Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published 2009 by Prometheus Books

 

 

Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World.
Copyright © 2009 by Hank Davis. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

 

 

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

 

Davis, Hank, 1941-

Caveman logic: the persistence of primitive thinking in a modern world /

Hank Davis. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-59102-721-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

eISBN : 97-8-161-59288-2

1. Reasoning. 2. Thought and thinking. 3. Stupidity. 4. Errors. I. Title

 

BC177.D385 2009

153.4 22

2009010307

 

 

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

M
y parents, Sarah and Al Davis, offered religion as part of my cultural identity. The details were a bit fuzzy and they were never shoved down my throat. My parents and extended family tolerated any manner of questions; in fact, they seemed to enjoy them. I grew up assuming that Jews, indeed people of all religions, loved to discuss and debate their faith. Obviously, I was wrong. My parents wanted and expected me to be a good boy. Being smart and being kind were the two biggest virtues in our home. Both were independent of religious training or pressure of any kind. I was never threatened with God’s vengeance or “going to hell.” I couldn’t even imagine such things. There were other, gentler incentives for “being a mensch.”

One way or another, I’ve been writing this book for over thirty years. That means I have countless students and colleagues to thank, whose influence was indelible. None more so than Harry Hurwitz, as fine a friend and mentor as one can have. I am also thankful to Martin Daly, who in the course of casual conversation informed (or perhaps reminded) me that I was an evolutionary psychologist. He didn’t have to tell me twice.

I have many other people to thank. Kataline Trudel spent the past several years reading drafts of this manuscript and discussing ideas with me. She made this project her own, back when she was still an undergraduate, and has remained with it to completion. I can’t imagine having done it without her. Holly Franklin became involved more recently and caught up quickly. She contributed encouragement as well as her newspaper background and copy-editing skills. Both were very much appreciated.

Friends and colleagues supplied me with a steady diet of articles about Caveman Logic in its many, sometimes bizarre forms. There seemed no limit to them. Fortunately, these friends were also willing to discuss the ideas they had provoked and critique what I had written about them. I thank Doug Reberg and Scott Parker for their insights. I also thank Kat Bergeron, Chris DiCarlo, Alan Wildeman, Loren Lind, and Colin Escott for their contributions. I am also grateful to Chris Scimmi, a fine artist, for creating the Caveman image that appears throughout this book.

There was also plenty of moral support for what I was doing. I thank Beth Scimmi and Susan Simmons for those simple “How’s the book coming?” or “What did you write about today?” queries. I never felt like I was working alone.

Many of us working in this field have been provoked, one way or another, by the scholarship of the late Steven Jay Gould. Gould and I were born in the same year and we both grew up in New York—he in Queens and I in the Bronx and Yonkers. We disagreed strongly about the virtues of evolutionary psychology, but we shared the broader conviction that comfort is a poor substitute for rationality in shaping one’s worldview. When Gould and I found ourselves sitting side by side at dinner after his commencement address at my university, we talked nonstop. Almost all of it was about baseball. Not baseball as a metaphor for life or natural selection, but baseball as a game we had both played as children and watched, analyzed, and written about as men.
¹

I think my parents would have been proud of this book. Maybe a little surprised, but proud. Mostly they would have been pleased that I was happy with the result and had thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating it.

D
iana Duyser saw the face of the Blessed Virgin staring up at her from a grilled cheese sandwich she had begun to eat. The Florida resident sold the remainder of her meal on
ebay.com
for $37,000. Guadalupe Lopez, the mother of actress Jennifer Lopez, walked into a casino in Atlantic City to play the slot machines. She eyed the huge prize, uttered a few heaven-bound words, then sat down to play. Before the dust cleared, she had won a jackpot of $2.4 million. In the press conference that followed, Ms. Lopez called her winnings “proof of the power of prayer.”

Few Americans would disagree with her. A June 2008 survey
¹
revealed that about a third of Americans believe they receive answers to “prayer requests” at least once a month. Eighty percent of respondents believe in angels and demons as active forces in their everyday lives. This goes beyond mere belief in God, which clocks in at about 92 percent according to the same poll. No one was doing formal surveys of superstitious belief or religiosity in medieval Europe, but it’s hard to imagine the results would have been a whole lot different.

Both Lopez’s statement and seeing the image of a religious icon on a piece of fried food are prime examples of what we will refer to as
Caveman Logic
. So is our tendency to utter a reflexive “Thank God!” when something good happens to us, or to blame vengeful deities or spirits when natural disasters occur (“New Orleans must have had it coming!”). Fear, irrationality, and superstition are rapidly moving to the mainstream of American culture. International surveys confirm that the United States has lost its preeminence in education and science. In their stead, we rival Middle Eastern and African nations in measures of religiosity.