Here is the final piece of the puzzle. How can something become sacred? This is where the supersense comes into its own. Society can tell us what is sacred but, to be experienced as sacred, something must become supernatural. It has to be more than mundane. It must possess qualities that are unique and irreplaceable. Discerning such qualities requires a mind designed to sense hidden properties. If something can be copied, duplicated, corrupted, cloned, forged, replaced, or substituted, it is no longer sacred. To arrive at this belief we have to infer that there are hidden supernatural dimensions to our sacred world. And with this thinking comes all the supernatural qualities of connectedness and deeper meaning. We need these to make sense of why we value some things over and above their objective worth. Ironically, it is the supersense that enables us to justify our sacred values. Irrationality makes our beliefs rational because these beliefs hold society together.
AND FINALLY . . .
In this book, I have been sketching an account of how a supersense we all share as members of a highly social species could emerge. Culture and religion simply capitalize on our inclination to infer hidden dimensions to reality. We have discovered that our naturally evolved reasoning mechanisms compel us to make sense of the world by seeking patterns, structures, and mechanisms. We have intuitively done this from the beginning, long before formal education was invented. Supernatural thinking is simply the natural consequence of failing to match our intuitions with the true reality of the world. What’s more, these misconceptions are not necessarily discarded over our lifetime. Even as adults, we can simultaneously hold rational models of the world alongside our intuitive notions.
Over the course of childhood, we become participating members of a social group. As young children, we may be the focus of our parents’ attention but, as we grow, we must learn to become part of the human race. We must learn to negotiate a social world of competing interests. We must learn to become members of a tribe that shares sacred values.
To achieve this we increasingly become aware of ourselves as unique individuals with unique minds embedded in a society of other unique individuals and minds. We are both individuals and a collective. We see ourselves as part of a group, to be distinguished from other groups. This belief is cemented by our sense that our own group has hidden properties that are essentially different from the invisible properties of other groups.
We mind-read and manipulate others to achieve our individual goals, but we also seek the emotional connections that others provide. We need the totems and sacred objects that bind us together. For many, religion provides these frameworks, but for the rest of us it can be a personal possession, a grubby blanket, a family heirloom, a famous painting, a beautiful statue, a historic monument, a martyr’s relic, or a return to the place where we were born. All of our sacred values convey a common sense of connectedness that joins us to each other and to our ancestors. In this way, we are extending ourselves to the rest of humanity from the past to the present.
We may be able to understand the external world through logical cost–benefit analysis, but within each of us is a sacred supersense. If we thought that our partner, spouse, lover, friend, ally, or fellow man did not share these sacred values, we would not trust them and we could not love them. We would see them as fundamentally different from us and even as less human. When people choose to wear a killer’s cardigan, they are violating our sacred values and our inherent supersense.
EPILOGUE
Eight months ago on my visit to Gloucester, I discovered that not all buildings associated with evil are levelled to the ground. Fred West’s first house in Gloucester, at 25 Midland Road, across a beautiful park from Cromwell Street, still stands today. Somehow this property had escaped the public’s attention when it was focused on Cromwell Street. At Midland Road, the dismembered body of his eight-year-old stepdaughter Charmaine was found buried in the cellar. I was unaware of this house until Nick the landlord told me how, despite being a reasonable man, he had felt ‘something there’ when he visited the property with a view to buying it in 1996. Despite an asking price of only a fraction of the true value, Nick declined. He thought he would have trouble renting it. As it turned out, this is not a problem in a city like Gloucester. It is a deprived area with a large number of migrant workers always in need of affordable accommodation.
On that odd April day, I walked across the park full of people sunning themselves, crossed a busy main road, and found the semidetached property in what was clearly a run-down part of the city. Munchi, a teenage girl, sat on the steps of the house reading a book. I discreetly photographed the house, which immediately made me feel guilty and self-conscious, but I had to ask Munchi about living there. So I approached and tentatively tried to strike up a conversation. I can be an awkward person at the best of times, but I needed to know if she had experienced anything unusual in the house.
Imagine being a teenage girl relaxing with a book on a hot April day and being approached by a middle-aged man wearing an inappropriate leather jacket and asking strange questions. She looked nervous and said that she lived with her cousin, Diana. She was the one to ask. Munchi disappeared inside and returned moments later with Diana, an older woman, who was looking equally suspicious. I asked again, trying to be as relaxed as possible. ‘Have you noticed anything strange since you have been living in the house?’ Diana was much more open. She said she saw things out of the corner of her eye in the living room. I don’t know what I expected to hear. It’s such a leading question in the first place. I asked if they knew who Fred West was. Both looked blank and shook their heads.
For a brief instance, I was tempted to tell them the history of their home. How twenty years ago the world’s media was focused on Fred and Rosemary West. How people were appalled and disgusted when the details of the gruesome murders of young women and two daughters became known. Telling them this history would have been no stunt with a cardigan to make a point. Munchi and Diana were really living with the past. Their response to this news would be genuine but devastating. What was I to do?
They say ignorance is bliss and to take that away is cruel and unnecessary. So I thanked Munchi and Diana for their time and left them baffled by the strange professor. By the time these words are in print, I expect that Munchi and Diana will have moved on and some other unsuspecting tenants will be living at 25 Midland Road. But if not, Munchi and Diana, I am sorry for not telling you, but I thought it was better for you not to know. There is no essence of evil in your house. It’s simply something our minds create. But knowing that doesn’t make it feel any more comfortable to be living in the house of a murderer. That’s because we are a sacred species.
READER’S NOTES
In Brief
Belief in the supernatural is extremely common in today’s modern society. Whether it is religious or secular notions of paranormal activity, most people hold some form of belief that goes beyond the current natural understanding of the world. SuperSense attempts to explain this by looking for the origins of such beliefs in children’s everyday reasoning. The book surveys the research into early childhood behaviour to reveal that the foundations of many aspects of adult belief appear early in development. This way of thinking is our ‘supersense’ and, while its influence may disappear with education and increased rational control, it may never entirely go away, especially if the culture supports such beliefs. Moreover, it may become more apparent at times when our ability to exercise rational control is weakened by stress, disease or diminished mental agility. Believing in the supernatural also appears to offer comfort and control when we feel under threat. However, we are not all the same in our reliance on our supersense. There is much room for individual variation. Some of us are more inclined than others towards our supersense, but this may not be a weakness; it may be the basis for why some people are more creative in their thinking. Also our supersense may forge the bonds that hold us together as a society. This is because the supersense may enable individuals to believe and act as if there were some supernatural property that binds them together to form close personal bonds with others. In this way, social cohesion may benefit from this perception of supernatural connection. So, with its natural origins, creative influence and social benefits, it seems unlikely that such a supersense will ever be eradicated entirely by reason.