Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (17 page)

How do we immunize ourselves or others against the effects of this kind of thinking? Is it possible to change such thinking after a history of well-socialized cognitive distortions? I believe the answer is yes. Is it possible to raise one’s consciousness and wean ourselves off these examples of Caveman Logic? Many persons have moved beyond the racism or sexism of their earlier lives. In some cases it wasn’t easy and it certainly required a lot of self-monitoring and social support. But it is doable. Likewise, many of us learn a second language later in life, long after the sensitive period for language acquisition in our youths. Again, it takes dedicated work but the results more than justify the effort. It’s true that you’ll always speak with an accent (language learning later in life typically transfers the phonemes of our first language), but the spoken results are still intelligible and worthy of pride. So, too, are the results of weaning ourselves away from the cognitive distortions we’ve unquestionably used for much of our adult lives: we may have to stop ourselves consciously from slipping into the old default modes, but we can do it. It’s a bit like speaking with an accent. It isn’t perfect, but we’ve pushed ourselves beyond reflexive comfort levels in order to accomplish something.

I’ll offer two examples of clear thinking in the face of circumstances that might have easily triggered some socially supported superstitious distortions. The first is from my own life, so I am privy to the internal struggle it presented.

Several summers ago I was scheduled to present a talk at an international conference on cognition and religion.
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My talk was decidedly of the nondevout kind. I was going to be in a public forum making many of the arguments against superstition that I make in this book. A colleague jokingly said to me, “You better hope God doesn’t strike you dead on the podium.”

I was recovering from surgery at the time and as the date of the conference neared, it became obvious that I would not be recovered enough to travel. Neither I nor the conference organizers wanted me to cancel so we put our heads together about how we might make this work. Several days before the conference we hit upon a solution. The organizers would wire the hall for sound. I would call a special line and deliver my talk over the telephone that would be broadcast for all in the room to hear. A colleague of mine who was attending the conference would carry my PowerPoint slide show and run it while I gave my talk over the phone. Everything seemed to be under control.

The afternoon before the talk, the skies grew dark. It started to rain heavily. By 7 PM the trees around my house were being whipped by strong winds. Shortly after, an electrical storm moved in. Lightning began to strike. I watched a tree come down within a hundred feet of my back deck. It was getting rather scary out there. Finally, the storm let up enough for me to take a deep breath. I picked up the phone to call a friend and share my adventure. The line was dead, knocked out by lightning. I wasn’t going to be calling anybody.

And then the realization hit. Not only was I not calling my friend, but I wouldn’t be calling the conference tomorrow morning at this rate. I checked all the other phones in the house. They were also dead. It began to grow dark and I sat there considering my options. A thought crossed my mind, although I worked hard not to indulge it: Here I was, about to deliver an antitheological talk at a conference. I would be outlining how defects in our mental processing predisposed us to religious and other supernatural belief systems. No doubt I had some social support for championing such enlightened attitudes. But in a largely comical vision, I imagined a vengeful deity sitting somewhere watching all of this happen: “Who is this heathen who plans to get up on stage and bad-mouth me and my believers? What if this infidel manages to convince these mortals that they don’t really need me? That I am just a product of their defective minds? I’ll show him!”

And then I replayed the whole sequence. My original plans to travel to the conference had been cancelled due to illness. Perhaps that was the deity’s first attempt to block my evil intentions. When I decided to do an end run around that obstacle and give my talk over the phone, the vengeful deity turned up the ante a bit: “Use the phone, will you? Let me teach you a thing or two about puny human devices. Take this!” And with that the rains fell and the lightning struck. It was quite a show. And truth to tell, it did its work. I no longer had a phone. But would I let this little display of supernatural power stop me? Not on your life. I gathered up my papers and drove ten miles to a friend’s house. The weather was no better where he lived, but fortunately he had been spared the lightning and the damaged phone lines. After all, he wasn’t planning on using his telephone to criticize anybody’s theology.

