Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (14 page)

Science is
not
an equal competitor in the marketplace of ideas. The
methods
of science may be the stuff of common sense, but the
conclusions
of science are often unappealing. They deal in distances or time periods that are too large to grasp. The distance between Earth and Saturn can be specified in miles, but it has little resonance to the average person who thinks in terms of distance to the nearest Wal-Mart. Our understanding of time is also constrained. The Keck telescope located atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano probes the universe and helped confirm its age at 13.7 billion years. If we think in terms of the human life span, what does 13.7 billion years mean? Can we grasp time moving so slowly and for so long? In a measured piece of reporting, the September 4, 2006, issue of
Time
magazine described the age of the universe as an “unimaginable” time period.

Sometimes an accurate understanding requires us to move beyond familiar time or distance scales. We are plainly not very good at doing it. In their place we are likely to grasp at accounts that almost always are rooted in frames of reference we can understand. I often find it difficult to explain the notion of geological time to my students. You can tell them Earth is 5 billion years old and they can write down the number. Whether or not they have any sense of how large a number it is, or how long a time natural selection has been at work, is another matter. Many textbooks in sciences like biology have taken to using analogies to make such time periods “graspable.”
³
For example, the period of human evolution (roughly 5 million years) is likened to a single calendar year, such that the domestication of plants and animals does not occur until dawn of December 31. The growth of cities begins at 3 PM on the last day of the year, and the Industrial Age occurs at approximately twenty minutes to midnight. Virtually everything that is familiar to us appears a second or two before the end of the last day.

Many of the unadulterated conclusions of science suggest processes that lie beyond our understanding and comfort. They offer little or perhaps nothing in the way of egocentric conclusions. We, our planet, our solar system, indeed our galaxy are infinitesimally small and—do we dare use the word—inconsequential. How do you sell those conclusions to a species with a remarkably restricted sense of itself or the universe? With a powerful resistance to perceiving its own place in “the big picture”? Such tunnel vision may have served our ancestors well, but it predisposes us
not
to understand just who we are or where we came from. True, there may be more cultural resistance to these findings on a farm in Kansas or a truck stop in Mississippi, but the problem is found in urban centers as well. Caveman Logic is not that easy to caricature. The real problem is species-wide. The same cognitive architecture that makes it difficult to shake our ignorance in the “red states” is present even in the skulls of educated liberals who worry about growing theocracy in America.

Spirituality
is a loaded word. The dictionary defines it several ways. The adjective
spiritual
can mean “of or relating to sacred matters” or “ecclesiastical rather than lay.” That’s probably a little too close to organized religion to please many people who embrace spirituality. The key definition appears further down the list: “of or relating to ghosts or other supernatural beings.” Think about that one.

It’s a safe bet that most people who consider themselves “spiritual” would not want to be associated with
spiritualism
, which is “the belief that departed spirits hold intercourse with the living, usually through rapping or trances.” Rapping in this context presumably has less to do with Snoop Dogg, Puff Daddy, or Tupac than it does banging on tables.

Spirituality
is on the brink of becoming a sacred cow, along with apple pie and motherhood. “He’s a very spiritual person” is not a way to tell us, “The jerk believes in ghosts.” It is more likely to mean, “He’s a beautiful person, attuned to higher, more blissful realities. He’s good and decent beyond the rest of us mere mortals, who just seek good food, good sex, and good music in our lives.”

If spirituality means a better, more devoted friend or lover or parent or child, then count me in. Someone more likely to accept an outsiders for who they are, without needing to judge, convert, or condemn? I’m all for it. But I’m not sure that’s what it means at all. According to many, Osama bin Laden is viewed as being a highly spiritual man. So is George W. Bush. Holy wars are typically fought by spiritual men. Spiritual isn’t always good.

There is another reading of “spiritual” that is quite negative and actually more central to the point of this book. Spiritual people may be those who are less likely to embrace physical reality and rational logic. By becoming more spiritual, they may simply be defaulting into a world that emphasizes ghosts, demons, angels, and ancestor worship. It would be a pity for a twenty-first-century Western nation to return itself to the Dark Ages in a misguided quest for “spirituality.”

