Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (40 page)

Sometimes we describe those who do hit or rob or rape impulsively as “animals.” What are we saying? That giving in to primitive impulses is a sign of a “less-evolved” individual or species. We have entered into a social contract and it guarantees in return that our cake, our partners, and our selves will remain safe. Virtually every culture on the planet has learned to control such impulsive behavior under penalty of ostracism or worse.

But why do we draw the line there? There are other, less obvious parts of our “nature” that we might also want to rise above. It isn’t just the murder, meanness, and mayhem that we’d like to leave behind. We seem very concerned about protecting our cake and our sex partners, but rather lackadaisical about guarding against the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that owe their origin to the same early, less-evolved stages of human development. Most of us go blithely reeling into the primitive, error-prone logic of our Stone Age minds. We allow deductive mistakes, misperceptions, and supernatural beliefs—which are no less the remnants of an earlier stage of human evolution—to carry the day. We seem in no hurry to question or discard them.

Every Introductory Psychology textbook on the market today has a chapter on
perception
. Every one of those chapters contains material on
illusions
. We seem to delight in the ways our visual system can be misled by ambiguous sensory information. Our psychology textbooks bask in full-color illustrations of the “Moon Illusion,” the “Ponzo Illusion,” the “Muller-Lyer Illusion.”
¹
These reliable malfunctions of our mental hardware seem to cause us no embarrassment. In fact, we’re so entranced by them that we make our undergraduates memorize their names and properties.

But we are not equally proud of all our mental malfunctions. Why do we embrace visual distortions but become defensive about flaws in our ability to evaluate information and draw logical conclusions? The underlying dynamics are identical: we have inherited a mental system that thrives on snap judgments and shortcuts. These heuristics serve us in good stead most of the time; however, they can be misapplied or overextended. When that happens, we are handed faulty conclusions and, eventually, erroneous beliefs. The trick is not to depend upon heuristics reflexively, but rather to take the results they provide under review.

When is the last time you heard someone say, “Wow! Given the information I’ve just received, I’m tempted to drag some supernatural agent into play here. But that seems pretty extreme, so I’m going to have a closer, more careful look at what I’ve just seen or heard before jumping to any supernatural conclusions.”

Like most people, I have experienced the Moon Illusion (the size of the moon appears unnaturally large when it is close to the horizon). I recognize the faulty functioning of this mental module for what it is: the misfiring of something that works very well on most other occasions. I do not argue for the validity of the faulty perception I am experiencing. I do not embrace the company of other persons who also see the moon as impossibly large. I do not seek, at any cost, to find more evidence that the moon actually
is
much larger than we thought. In short, I let it go. I’m proud of my perceptual system. Most of the time, it works admirably well. But sometimes, the very qualities that make it such a streamlined analyzer of the world around me cause it to malfunction. I can live with that. I can even joke about it and teach young professionals in my field how and why such malfunctions occur. The malfunctions may be hardwired, but my acceptance of their results is not. I am not simply willing to accept each and every verdict produced by the ancient, hair-triggered heuristics in my head.

For this section I am borrowing the language of John Bradshaw and others whose work on “Inner Child” therapy,
²
which became a popular adjunct to psychotherapy in the 1990s and continues to offer a useful metaphor for understanding human behavior.

Assume there’s a Holy Trinity of sorts living inside you: an inner child, parent, and adult. Each represents an aspect of your experience and personality that is very much alive in your day-to-day functioning. People sometimes have problems when those three components get out of balance. An overactive inner parent, for example, can result in a repressed or rule-bound individual. An overactive inner child can result in impulsive, shortsighted decisions and a decided lack of maturity. The solution is not to purge the child or the parent altogether, but to heal them and get them back into balance with the whole system. Create a nurturing, understanding parent and a happy, expressive child. The wise adult should be there, too, overseeing the whole show and mediating if necessary.

When that wide-eyed, uncritical inner child of yours sees something amazing and comes running to the inner parent, holding the latest treasured illusion her mind has just produced, the parent can say, “That’s wonderful” to little Alice or little Billy or whatever name you have privately given to that excitable, easily impressed, delightfully naive part of yourself. You can let that kind, understanding inner parent who also lives there thank the child for the perceptual illusion he or she has brought “home” with such wide-eyed wonder. “Thank you for doing your job, Billy. Thank you for showing me this thing you’ve seen or heard. Now we’re going to let the adult have a good look at it and see what needs to be done.” And ultimately that adult, who is a lot more sophisticated and reality based than the child, will decide that no matter what kind of illusion the child has seen, the Earth really isn’t flat. That
isn’t
the face of Jesus on a hot cross bun. And your having shouted “I hate you” to your sister didn’t cause her to get run over by a car the next day. Those “prayer requests” you make are not being “answered” by a dead ancestor spirit or a personal God who is listening for your voice twenty-four hours a day, waiting to intervene in the fabric of your day-to-day life. A few words of supplication from you will not let you win the lottery or deliver a pony or bring your goldfish back from the dead.

These are all beliefs your inner child may embrace, but they are all wrong. You may cherish that innocent child who lives within you and, indeed, there is much there to cherish. But you do not want her to steer the ship, run the show, or make important decisions in your life.

