So, can we ever evolve out of irrationality? Why would such a way of viewing the world continue to flourish in this age of reason? Will the human race ever become ultimately reasonable?
I don’t believe so. There is one final piece of the puzzle that I have been hinting at throughout the book that now needs to be considered. It moves beyond the question of origins and asks: are there any benefits of the supersense? After all, if science has the potential to elevate the human species to new levels of achievement, why do we still succumb to a supersense? Part of the answer is that it may be unavoidable, as I hope you will now appreciate. Another reason is that the supersense makes possible our capacity to experience a deeper level of connection that may be necessary for humans as social animals.
Even though humans have the capacity to reason and make judgements, I think that we will always regard some things in life as not reducible to rational analysis. That is because society needs supernatural thinking as part of a belief system that holds members of a group together by sacred values. In the final pages, I will explain how this supersense forms the intuitive rationale for the sacred values that bind our society together.
CHAPTER TEN
WOULD YOU LET YOUR WIFE SLEEP WITH ROBERT REDFORD?
IN THIS BOOK, I have proposed that humans are compelled to understand the nature of the world around them as part of the way our brains try to make sense of our experiences. This process starts early in childhood, even before culture has begun to tell children what to think. Along the way, children come up with all manner of beliefs about the world, including those that would have to be supernatural if true. These ideas go beyond the natural laws that we currently understand and hence are supernatural. Whether it is a disembodied mind floating free of the body, a sublime essence that harbours the true identity of people, places, and things, or the idea that people are all connected by tangible energies and hidden patterns, these notions are all intuitive ways of thinking about the world. We persist in these beliefs despite the lack of compelling evidence that the phenomena we think are real do in fact exist. Culture may fuel these beliefs with fantasy and fiction, but they burn brightly in the first place because of our natural inclination to assume ‘something there’, as William James put it. Culture simply took these beliefs and gave them meaning and content.
If we are deluded, can we ever get rid of such a supersense? Will humankind ever evolve into the Bright species that uses logic over and above emotion and intuition? This seems unlikely for a number of reasons. The first reason, which I have been at pains to labour throughout the book, is that the supersense is part and parcel of our mind design and so is deeply embedded in the way we reason. We may possess the capacity for both logical analysis and intuitive reasoning, but one is slow and ponderous while the other is fast and furious. Intuition is not something we can easily ignore, and although we can learn to think in a rational–analytical way, intuitive reasoning has the advantage in the race to influence our decision-making because it is so effortless, covert, and rapid. When a taxi driver asked the late Carl Sagan, the cosmologist, for his gut reaction to the question of whether UFOs are real, Sagan replied that he tried not to think with his stomach. For the rest of us, such control is often lacking as we succumb to naive intuitive reasoning. It is not always right, but we must remember that it has served us well in the past. Otherwise, as a species, we would not be around to tell the tale. The supersense comes from our intuitive reasoning systems and so is part of our makeup. This brings me to another, more important reason for why we may foster a supersense.
I think the supersense will persist even in a modern era because it makes possible our commitment to the idea that there are sacred values in our world. Something is sacred when members of society regard it as beyond any monetary value. Let me give you an example. Life can be full of difficult decisions. People who run hospitals are constantly faced with choices involving life and death. Imagine that you are a hospital administrator and you have $1 million that can be used to perform a lifesaving liver transplant operation on a child or to reduce the hospital’s debt. What would you do? For most people, this would be a nobrainer – of course one must save the child.
The economic psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that people are appalled when they hear that an administrator would make the decision to benefit the hospital, even though more children would gain in the long term from such astute financial planning.1 What’s more, they are also outraged if the hospital administrator decides to save the child but takes a long time to arrive at that decision. Some things are sacred. You should not have to think about them. You can’t put a price on them. Likewise, if the choice has to be made between saving one of two children, this decision must take a long time. The choice should not be made quickly. This unbearable dilemma has become known as ‘Sophie’s choice’, following William Styron’s novel about the Jewish mother who was forced to decide which of her two children would die in the Auschwitz gas chambers and which would survive.2 She chose to let her son live and her daughter die.
We intuitively feel that some things are right and some things are just plain wrong. Some decisions should be instantaneous, while others must be agonized over. Decisions can haunt us even when there really should be no indecision. Every choice has a price tag if we care to consider relative worth. There are no free lunches, and so while we may be outraged and indignant about some choices and decisions, the reality is that all things can be reduced to a cost–benefit analysis.
However, a cost–benefit analysis is material, analytic, scientific, and rational. This is not how humans behave, and when we hear that people think and reason like this, we are indignant. When Robert Redford’s character offered $1 million to sleep with Woody Harrelson’s wife (Demi Moore) the movie audience knew that it was an Indecent Proposal. It was morally repugnant. Better that she should have had an affair than do it for money. If you love someone, no amount of money should enter the negotiation, even if he does look like Robert Redford! For many, this $1 million decision is much easier than the hospital administrator dilemma. Likewise, when we hear that people could wear a killer’s cardigan, live in a house of murder, or collect Nazi memorabilia, we are disgusted. We feel it physically. Though a cost–benefit analysis may reveal our reaction to be out of balance with the actual costs, we still intuitively feel a moral outrage and violation of society’s values.
This is because humans are a sacred species. We treat sacred places, sacred objects, and sacred lives as beyond commercial value. The value placed on each depends on who is making the decision, but each sacred thing could literally be ‘priceless’. The alternative is to accept that everything has a price.
The trouble with such a market-driven approach to decision-making is that it undermines the cohesion of the group, which is bound together by shared sacred values. If we think that anything and anyone can be bought, then this cohesion fragments as sacred items lose their special nonmonetary value. For this reason, certain sacred values must exist that cannot be measured by rational analysis. Every society needs things that are taboo and cannot be reduced to trade-offs and comparisons. People do not sign on explicitly to these rules, but we understand that as members of a social group we are expected to share in the same collective sacred values.