Work in Progress: Superstition is pervasive and foundational to the human mind…
Friday 16 December 2022
I suppose everyone has their own personal reference points for understanding the world and their place within it. I have my consistent reference points that I have brought up time and again in these newsletters. A cognitive reference point is like an anchor for our thoughts — indeed, there is a cognitive bias known as anchoring. Insofar as anchoring is a cognitive bias it is limiting, but insofar as anchoring allows us to orientate ourselves and so gives us a sense of meaning by which we interpret the world, it is both our rock and our guidestar, and as a rock and a guidestar it is the basis for our action and therefore the condition of the possibility of acting effectively. And insofar as acting effectively is a realization of freedom, so far from being limiting, anchoring can be liberating.
I have spent some time reading about medieval history, and I have seen more medieval art that most have (when I travel to Europe I make a point of seeking out as much medieval art as I can find), thus I often bring up medieval European civilization as a point of reference. Medieval civilization has the advantage of being relatively well-bounded in both space and time, so it gives us a discrete civilizational entity, as it were, that we can take as a whole and compare and contrast with other civilizations. I also like to use Byzantine civilization as a reference point, as it, too, is reasonably well defined in time and space, and has the additional virtue of being distinct from medieval European civilization but more than tangential to it. The two are twins, in a sense, each a contrast to the other, and each utterly different from our own contemporary civilization.
In particular, the strangely involuted character of medieval intellectual life has always been a fascination for me. While medieval civilization was expansionary during the Crusades, and seamlessly transitioned to the Age of Discovery of early modern Europe, intellectually the Middle Ages were inward-focused. In the most general terms (i.e., the terms largely avoided by contemporary historians), one could say that medieval Europe had to rebuild its social ideals on new and indigenous foundations after the catastrophic failure of Roman civilization and indeed the entire project of ancient civilization — if ancient civilization could be said to have a project. I would be willing to argue that classical antiquity had a kind of unity that made it a discrete project among human endeavors, and when the ancient world came to an end, there was nothing immediately available to fill the resulting rent in the fabric of society. (Since there is a no clear earliest boundary for classical antiquity comparable to the earliest boundaries proposed for the Middle Ages, the ancient world is less well defined in time than is in the medieval world.)
One of the charming aspects of the Middle Ages is their interpretations of classical antiquity that made no effort whatsoever to be historically accurate. Bible stories and depictions of the ancient world were presented in the art of the period in contemporaneous costumes and landscapes. This refreshing naiveté has its limitations, but it also possesses authenticity and honesty — not the authenticity of correctly depicting the past, but the authenticity of depicting the present as it is. They knew of the existence of classical antiquity, and some historians have argued that the medievals saw themselves as much-debased Romans, long after the glory days of Rome had passed. But while they knew of Rome, and some may have seen themselves as Romans (certainly the Byzantines thought of themselves as Romans), almost all of the traditions of Rome had been lost, so the medievals had to fill in this gap of knowledge and experience with their own experience, which effectively made medieval culture a case of new wine in old bottles.
One of my favorite stories about the Middle Ages comes from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, in which he describes the investigation of miracles connected to the canonization of Sainte Foy:
“Her relics began to work miracles, and in the eleventh century one of them was so famous that it aroused much jealousy and Bernard of Angers was sent to investigate it and report to the Bishop of Chartres. It seemed that a man had had his eyes put out by a jealous priest. He had become a jongleur, a blind acrobat. After a year he went to the shrine of St. Foy and his eyes were restored. The man was still alive. He said that at first he had suffered from terrible headaches, but now they had passed and he could see perfectly. There was a difficulty: witnesses said that after his eyes had been put out they had been taken up to heaven, some said by a dove, others by a magpie. That was the only point of doubt. However, the report was favourable, a fine Romanesque church was built at Conques, and in it was placed a strange eastern-looking figure to contain the relics of St. Foy. A golden idol! The face is perhaps the golden mask of some late Roman emperor. How ironical that this little girl, who was put to death for refusing to worship idols, should have been turned into one herself. Well, that’s the medieval mind. They cared passionately about the truth, but their sense of evidence was different from ours.”
This story contains so many of the fantastical elements that characterized the Middle Ages — the golden idol, the repurposing of classical art, the institutionalization of inquiries into miracles, and so on — but what I like most in this passage is that Clark notes that the medieval mind was passionate about truth but had a different sense of evidence from ours. This is perfectly understated, and we could go on to observe that most distinct civilizations have distinct standards of evidence as regards the truth, and these distinct standards of evidence could well be used as the differentia among civilizations.
