Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (20 page)

Arguably, references to Edmond, Oklahoma, are out there, occurring at some stable but extremely low rate. Because I had no knowledge of the town, I was unlikely to pay attention or react to such occurrences and so their rate appeared—for all practical purposes—to be zero. Once I became aware of Edmond, I became sensitized to any mention of it. Actually, the term used by cognitive psychologists is
primed
. I was primed to hear or see instances of Edmond, Oklahoma. And so when the next one came down the pike several days later, it immediately caught my attention.

By transferring the account from the external world to the internal, I have stayed clear of magic or supernatural thinking and kept within the boundaries of scientific knowledge. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened in the external world; the change has been in me. And that, in turn, has shifted my attention to events around me. Can this approach to everyday life be taught? Even if we could learn to look
internally
as our first line of investigation (rather than looking for magic in the outside world), we would also have to be aware of a host of psychological processes such as “priming” that offer workable explanations of such “mysteries.” Admittedly, this is a less-exciting account, offering nothing in the way of magic to brighten one’s humdrum existence. But it does offer the satisfaction of understanding a somewhat baffling but widespread experience.

When I was about ten or eleven years old I had a conversation about God with my mother. My own family wasn’t particularly religious, although if you pushed them, both of my parents professed to believe in God. It wasn’t their beliefs that confused me; it was the stuff I heard on television and from my friends.

I began with, “I always thought God was abstract, like some spirit in the sky.” I’m sure I didn’t use the word “abstract,” but that’s exactly what I meant. Somehow, I had concluded that God was just a thing, an idea, something we couldn’t really grasp, and certainly not picture. You just took it on faith that he was “up there” and didn’t try to draw pictures of him. It was OK to pray to him, but you didn’t expect he’d become personally involved and stop a speeding bullet for you.

“How come other people talk about him like they
know
him?” I asked. “Like he’s one of the guys or some old rich uncle who has a lot of power in your family. So you kind of keep on his good side and ask for favors whenever you need them. That doesn’t sound very religious.”

That’s the confusion I brought to my mother’s attention when I was a child. I needed to know how to reconcile my spiritual /abstract view of God with this “aw shucks, rich uncle watching over everything you say and do like he was in the schoolyard with you” version. Even at age ten or eleven, I knew this other view felt better, but it really seemed pretty hokey to me and I was surprised that my friends—forget about adults on TV who were usually asking for money—but my
friends,
who doubted almost everything, could buy into this. These friends were the same guys who picked up on the Santa Claus scam before I did and laughed at me until I finally came over to the adult world and acknowledged it was just my parents leaving those presents. What happened to the idea of kids as born skeptics? Why were they being so gullible?

For one thing, once we kids found out the truth about Santa Claus, all the adults in our lives admitted it. None of them tried to keep the myth going. But somehow this was different. When my friends made respectful or belief-affirming statements about God, their parents nodded piously. Teachers seemed to approve of it, as did every priest, reverend, or rabbi I ever heard about. This story seemed to have adult support, although I couldn’t honestly see why.

My mother listened to this rant without interruption and said nothing at the end. So I summarized my confusion into a question: “Why do they all talk about God as if he were just another person whom we can picture and understand?”

My mother responded with eight well-chosen words that, as far as I am concerned today, contain more than a fair share of wisdom: “I guess they like him better that way.”

Even then, I must have known there was something very special about that answer. What is most important is what she did
not
say. She did not tell me, “Because that is the nature of God.” She never commented on that. Her reply focused exclusively on what people need God to be and the manner in which they construct him to be just what they need.

I now realize that people are not simply blank slates, constructing God as they see fit in order to bring comfort to their lives. If that were the case, there would be a lot more variability in how God was seen and described. Wherever you look, he remains essentially humanoid (often looking suspiciously like Charlton Heston), and his mind is usually quite knowable and predictable. That uniformity should tell you something. In fact, it is one of the core tools used by evolutionary psychology. When interpersonal variability shrinks to near zero, you can usually bet that the behavior (or trait) we’re examining has a strong evolutionary basis.

Such is the case with God. The cognitive architecture of our species sets some very real boundaries on the way in which we will see the world, our place in it, and the things we need to do to get along. We learn early on that we are not in control of things as much as we would like to be. There are many things out there, very important things, that we can simply not control. We learn this as children. Our parents control the resources (e.g., toys and candy) and events (it’s time to go to bed; it’s time to come inside for supper) in our lives. They have the power. When we want more candy or want to stay up just an hour longer, we try to manipulate the one(s) with the power. We beg, bargain, and beseech to reach our goals.

These are good skills to have and we are apt, even evolutionarily prepared, subjects. The rules are simple: 1) Determine the limits of your personal power. 2) Find out who has more power. 3) Establish a working relationship with them in order to maximize the outcomes. The utility of these mental rules becomes obvious when we realize that after growing up, we still don’t let go of the strategy. We still find, even as adults, that we don’t have all the power over important events that we wished we did. We learn that our parents—once the source of all power—just don’t cut it anymore. We can beg them all we want, but they can’t control our health, success in school or at work, or interpersonal relationships. Bad stuff still happens to us. And so a little kernel of Caveman Logic gets activated.
Somebody
must have the power around here, because it sure isn’t me.

It never occurs to us that maybe no power broker is out there. All we’ve ever known is that when we wanted something, there was someone who held the purse strings, someone we could implore and manipulate through entreaties. Why should things be any different when we become adults? And so rather than rethinking how the universe works (a sign of real maturity), we keep the same old circuitry humming and imagine some all-powerful, parentlike agent who must be running the store. And then we get ourselves into a seemingly personal relationship with him or her. We break out the three Bs: beg, bargain, and beseech. Of course, we call it prayer, but the ground rules and expectations are still the same. There is such comfort and familiarity in doing this that we have little incentive to question our actions. And even if we started to see through our own actions, there is enough consensual validity—like the person kneeling beside us in church—that we figure it must be right. This is a double whammy if there ever was one: not only does it feel “natural,” but the guy next to you is also doing it. It’s an official permission slip to carry on.