Perhaps your kind, gentle inner parent can explain to her that it can’t possibly work that way. That seeing is not always believing. That there are no magic faces in pizzas or in the clouds. That there are billions of people on Earth, most of whom also want things. Some of those things, like the lottery ticket or the pony, are relatively trivial. Others are not. They involve the pain and suffering of loved ones. They involve life and death. These things, sad as they are, are still part of the natural order of our world. What’s the point of having natural laws if they can be broken at the whim of a prayer?

The inner adult should know that living on Earth is both a sad and joyous business. Good things, like sunsets and health and winning lottery tickets, do not require thanks to a supernatural being that you or someone has imagined into existence. The bad things, as sad and painful as they may be, are also part of life on this planet. Asking for exceptions to be made in your case is somewhat arrogant, especially when those requests involve the death and deterioration to which we are all subject. Those inevitabilities are there for the general good. They are not arbitrary. Sure, maybe you’d like to live forever, but as the old parental comeback goes, “What if
everybody
did?” Well, damn near everybody
does
want to. So where does that leave us? Why should God play favorites with you or your child or your puppy? Why not just abolish pain and suffering and death and be done with it? Then
nobody
would have to pray.

If this God you believe in is really as wise as people say he is, then, like your own inner adult, he should be able to sit down with your inner child and say, as kindly as possible,

What incentive is there to change? In baseball terms, will we ever stride to the plate without praying to deities or smearing chicken entrails on our bats? Will we take credit for that crucial base hit rather than attributing it to a higher power? Will we take ownership of our failures as well, rather than attributing them to curses or not enough prayer?

Why should we care about what people believe privately? Because those people vote. Because they band together into groups that wield social power. Because some of them fly airplanes into buildings. Others join armies and feel absolutely justified when they go out to kill opposing armies whose side God is presumably not on. If we are among the relatively few who see things less comfortingly but more realistically, we have got to do everything in our power to educate those around us. This is no easy task. We may be putting our livelihoods and our relationships at risk.

My “not with
this
brain” colleague is fond of pointing out that as a species we have a marvelous track record of repairing our environments and our bodies when necessary. Is it too hot? We invent air-conditioning. Is it too rainy? We put a retractable dome over it. Our eyes don’t provide adequate visual information? We invent corrective lenses or laser surgery. Auditory stimuli no longer getting through to you? We invent a hearing aid. Have trouble walking? We reach for a cane, a crutch, a wheelchair, or prosthetic surgery.

There seems no end to compensating for physical problems in our lives. But what of our mental shortfalls? The cliché goes, “If you don’t recognize it as a problem, there’s no hope of getting it fixed.” Tell the folks shaking their fists as they listen to tales of tsunami theology that they have an inaccurate worldview that is in dire need of repair. But don’t wait around for them to see the error of their ways. Tell the conferees at an alien abduction gathering that, in all likelihood, the events they are describing originate inside their heads rather than in a universe full of sexually predatory aliens. But, again, don’t hold out for much in the way of enlightenment.

Fixing problems
within
our minds is exactly where our minds let us down. Plainly, not all problems can be fixed, but there is a relatively small set of beliefs or mental activity that our society does recognize as needing a fix. As a culture, we agree about certain minimum standards for sanity. Most Western societies would agree that a schizophrenic experiencing florid hallucinations is not OK. That person needs to be isolated to keep him from doing harm to himself or others. Once isolated, there are certain drug regimes that seem to help. We have invented these chemical agents and are willing to make them available to afflicted individuals.

But just how many mental patterns have we identified as pathology? Physical defects are easy to spot and remedy; mental defects are trickier. On balance, most of us would rather have it that way. I would be more optimistic about our species’ chances for survival if pseudoscience, organized religion, and a host of other delusions were voluntarily taken off the table. Yet, I would have no hand in prohibiting them. I would much prefer it if my fellow humans opted out of their own accord, preferring to dust off their critical and rational faculties.

The point of mentioning mental illness is to show that on those rare occasions when we agree on what constitutes defective mental functioning, we can do something about it. The problem is that most mental deficits that we agree need fixing are only present in a minority of people. The kind of Caveman Logic we have been discussing in this book involves the majority of humans. By definition, this is going to be tough to remedy. If the world were paranoid schizophrenic and 5 percent of the population saw things in less-threatening terms, what is the likelihood that the problem could be identified and fixed? At present, we find ourselves in a situation in which at least 95 percent of people on the planet believe in some combination of ghosts, alien visitations, communication with the dead, astrology, and an all-powerful deity who screens and answers prayer requests. What incentive is there for this substantial majority to reconsider its beliefs?

In the main, these are good people. They are capable of compassion, decency, generosity, creativity, and hard work. But the list is longer than that and not all of the remaining qualities are admirable. Some of them may be downright dangerous. Not a day goes by when you can’t read a story in your local newspaper about those less-admirable qualities at work.

It is true that human nature is a package. Let us embrace what is best about it and work to our fullest to modify what it is not. At least let us be forthright about our deficits. If we choose not to live up to our name
Homo sapiens
, let us do so with our eyes open and for reasons that make sense.

Learning to avoid childlike magical thinking later in life is like learning a second language postpuberty. You can do it, but you’ll probably always have an accent. So it is with the mental mistakes and superstitious belief systems we have discussed in this book. Unless you were immunized against them as a child, you will have to work extra hard not to lapse into their effects. It will, in essence, be the mental equivalent of speaking with an accent.