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) can rightly be considered the father of the term
synchronicity
. Even by the rather loose standards of his day (Jung was a contemporary of Freud), Jung could arguably be classified as a flake. To be sure, his writings set the stage for and gave legitimacy to a whole new generation of magical thinkers who see patterns where there is only noise, and who are only too glad to wring “meaning” from the blips in the flow of random events. It is possible that even Jung would have raised an eyebrow or two over the sappy and uncritical way his work has been co-opted by the New Age spirituality movement. That’s a lot of parental responsibility to shoulder.

Jung observed, rightly so, that life was full of coincidences. Some of them, like your flipping a switch and a light coming on, are causally related. But others, he argued, are still “meaningful,” even though they are not formally linked by causality. This is where the concept of synchronicity comes into play.
⁴
Jung defined it as “a psychically conditioned relativity of space and time.” Admittedly, that definition stops a few meters short of clarity, although Jung argued that synchronicity was equal to causality as an explanatory principle. What this tells you, if nothing else, is that Jung, and like-minded individuals, think they are living in a very different universe than the one most of us inhabit.

The idea of the “importance” of synchronicity is where most people bring their least critical, most flawed thinking into play. Books have been written—although apparently not enough of them—to dispel this kind of delusional thinking. The temptation to “see something” (be it a pattern or a connection) is just too great. It benefits from how our minds are predisposed, as well as from a burgeoning amount of social support, of which Jung is just the tip of the iceberg.

Let’s look at one of Jung’s own examples of what I like to think of as “Shirley MacLaine thinking.” This former actress-turned-philosopher could have been the poster girl for
not
changing careers midlife, especially when the change involves moving into a domain where one has minimal expertise. In general, rock stars do not become nuclear physicists for a good reason. But Shirley MacLaine decided to become a guru of the New Age movement, specializing in past lives. She wrote books like
Out on a Limb
(1994), toured, and gave interviews in support of her beliefs, which were grounded in logical errors so egregious you had to suspend all common sense. Undoubtedly, audiences were drawn to her because of her celebrity and, quite likely, because of her views on reincarnation, which were shared by many. It was the other part—the gathering and evaluating of evidence—where MacLaine and her followers came up short. Had she brought the same wretchedly inadequate standards to her work as an actress, she would have been laughed or booed off the stage. Which all goes to suggest that most people are far more critical of performers than gurus.

But back to Jung, who in many ways anticipated Shirley MacLaine-style thinking by fifty years. Jung writes all about his recurrent encounters with fish over the course of a day or two: dead ones on his dinner plate or lying on the beach, live ones in the sea, linguistic ones in sentences spoken by those around him (or by Jung himself). It’s quite an effective narrative and almost makes you wonder just what is going on with this embarrassment of fishes. Treasure the moment: you are experiencing a taste of your own Caveman Logic. But does this string of coincidences deserve serious consideration as an explanation of how the universe works? What specifically is wrong with Jung’s growing mound of evidence? Largely, it suffers from what logicians call “multiple endpoints.” Multiple endpoints are a seductive and nasty little trick used by all kinds of debaters to “prove” their points to an uncritical audience. They are a staple of religious tracts, sermons, and unsound polemics of all kinds. In a nutshell, they work because there is an almost endless supply of evidence that will serve as “proof” of whatever is in question. The question is usually stated in what sounds like highly specific terms—the sign of a good, rigorous, scientific test. It isn’t until we begin the “test” that it becomes clear that just about anything qualifies as “proof.”

The believer in despair turns to God and says, “Please, God, if you
really
are out there, send me a sign.” It sounds like a fair test, until you realize that just about
anything
can qualify as a “sign” and that there really is no possible outcome that would qualify as negative evidence. Imagine a believer who has lost faith, reporting to his friends, “I asked God for a sign so I might clarify my belief and He sent me none. So I took this as evidence that He doesn’t exist and I stopped believing in him.” No, you haven’t heard that and you aren’t likely to.