You combine evolutionary predispositions with nearly universal early life experience and you have a species predisposed for the beliefs and rituals of conventional religion. Even if social critics like Richard Dawkins had their way and organized religion could be swept away with the whoosh of a magic wand, there is every reason to believe that new rituals, supernatural beliefs, and group identities would emerge almost immediately to take their place. This does not bespeak the validity of religion in any theological sense. But it does tell us a lot about our species, how it is hardwired, and, to borrow my mother’s logic, “how we like our gods to be.”

If religion brought sunshine and light and let peace and brotherhood reign, its inevitability would be cause for celebration. But despite its lofty goals, organized religion seems to be a source of anything but peace and brotherhood. In the words of Blaise Pascal, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
¹⁹
Yes, it may bring a modicum of personal comfort, but the social and organizational behavior it repeatedly leads to is cause alone to question, if not abolish, the whole enterprise. The ever-widening spread of terrorist attacks, genocide, and general ill will between groups should be a deafening alarm bell for us all. Are these problems attributable to a few extreme individuals or to one “bad” religion? That seems unlikely. The problems are nothing new. The general “My god is better than your god” and “Convert or die” mantras are a fundamental part of organized religion. As David Berreby has argued in his book
Us and Them
,
²⁰
defining in-group/out-group membership is an essential part of human nature and will continue to fuel conflict and bloodshed between cultures and religions until humans decide to consciously transcend their Pleistocene predispositions.

Many people believe that
natural
means
good
. Natural food. Natural remedies. The cognitive and perceptual mistakes we inherited from our ancestors must also be good. Why should we question our gut-level impressions? Why should we have any doubts about those faces in the clouds? Why shouldn’t we view each coincidence as the universe “trying to tell us something”? As Timothy Leary told us back in the 1960s (in an acid-induced wave of insight), “Listen to your cells.” That message usually finds favor when it is rediscovered in some form by each succeeding generation. Listen to your signals from
The Gift of Fear
(1999), as suggested by best-selling self-help guru Gavin de Becker.

The message is clear. The further we get from our essential nature, from being “natural,” the worse we will be for it. This is also the essential teaching of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Natural is good. Its enemy is progress, civilization, technology, and science. The essential message of this book is probably its enemy as well. We propose that you second-guess some important aspects of what comes naturally. What passed for wisdom or common sense in the Pleistocene era is now dangerously out of date. At worst, it can get you into serious trouble. At best, it can leave you barking up the wrong tree.

When individuals aren’t too smart, species-wide predispositions will actually save a few lives.
You
don’t have to be so wise as long as your ancestors’ collective experience is encoded in your genes. Let’s face it: most of our caveman ancestors weren’t exactly Rhodes scholars. They were learning from day to day, scuffling to get by in a hostile and barely comprehensible world. Those are the times in which our cognitive shortcuts were welcome software. They got some of our not-very-sophisticated ancestors through their struggle.

Fast-forward 100,000 years and times have changed. But that “natural” circuitry remains locked firmly in place. While still not totally under our control or even our understanding, the world around us is no longer such a mystery. As recently as five hundred years ago, much Pleistocene-like ignorance was still rampant among even “civilized” nations in Europe and Asia. But that ignorance is receding. Solar eclipses, bacterial infections, thunder-storms, crop failures, and pregnancies are no longer mysteries to us. Admittedly, in some fast-disappearing corners of the world, such events remain mysterious. When that ignorance finally recedes, you can bet the superstition that came before it will not go quietly. There’ll be an ugly and contentious conflict between forces of entrenched superstition and those of enlightenment.

Caveman Logic has an interesting quality. Humans are not a species that finds it easy to say, “Hmmmm. That
is
a puzzle. We really don’t understand why that happens. We need to get our best scientists or thinkers on the case and try to make sense of it.” Nope. That tends not to be what many humans, even the modern versions, do. Rather, we are all too likely to come up with a supernatural explanation of the event or affliction in question. Then we circle the wagons to defend that account.

If all else fails, we invent a deity whose job it is to look after whatever it is that has us puzzled. Fertility? No worries. We have just the god for you. And one thing these gods always seem to have is a willingness to listen to our entreaties. There’s always someone out there to show the other members of the tribe how to appease or cajole the god who holds the reins. Beg, bargain, and beseech—the three Bs. Make sacrifices, pay homage, keep on his good side, and he will answer your prayers. Fertility will be yours. There are numerous examples of this, especially where fertility is concerned. One of the more engaging cases is Tagata Jinja, a 1,500-year-old shrine in Komaki, Japan.
²¹
Famous to travelers as the “penis shrine,” it is the centerpiece of a yearly fertility festival that involves unwrapping an eight-foot-long wooden penis. Each year this phallus draws prayerful offerings centered on conception and safe childbirth.

Forget sending in your scientists to garner some real understanding of reproduction. Why bother with science when we can invent deities and carve wooden idols? And even if scientists do seem on the brink of unraveling whatever mystery or ailment troubles us, there are those who would withhold public support, discredit the scientists, or propose a superstitious alternative that many people will be far more comforted by. Sadly, over the course of human history, including the present day, this seems how we transact our business as a species. Superstition and supernatural lore are tenacious. They do not simply give up the ghost (literally) when higher levels of understanding are available to replace them.