Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (15 page)

Again, the idea of multiple endpoints looms large here. It appears that a singular piece of evidence has, against all odds, managed to come forth to confirm a meaningful coincidence. A closer look, which disciples of synchronicity no doubt prefer you do not take, suggests otherwise. If Mr. Grand had been six feet tall, that would also have confirmed Jung’s point. If Mr. Small had not had an inferiority complex but had been small in stature or generosity, Jung would have again claimed victory. If the Altmann sisters were eighteen when they married, were their thirty-eight-year-old husbands really “old men”? Mr. Stout, the food minister, seems a roundabout way to confirmation. The case would have been stronger had he been overweight, but then how many middle-aged German men of his vintage were not? If that number approaches 50 percent, the notion of a meaningful coincidence pales. Concerning Mr. Horsetrader, the case might have been a bit more striking if he made his living buying and selling equines. The coincidence between his name and his work as a lawyer seems a bit contrived. Similarly, chalking up as another “hit” the fact that Mr. Calver was an obstetrician takes a backseat to the possibility that he might have been a veterinarian. As to Drs. Freud and Jung, contrivance again seems the order of the day. Had Freud just been a happy-go-lucky fellow and Jung a pediatrician, I would be a lot more impressed. But none of these examples holds a candle to my own discoveries of Smellie and Leakey or Gillette. Since those were my own citations, my interpretation must count for something. So here it is: I don’t think they matter a hill of beans. I also learned in my research that the head of the Canadian Dairy Association was named Cheeseman. Undoubtedly worth a chuckle but, with all due apologies to Professor Jung, it’s useless information. Until someone is willing to enumerate all the dairymen named Smith and Jones, we don’t really have a handle on the situation. And how about all the Mr. Smalls and Mr. Grands who are of average height and weight? They are of interest to nobody and don’t go into Jung’s equation, although they should. This is a really important point, and we will return to it in some detail. For now, consider that if such a study were made and the results documented tens of millions of individuals whose names bore no logical connection to their employment or identity, what would we have learned? What constitutes negative evidence here, Dr. Jung? In retrospect, it’s too bad the reporter from the
National Enquirer
couldn’t have talked to Jung himself. I’m sure they would have made each other’s day.

The odd thing about all of this is that Jung was by no means an ignorant man. In fact, he seems quite aware of the use of statistics and their role in discounting chance as an account of seemingly odd occurrences. Unfortunately, his passing acquaintance with statistics did not immunize him well enough. For one thing, Jung seems totally unaware of the idea of multiple endpoints, accepting virtually
anything
in support of his hypothesis (a true role model for Shirley MacLaine). His is a flexible standard of evidence that cannot fail its master. Moreover, although Jung seems passingly aware of the notion of control groups as points of comparison, he seems to stop short of selecting the most relevant ones. In addition, Jung has a strange view of chance. To most people (and almost all scientists), chance refers to events that happen randomly, with no design or purpose. It offers a neutral explanation that’s just about as far from the
Twilight Zone
as you can get. Jung has a different view. He champions a universe in which chance itself is fraught with meaning. It is trying to tell us something. Remember, all things happen for a “reason,” and if we are too limited to see the connections in the physical world around us, the shortcoming lies in us, not in the universe. You can see why Jung is a hero to purveyors of Caveman Logic.

Jung saw many things. Some of them—like dinner tables and puppy dogs and attractive women—were perfectly accurate perceptions and allowed him to function in a successful and socially acceptable manner. But Jung also saw other things that, for all intents and purposes, weren’t there. He saw patterns of events, odd clusters of circumstances that he wrongly interpreted as exceptional. Jung never questioned these perceptions, any more than he questioned his perceptions of furniture, dogs, and women. He assumed these things were out there in the world and went about acting on the information flashing across his brain. Worse yet, he wrote and lectured about his perceptions, infecting other minds in the process.

