a 1911 Edison kinescope called
Life without Soul
. Twenty years later
Frankenstein
became one of the first successful talking films and cemented the career of an English actor named William Henry Pratt, a.k.a. Boris Karloff. The rest, as they say, is history. Film history in this case. And you can include such alternate forms of death-defying characters as
Dracula
(Bela Lugosi, also 1931) and
The Mummy
(Boris again, in 1933). The thread running through these films, other than commercial success, is the unwillingness to accept death as an endpoint. Biology be damned. We can and will live on. We can be resurrected by a powerful bolt of electricity (
Frankenstein
) or a swig of blood (
Dracula
) or tana leaves (Kharis in
The Mummy
). Note that in none of these cases is the resurrected body particularly friendly to the living. The ill-tempered dead also seems to be a theme that refuses to go away, finding its clearest expression in zombie fare like the classic 1968 film
Night of the Living Dead
.