Shirley MacLaine started with a premise—that humans had past lives—and went looking for evidence to support it. What did not support her belief, she simply ignored. That may be human nature, but it is not science. Nor is it logical. Well-known physicist and commentator Robert Park uses the term “Texas sharpshooter fallacy” to describe it. As statisticians describe it, it is like firing all your bullets into the side of a barn and then walking over to the bullet-riddled wall and drawing a bull’s eye where it looks best. That little trick is no more evidence of sharpshooting than Shirley’s claims were scientific proof of previous lives.

Jung started with a premise about the recurrent presence of fish and found evidence galore, confirming his views about synchronicity. Using multiple endpoints, I can continue, more than half a century later, on Jung’s magical foray into the cosmic world of fish, and what will I have learned? As I sit here writing this book, I gaze out at my backyard. Beneath my indoor perch (pun intended) is the yard that contains a pond. In it are seven goldfish! Earlier today, I took a break and watched some television. As I surfed through various channels, I passed reruns of the classic TV show
Barney Miller
. You might recall that one of the central characters was a cop named “Fish,” who was on screen as I watched. One of the commercials that followed was for the restaurant chain Red Lobster, whose ad depicted several appealing-looking seafood dishes. I came downstairs and made myself a tuna fish sandwich before getting back to work. Then a colleague from Montreal called from his office at McGill University. (Get it? Mc
Gill
?) Last night I watched an old 1940s gangster movie and one of the characters, who wanted to borrow five dollars, asked the other one for a
fin
.

Where does it end? Does this seem far-fetched (or
fishy
) to you? Why is my example any sillier than what Jung or any of a dozen New Age gurus teach their wide-eyed followers? Here is another example, drawn entirely from archival sources. Nothing is made up or exaggerated.

In the late 1970s, I published two papers
⁵
on how a person’s name often appeared ironic in light of what he or she did for a living. My first paper dealt exclusively with animal behaviorists. I surveyed about a hundred scientists who worked with various species and who, themselves, had surnames like Tiger, Fox, Wolf, Herring, Trout, Fish, and Bird. After the paper was published, I received hundreds of responses from readers who had more examples to offer. Some pushed the boundaries of my original search even further. For example, there was a paper on abnormal behavior in dogs by Freak, a paper on vision in frogs by Gaze, a book called
The Life of Insects
by Wigglesworth, and a paper on historical attempts to prevent masturbation in stallions by Mountjoy. And once I went beyond the realm of animal behavior, the floodgates opened up. I found a paper on vasectomies by Gillette. My favorite was a paper on urinary tract infections by Smellie and Leakey. The point is, had my quest been—by any stretch of the imagination—serious or
spiritual
, there is no telling what would have been made of my findings. Thankfully, it was all in fun. But even so, the whole thing got taken way too seriously. My work
seemed
to offer a test of a specific premise—that there is some correspondence between one’s name and one’s work. But because of multiple endpoints (almost anything we found fit the bill) and no serious attempt to look for disconfirming evidence, the paper held no value whatsoever other than as entertainment. Nevertheless, it continues to be cited. In fact, shortly after the second paper was published, I received a call from the
National Enquirer
. The reporter said they were considering doing a feature on it, but only if I believed it
meant
something and could fuel that viewpoint. Humor (which had been my only goal) was not enough.

Now, you might ask, how would Jung have handled this same issue? In his book
Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
,
⁶
he sorts through exactly the same kind of evidence I did and reaches a somewhat different conclusion. Commenting on Wilhelm Stekel’s book
The Compulsion of the Name
, Jung cites the following examples of what for him was compelling evidence of the universe telling us something: Herr Gross (which Jung translates as Mr. Grand) has delusions of grandeur, Herr Kleiner (translated as Mr. Small) has an inferiority complex, the Altmann (old man) sisters each marry men twenty years older than themselves, Herr Feist (Mr. Stout) works as the food minister, Herr Rosstauscher (Mr. Horsetrader) is a lawyer, Herr Kalberer (Mr. Calver) is an obstetrician, Herr Freud (Mr. Joy) champions the pleasure principle, and Herr Jung (Mr. Young) champions rebirth. Jung then asks, “Are these whimsicalities of chance, or are they meaningful coincidences?”