It never occurred to him that the odd coincidences or patterns or clusters he “saw” originated in his own mind rather than in the outside world. He trusted his perceptions (and his conclusions about them) implicitly and went about trying to explain them. Because he was an educated man, he drew upon sources as varied as sixteenth-century philosophy and the I Ching. In the long run, he needn’t have bothered. There was essentially nothing to explain. All of those bizarre “coincidences” involving scarab beetles flying into rooms and fish of various types crossing his path were actually products of his own imagination. He would have been better advised to spend his time and considerable intellect studying the misguided workings of his own mind rather than supposedly magical forces in the outside world. But, for all his education, Jung’s mind did not work any differently from the minds of most humans on the planet. Thus, when he began to describe those mysterious patterns he had observed, people around him shook their heads and said, “I’ve seen things like that too. I always wondered why they happened.” And so the uncritical contagion began.

Here is a Jungian-type tale I sometimes tell my students to underscore how attractive synchronicity can be. In fact, this story is conflated from two famous case histories reported by Jung—one involving a scarab beetle and one involving a bird. The species itself doesn’t really matter. For the record, both birds and beetles are well represented in the Jungian world of archetypes, which lies beyond the realm of this book.

Here’s the story: A therapist was faced with a chronic depressive patient who seemed resistant to any sort of therapy. Since this tale takes place nearly eighty years ago, the therapist was working in an age without the easy benefits of Prozac, Zoloft, and other commonly prescribed antidepressant drugs. Nothing in the therapist’s skills seemed to work on his patient. The problem came to a head on a particularly sunny spring day. The grass was green and the breezes were warm but, despite the splendors of nature, the patient sat morosely on his bed, unable or unwilling to respond to anything.

Realizing he was all but out of therapeutic ammunition, the therapist announced that he could do no more. “What would it take to cure you?” he asked in frustration.

“If only there were some kind of sign,” the patient replied.

At this point, a dove flew into the open window. The patient and the therapist were both shocked. Just the sign they both needed. The patient was cured and the therapist knew he had an anecdote, if not a publication, in his future.

Neither the patient nor the therapist was particularly religious, but both knew when the universe was trying to send them a message. Was it possible that this had just “happened,” that is, that there was no deeper “meaning”? To the patient, who had wallowed in despair and misery for years, the sudden and dramatic event seemed too large not to be the sign for which he was looking. To the therapist, the events happened when all hope seemed lost. Neither was sure whether it was the dove, itself a creature rich in symbolism, or the coincidental timing of the event.

Although the tale has a happy ending, the actual sequence of events was not quite a Hollywood movie. The patient was not immediately healed, although he did eventually rejoin the world as a functioning individual. The episode with the dove jolted him from his depression so that he was able to respond to treatment, although he did experience periodic bouts of depression later in life.

What did it all mean? The hopeless patient asking for a sign, the flight of the bird, the shock of both patient and therapist, and the eventual cure? To begin with, some might argue that the need to “explain” these events may itself be a sign of our faulty mental apparatus. What is there to explain? Things happen, and sometimes their couplings or coincidences are intriguing. Nothing more. Still, it is a rare person who doesn’t find such tales memorable, even inspirational. The question is, do they really suggest anything deeper than coincidence? If you can feel your mental circuits starting to twitch, try to rein them in for a moment while you look at things in a less Jungian way. Consider that birds have been flying into houses (and cars and airplanes) as long as there have been houses (and cars and airplanes). Their appearance is rarely cause for spiritual awakening. Why now? Because the patient asked for “a sign” just before the appearance? That seems a pretty slim basis for raising this episode to the level of myth. I live in the country and field mice often find their way into my house, especially during the fall when the weather starts to turn cold. I happen to like small animals, although I don’t want my house overrun by them. Imagine that I were having a particularly bad day keeping up with the property, and I wondered whether to move into town. Perhaps I asked for a “sign”—from whom, I am not sure—that would help me make my decision.

This seems a pretty open-ended business. Just what constitutes a sign? Are certain types of events sign-worthy and others not? If so, what is the criterion? Is it their nature—say, natural versus man-made objects? For example, a bird flying through the window is a sign, but a baseball is not? Is it the relative probability of the event? Perhaps “rare” is good but “commonplace” is not. On second thought, maybe we should steer clear of probability since most people are very poor estimators of it. But, like it or not, probability counts.