I used his phone to notify the repair service, who promised to try to have someone fix the problem before the time of my talk, although they weren’t sure they could accommodate me. I borrowed my friend’s cell phone just in case. He observed wryly, “It sounds like someone doesn’t want you to give this talk.” I told him the thought had crossed my mind but that I was using those moments as a source of insight into the kind of thinking I was asking people to give up.

I got back into my car and headed for home. Almost immediately it started to rain again. This storm made the earlier one look like a summer shower. The rain was torrential and lightning began to strike visibly around my car. The road appeared to be deserted and I was tempted to pull on to the shoulder and let the worst of the storm pass. I kept driving, though. When I was within a mile of my house I noticed something on the road ahead of me. My headlights didn’t quite illuminate it so I stopped my car and waited for the next lightning strike. When it came, the entire sky lit up, and there, about twenty feet in front of my car, lay a baby raccoon. He had been hit by a car and was writhing in pain. I closed my eyes, wishing the image would go away. It didn’t. I got out of my car and walked through the pelting rain toward him. I stood over his body and looked down at him. We made eye contact. I looked carefully at him and realized the damage was too severe; there was nothing I could do to help him.

I’ve always been a sucker for baby animals and have taken in countless stray and wounded creatures, from birds and turtles to red squirrels. My lab once adopted a baby raccoon whose mother had been hit by a car. But this one was too far gone. I got back into my car. “Mess with me?” the vengeful deity screamed in my head. “I know you! I know where you live! What else would you like me to show you before you back down and cancel this sacrilegious talk?” I shook my head, fighting back tears of anger. This wasn’t easy, but I’d be damned if I caved into the very thoughts I was arguing against so passionately.

“Take your best shot,” I screamed to the skies. But I knew what lay ahead. I had to do something about the raccoon and it wouldn’t be easy. What I really wanted most to do was move him to the side of the road, out of the rain and further harm. Then I wanted to rush home and not think about him. By far, that was the easiest path, but I couldn’t talk myself into it. It seemed like all of a sudden I was being confronted with easy versus difficult choices. A part of my mind I had no trouble discovering, one that used to be second nature to me, wanted me to “apologize to God,” give up this atheistic foolishness, cancel my paper, and lead a decent God-fearing life like any normal person. Just how much peril did I need to put myself (and neighboring animals) into?

Maybe if I were somebody else or perhaps at another time in my life, I would have made the easy choice. Cancel the talk. Move the raccoon off the road, convincing myself I had “helped” while leaving him there to suffer and die. Drive home to my warm, dry house and pour myself a drink. It all seemed so easy.

I backed my car up and ran over the raccoon, terminating whatever remained of his life and his misery with two thousand pounds of metal. I went home and experienced the full force of emotional horror at what I had done. I had chosen what was toughest for me and best for him. The next day the telephone repair crew completed their work about thirty minutes before I was scheduled to begin, replacing wires seared by lightning. I gave my talk as scheduled and it went well. When I describe this episode to colleagues or students, I tell them that I believe I took the high road, but I know firsthand about the lure of the low road. When I ask people to make difficult choices around these issues, I feel I have come some small distance toward earning that right.

In contrast to my travails, let me tell you briefly about a friend and former professional colleague. He recently visited Prague to transact some business. He was scheduled to stay for about ten days, during which he had a schedule tightly packed with business meetings and events to attend. On his third day, he went for a stroll following a leisurely dinner in the old part of the city. The streets are made of cobblestones, some of which are not in the best of repair. With his mind on something else, my friend took what should have been a normal step and instead found himself flying through the air into a substantial pothole. When he recovered from the shock he found that his leg was injured severely enough to require medical attention. He could not walk. He was able to hail a taxi, which took him back to his residence. Somehow he made it up to the fourth floor and entered his apartment. For some reason he bolted the door before dragging himself to bed.

