Because I’m a supporter of George Hrab’s Geologic podcast, I receive his weekly newsletter, and the one from July 5th [yes, this sat in editing limbo for a bit] contained an article on superstition that he’d written for the James Randi Educational Foundation back in 2008. I’d done a post myself on superstition two years after that, without having seen his, so I dug it out to compare it as I read his own. Mine was much shorter and more ‘clinical’ (you know, like how that sketchy tattoo parlor is ‘clinical’) while his delved more into the social and empirical implications – I’d link to it here but I don’t believe it exists online anymore. Anyway, what I’m going to cover now is an extension of his own thoughts, so credit to George Hrab for most of this.
Basic premise of my post: superstition seems (to me) to stem from three things primarily, which are searching for meaning and cause, finding patterns, and confirmation bias. As for the first, while we endeavor to find the cause of any particular event or phenomenon, we too often view this through the filter of our human social instincts where we reward good behavior and punish bad, to keep the tribe strong, but then mistake events that occur to also follow this reward and punishment system, even when there’s no reason to believe this. When something bad happens to us, we’re too inclined to think that we deserved it somehow. The second part, pattern recognition, is simply our ability to seek patterns from what we experience, which was likely a decent survival trait and certainly assisted in our quest for knowledge – yet we can find patterns too often when no such pattern actually exists. And that brings us to confirmation bias, the practice of noticing the events or circumstances that support our beliefs and ignoring or downplaying those that fail to. Together, this gives us the ability to wonder about things like droughts, then consider that they might be related to when the peppers were harvested, and then start to believe that harvesting peppers leads to a drought (reinforced by not harvesting the peppers and finding that it rained soon afterward – even when it was bound to rain at some point anyway.) In short, various human traits combine to support superstition. Something that I failed to note in that post: assisting with this is the tendency to seek agency, to believe that events or occurrences are the product of intention rather than simply happenstance, which does a lot for supporting gods and all that. This last one isn’t always an aspect of superstition, but it appears a lot all the same.
Hrab goes into the advances of science and human achievement when superstition was ignored in favor of actual testing and experiments and consideration of other causes or answers, and this is the part that I’m highlighting now. It’s easy to believe that ancient cultures, when viewing the rare occurrences of eclipses, assigned them portentous or supernatural causes, and there are some limited accounts of this, though written records of older cultures are too sparse to give an accurate idea of how widespread such beliefs might have been. And while total solar eclipses tend to be few and far between, not usually able to be witnessed multiple times in anyone’s life span, partial solar and lunar eclipses are another matter. Someone, sometime, recognized that these occurred only at the times of new or full moons and began piecing together the patterns, ignoring whatever cultural beliefs existed about the special or supernatural causes and starting to find that they were only due to orbital mechanics. The Antikythera mechanism indicates that this occurred, at least in Greece, 2,200 or more years ago, since the patterns and timing were understood well enough to build a geared device that would predict future eclipses, as well as other celestial events.
Medicine is another excellent example. The various illnesses that befell humankind were given untold thousands of explanations and supposed treatments, some vaguely on the right track, some so far afield that we consider our ancestors to have been irretrievably stupid, but gradually, people began to notice the patterns, and to recognize the indicators and counter-indicators. Germ theory, easily the greatest advancement of medicine in our history, promoted the idea of organisms far too small to see as the primary culprit in numerous diseases, and while we can understand how difficult it was to get this idea across to enough people, the concept was obviously quite sound.
We might see such occurrences as evidence of past ignorance, a time when the populace was much more superstitious than today, but we need to recognize that a lot of such advancements occurred quite recently, and it wasn’t very long ago at all that exorcisms were practiced for erratic behavior; indeed, they still are.
The point here, however, is that a very large percentage of the advancements that we’ve made, as a culture, as a species, originated from people that didn’t accept the pat answer, that didn’t believe in the idea that ‘if enough others believe it, it must be true,’ that dared to question not just common knowledge, not just authority, but even their own senses. The ones that said, “Shouldn’t we expect B to happen if A is really true?” The ones that required a demonstrable and measurable body of evidence before they accepted an answer. They had to deny that tendency towards superstition, the ‘gut feelings’ and the internal prods towards accepting certain answers (or even just relying on other people as a guide,) to actually make progress.
It’s also easy to take the wrong message from this. The key isn’t, “Buck the trends and rebel against common knowledge,” which can be done for literally anything (as countless people do,) but instead, “Build the supporting data and the probabilities until the conclusion is valid.” And there’s even a caveat to that, because that pattern-seeking aspect, as well as the ego in believing we’re right, can cause us to ignore all of the evidence that fails to support this, which is confirmation bias, a huge favorite of those that embrace psychic powers and alternative medicine. Doubt is a key ingredient, especially self-doubt, the recognition of how many ways we can be wrong.
And there’s another aspect that doesn’t receive as much attention yet has held true throughout the majority of advancements, and that is, if we need to propose significant complication or properties that we have not actually measured or observed, it’s probably wrong – at the very least, such complications should be well-supported by evidence and data. Oh, the stars can predict what our personalities will be? How do they possibly do that? What physical law applies here, and in what manner? The number 666 is connected to satan? In what way, and why? Isn’t this a distinct giveaway that satan should have abandoned by now? Even small corporations will ditch their negative branding…
This is why critical thinking is such an important aspect of education, too often neglected in favor of simply teaching facts. The idea isn’t to memorize what we’ve found before, but to know how to find (and test, and confirm or deny) new results, new ideas, new discoveries. The scientific method, overall, places a lot of emphasis on this, though it’s not as widely adopted as it should be, but it should never be up to just college graduates; we should all be practicing this as much as possible. Remember that, at one time, there were no colleges, no such thing as ‘higher education.’ It took specific people to encourage and emphasize this departure from our internal biases to even promote the idea of an advanced and comprehensive education.
Those are the people that we need to recognize and emulate – or more specifically (since hero worship is missing the point,) the mindset and habits that they possessed. As interesting as it might be to believe in ghosts, as satisfying as it might be to think that shaking water gives it special properties, as self-affirming as it is to hear that Capricorns are supposed to like music and we really do, 99.999% of the time, the actual advancements and improvements in our culture and health and technology came from relying on more than feelings and gut instincts and “there’s something more mystical at work here, I know it.” We can’t look at any point in human history and say something like, “Boy, it’s a good thing we could tell how honest someone was by how far apart their eyes were – that certainly saved a lot of lives!” Let’s give credit and respect where it’s actually due, and not fall prey to the simpler human traits.