Our poor estimates of probabilities have a lot to do with our belief systems. Things that
appear
to be singular and salient events may often, on closer examination, turn out to be quite ordinary or regularly occurring. But by then, of course, we may have already processed them as unique and already assigned meaning to their occurrence. And once we begin to share our reports with other malfunctioning and uncritical minds, we have derived such social support and attention that it is even less likely we will invest energy in correcting our beliefs.

Let’s go back to the bird who flew into the patient’s room. Just how rare was that event? To begin with, many people spend a lot of time on the lookout for signs in order to lead their lives. Whether checking the astrology column in their morning newspaper or watching the skies, their “locus of control,” to borrow some psychological jargon, is largely external. So the stage for belief has already been set by someone looking or asking for a sign in order to move on. As to what happened next, this was hardly the first bird that flew into an open window, even at this elite private sanitarium. Consider your own experience with birds and windows. Sometimes the windows are open and the bird ends up fluttering about the room until it is dispatched by an exasperated homeowner or prompted to fly back out the way it came in. In fact, such events are apparently common enough for there to be superstitions in numerous cultures about what it means (i.e., good or bad luck) to have a bird in your house. Living in the woods, I can vouch for that. Unfortunately, windows aren’t always open when birds fly into them. These episodes usually don’t end so well for the bird.

Is it rare that a bird in a house coincides with the cure of a persistent ailment, as in the case of our patient? Perhaps we only know of this episode because it happened to be a warm day. Would the therapist have reported the events if the weather had been chilly, the window had been closed, or the same plea for a sign had been followed by a bird crashing into a window and fluttering three stories to his doom? What if the patient, witnessing all this, had lapsed into a suicidal depression, claiming, “See? Everything is hopeless and ends in death.” Somehow, it seems unlikely that these alternative events would have been the stuff of great anecdotes, regardless of how frequently they occurred.

The point is that we are apt to lose sight of the fact that most bird-entry cases go unreported, which is why we don’t know how rare they are. This is no small issue since rarity is an implicit part of the “meaningfulness” processor, whether we like it or not. If local birds fly through or into windows a thousand or more times a day, which they very well might, the synchronicity in the therapist’s story would be far less compelling. After all, do airline pilots fall to their knees and wonder about deeper meaning every time a seagull is sucked into one of their jet engines?

Carl Gustav Jung simply could not accept the possibility that anything, and certainly not a coincidence, was meaningless. To attribute coincident events to “chance” was to diminish their cosmic importance. He
wanted
them to have meaning. Jung argued that if we are foolish enough to dismiss the bird in the window or the fact that Mr. Gross was a fat man, that would put us in conflict with J. B. Rhine’s ESP discoveries.
⁷
Jung goes on to detail these discoveries with obvious admiration and relief, since they offer considerable support for the supernatural universe he inhabits. The great majority of psychologists and psychiatrists, he laments, seems to be completely ignorant of all the carefully verified case studies on synchronicity. Jung goes on to argue that both ESP and psychokinesis have both been verified by solid empirical research.

With the wisdom of half a century’s hindsight, we can caution Jungians everywhere that to build one’s dream house on a foundation of Rhine’s data is to invite architectural disaster. When Jung rhapsodizes, “There are very few experiments in the field of the natural sciences whose results come anywhere near so high a degree of certainty,” he has shed any semblance of credibility. He might as well be arguing for the solid evidence behind phrenology or a flat Earth. Jung argues that continued skepticism about ESP is really without a shred of justification. The landmark studies to which he specifically refers include work by Soal and Goldney,
⁸
which have long ago been disproved and in some cases were the result of outright cheating. In short, rather than serve as the cornerstone for Jung or his doctrine of synchronicity, these ESP experiments are, in fact, a source of considerable embarrassment to the field of psychic research, which itself is no source of pride to the broader field of psychology. We can forgive Jung for not knowing better. But those who today build their empires on Jung’s work cannot be so easily excused.