As he lay there, the pain grew worse. He began to scream for help but no one came. He managed to reach a phone and called an associate who immediately phoned for an ambulance. However, the ambulance crew could not reach him because the door was locked. By this time, he was unable to move enough to reach the door and open the bolt. His last memory was seeing the fire crew standing on a ladder outside his fourth-floor window, about to break their way in to rescue him. He spent the next ten days in considerable pain in a public hospital that left much to be desired by North American standards.

What did he make of all of this? Was he beset by “Why did this happen?” questions? Did he wonder whom he had angered to land in a spot such as this? He paused to listen to my question and announced simply, “No. Why would I do that?”

“Millions would,” I observed.

“I suppose so,” he replied, “but I don’t think like that.”

“What gives you the immunity to those kind of magic, superstitious thoughts?”

“That I can tell you easily,” he replied. “My mother. No one lived in our house and entertained that kind of thinking. It would have been viewed as barbaric. My mother was a totally enlightened person, straight out of Goethe. She believed man is a moral animal. The deity has no role in it.”

It may well be the case that, like language acquisition, magical thinking about causal agency has a sensitive period for acquisition. The software is there. Given the right inputs, the program will do its job. As in the case of language, those inputs can be pretty minimal or degraded and the end result will still be recognizable. On the other hand—and here the analogy to language breaks down—if the inputs are negative, that is, if the critically timed inputs work against magical thinking, they may provide immunity for the remainder of one’s lifetime. That seems to be what happened in my friend’s case.

There is no doubt that most people would prefer to live in a world where the important events in their lives are under their control, or at least under the control of an agent whom they can influence through social exchange (praying, deal making, cajoling). But I do not believe that individuals, because of this preference, consciously talk themselves into cognitive distortions or overactive agency detectors. That’s simply giving them too much credit.

Sure, most of us want a modicum of mastery over our lives, but in its absence we don’t go around creating more comforting alternate belief systems out of whole cloth. The simple truth is that these cognitive distortions—the faulty cause-effect detector, the overactive agency detector, the scramble to social exchange with supernatural agents—are far too similar. The neurosurgeon in New York, the cleaning lady in Kansas, the delivery boy in Denver—they all do the same type of things. Their religion, if they have one, may change a few of the nouns or rituals, but the basic program is identical. In fact, it is identical all over the world, in tribes and cultures that most of us can barely pronounce. What we are looking at here is undoubtedly the result of species-wide inherited brain architecture. It may not
feel
like that while it’s happening to you; I can guarantee you that from personal experience. But your mind is just doing its job, humming along on autopilot. If you don’t question it, it’s doubtful anyone else will.

The incidence of supernatural belief systems and uncritical thinking is disturbingly high among university undergraduates. For one thing, they are just kids, not fundamentally different from their peers who took jobs after high school and opted out of more formal education. They are still engulfed by all the idiocy and peer pressure of popular culture. It is a rare undergraduate who is not as attuned to so-called reality TV, corporate popular music, and diet fads as her less-educated counterpart. University students are no more or less likely to be critical of the astrology column in the morning newspaper. For another thing, they are rarely specifically taught to think critically, much less how to think critically. Few of their professors want to take on the icons of their student’s world or call their cherished beliefs into question. And so they are more likely to learn
facts
than to learn how to think critically and reach (or reject) their own conclusions.

When you face large undergraduate sections (e.g., five hundred to six hundred students) in introductory courses, you can pretty well assume that at least 5 percent of the class have been preindoctrinated into belief systems that are inimical to the methods and values you are trying to instill. Even if 4 of that 5 percent remain silent, that still leaves 1 percent—five or six students—to formally complain to someone within the university administration. The higher up the hierarchy you go, the more conservative the administrator tends to be. These people, regardless of their own political leanings, simply do not want trouble on their watch. A single complaint (even from a class of five hundred) that a professor has been culturally or “spiritually” insensitive can produce unwanted repercussions. Most institutions talk a good game about academic freedom but are surprisingly weakkneed in the trenches. The recent firing of Harvard president Lawrence Summers is a high-profile case in point.
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