Last week I asked whether there is some viable form of civilization that is optimal for science, and I characterized our civilization as being largely scientific without being properly scientific. Certainly our standards of evidence are much closer to the scientific than medieval canons of evidence. That, at least, has been my assumption to date, but I may need to backtrack on this. We moderns at least know that science exists, that it is possible, and that it is sometimes exemplified (much as the medievals were aware of classical antiquity, but that awareness did not translate into an authentic grasp of the past). That being said, science is only sometimes exemplified within science itself, and is almost never exemplified in wider modern society, and this is why I see contemporary civilization as falling far short of being a properly scientific civilization. So near and yet so far.
Formerly I thought our contemporary civilization, with its science and technology and industry was not perhaps qualitatively distinct from medieval civilization, but at very least quantitatively distinct from medieval civilization insofar as we have greater scientific knowledge, more technology, and more industry. I took this quantitative epistemic distinction between modernity and medievalism to be sufficiently wide that it neared the threshold of a qualitative distinction. While I do not dispute that we are more advanced in science, technology, and industry than the Middle Ages, I no longer think that we have any intellectual advantage whatsoever over the Middle Ages. In other words, advancement in science, technology, and industry has not made our society or our minds more advanced (in an epistemic sense), though we certainly are more complex.
Superstition is pervasive and foundational to the human mind. We wouldn’t know what to make of the world without the battery of superstitions that we carry around with us. And what I have recently come to realize is that the modern mind is no less superstitious than the medieval mind. We modern, scientific, technologically-savvy human beings are not less deluded, no less credulous, no less liable to irrationality and sheer stupidity that were medieval peoples.
It has taken me decades to grow out of my assumptions about what modernity is, and what the modern world is. Enlightenment ideology would have us believe a great many things about the world that simply are not true, and this is why I have come to see Enlightenment ideology as so invidious to the practice of science, and therefore Enlightenment civilization to be inconsistent with science and toto caelo distinct from scientific civilization. The journey has been a long and winding one for me. If you had asked me as a young man, I would have repeated any number of Enlightenment shibboleths and would have regarded myself as an entirely modern man. No longer.
I do not say of peoples of the past that they had any advantage over us as regards their epistemic endowment; I only hold that we have no epistemic advantage over peoples of the past, and while this should seem to follow straightforwardly from any consideration of evolutionary psychology, it is also a fraught journey from knowing something on an intellectual level to feeling it in one’s bones. In a scientific civilization, we would be acculturated to feel science in our bones, and the non-scientific or ascientific would seem counter-intuitive to us, to the extent that any social conditioning can overcome inherited cognitive capabilities. And evolutionary psychologists would be among the first to point out that the ability of social conditioning to overcome inheritance is extremely limited.
I do not make these observations as a counsel of despair. I do not say that we must change human beings so that we can let go of our delusions and our credulousness. Far from being desirable, this is the path to the most dystopian scenarios that we can today imagine. There have been many attempts in human history to make a “New Man” by means of social conditioning; the most effective among them have been the most disastrous. We can only wish that further efforts of this kind are as ineffective as they are ill-conceived.
It is often observed that evolution can only build on what exists; it doesn’t start from a clean slate and it doesn’t build new. The brain is a dramatic illustration of this, as the mammalian limbic system was built on top of the reptilian hind brain, the cerebral cortex was built upon the limbic system, and the outermost layer of the cerebral cortex, which is distinctive to human beings, is built quite directly on the (evolutionarily) earlier inner layers of the cerebral cortex. This we might call the hardware of the mind, and by analogy we could call social conditioning the software of the mind, but the dangers in such metaphors is that we take them literally and act upon them as though they were fact. The human mind is not a computer, and we cannot distinguish hardware from software. I could say that our cognition is “hard-wired” into the brain, but that would be merely to reiterate the same metaphor.
Gilbert Ryle ran into this problem when he criticized the Cartesian conception of the self as a “ghost in the machine.” Somewhere he wrote that he no more wished the body to be seen as a mechanism than he wanted to see the mind understood as a ghost, but while the ghost-in-the-machine idea became so widely known it eventually found its way into popular culture (the Police called one of their albums Ghost in the Machine), the complementary critique of the body as a machine-sans-ghost never achieved the same level of recognition.
