The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (46 page)

It is said that the Australian Aboriginals belong to the oldest surviving culture on earth. It appears profoundly different from ours. But I have come to believe that, in one crucial sense, we are just like the Aboriginals. We share their means of negotiating reality. Our lives, to an almost unimaginable degree, depend on stories.

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When you begin to look for stories – when you purposefully seek out that familiar, seductive pattern, the sly hook of the narrative – you
realise that you are surrounded. On the news, in literature, film and song, in your memory, your sense of who you are and how you got there and
in most of your conversation
.
I did this, and it was terrifying.
Cause and effect plus emotion. It is the fundamental formula of your brain’s understanding of the world. It is the fundamental formula of narrative.

Our compulsion for emotional narrative is why the BBC news chooses to report on
‘Astro’, the Australian horse
that got stuck in some mud, and not the nameless thousands of humans who happened to die, the same day, in road accidents and of curable diseases and the effects of poverty. It is why
$48,000 of US taxpayers’ money was once spent
on a twenty-five-day mission to rescue a small dog. It is why Saxon families revelled in the monster-slaying drama of
Beowulf
and why, twelve hundred years later, cinema-goers by the million queued to watch the monster-slaying drama of
Jaws
. It is why, in the seventeen years that followed
the birth of silent cinema
, more than ten
thousand
films were made in Hollywood alone. It is why we are addicted to celebrity magazines and to the grandest Russian literature. It is stories that lie at the root of vast world religions that hold genuine power over billions of faithful followers.

It is thought that
humanity’s earliest stories sought to explain the world
. They were a primitive form of science, and indistinguishable from religion. At some stage we began to use those tales like the brain uses its models – to attempt to predict and to change the world.
Rituals developed around them
. We made sacrifices, sang songs and prayed to the gods to effect natural phenomena.
The historian Mircea Eliade writes
of the ‘culture heroes’ that were subsequently created to effect social phenomena. Western storytellers imagined legendary characters – Hercules, Aphrodite, King Arthur – whose ghostly archetypes appear in the myths of faraway cultures and in the blockbusters and bestsellers of today.

Sigmund Freud believed
that we are emotionally satisfied by the hero’s slaying of the monster because we are all secret Oedipuses, murdering our fathers to win the hand of our mothers. For
the psychologist Otto Rank
, the hero narrative unconsciously tracks our struggle out of childhood and into independence. For
the mythologist Joseph Campbell
it speaks to the formative adventures of early adulthood. These academics understood that fiction is the journalism of the unconscious, reporting back sensed truths from the silent realm of feelings.

Today’s scientists have discovered that
we experience the tales that we immerse ourselves in
as if they are happening to us.
We feel the heroes’ feelings
, fight their fights, love their lovers. This is possible because stories mimic the illusion of consciousness. The novel’s narrator, the film camera’s eye – they are points of singularity in which sound, sight, emotion, motive and mission are combined. As we surrender ourselves to the tale, we surrender our own minds to that of our hero. We become infected by the tales that we expose ourselves to.

Observing how fear spreads through a herd of antelope, Professor Bruce Wexler writes that
‘contagion is at the heart of emotion.’
It is significant, I believe, that contagion is also at the heart of stories. But to become contagious, a story requires surprise. According to Professor Daniel Kahneman,
‘a capacity for surprise is an essential aspect
of our mental life’ and when we experience it, we feel
‘a surge of conscious attention’
as our minds seek new information to feed in to their recreation of the world. And so it is with narrative.

Harvard Professor of Psychology Jerome Bruner writes,
‘a story begins with some breach
in the expected state of things.’ In its most dramatic literary form, this narrative shock is Aristotle’s ‘peripeteia’, a sudden reversal of circumstances. Peripeteia is the ultimate disruption – a life spun around without warning. What happened next? How did the hero struggle? Was resolution found? What valuable information can be harvested and fed into the neural models?

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The brain constructs its models during childhood and adolescence, the period in which it is extraordinarily alive with creative activity.
By the age of five
, children have developed a sophisticated ‘theory of mind’ and are, therefore, ‘story-ready’. During our formative years we absorb many thousands of tales of ever-increasing complexity of message.
Professor of Psychology Keith Oatley has observed
that learning to negotiate the social world requires weighing up ‘myriad interacting
instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.’ We build our understanding of the emotional world through the myths and legends of our culture. We are all, in part, made of fairy tales.

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But stories are not just cultural teachers. They can be motivators and agents for epochal change.
Evolutionary psychologist David Sloan Wilson has compared
their effect to an imaginary ‘mutant gene’ that appears in a primitive tribesman and serves to distort and magnify his dread and hatred of his enemy, thus pushing him to fight with superior violence.
Marxist philosopher Georges Sorel believed
that myths were essential for revolution. Writing in
Nature
,
Professor Paul Bloom has observed
that stories have helped shift the moral codes of nations: ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
helped to end slavery in the United States, and descriptions of animal suffering in Peter Singer’s
Animal Liberation
and elsewhere have been powerful catalysts for the animal-rights movement.’

Stories change us first, and then they change the world.

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The mind is addicted to story –
crisis, struggle, resolution
– because that is how it experiences life. We are in the world, and we are battling against foes in order to make better lives.

As our brains are bombarded with a superabundance of information, we are constantly searching for our plot among the chaos. Psychotics such as Rufus May are too sensitive to stories. They see salient details everywhere. But I sensed this tendency, too, in the people I have met who were not mentally ill. It seemed a common thing, to confabulate wild explanations of cause and effect that weren’t really there. Veronica Keen and her Illuminati. Dr Valerie Sinason and her Satanists. Lord Monckton and his totalitarian United Nations. Hidden plots. Conspiracies that they were fighting, bravely.

All of it begins in the unconscious. We experience hunches about
moral rights and wrongs; wordless desires and repulsions; powerful instincts that seem to come from nowhere. This constant throbbing of emotions can be unsettling. We sometimes feel things that we don’t understand, or even want to feel. When we come across an explanation of the world that fits perfectly over the shape of our feelings – a tale that magically explains our hunches and tells us that it is all okay – it can seem of divine origin, as if we have experienced revealed truth.

When the racist lorry driver from Maidstone was a boy, he saw a party political broadcast by the National Front. ‘Everything made sense,’ he told me, shaking his head at the wonder of it all. ‘It
just fitted
.’ When I asked John Mackay how he knew that God was real, he explained, ‘It’s something in me.’ When Lord Monckton’s audience, with their right wing brains, heard him talk of climate conspiracy, he realised that they always knew instinctively, ‘that something was going on in this climate story that they didn’t like the smell of. They just couldn’t quite work out what it was …’

Stories work against truth. They operate with the machinery of prejudice and distortion. Their purpose is not fact but propaganda. The scientific method is the tool that humans have developed to break the dominion of the narrative. It has been designed specifically to dissolve anecdote, to strip out emotion and to leave only unpolluted data. It is a new kind of language, a modern sorcery, and it has gifted our species incredible powers. We can eradicate plagues, extend our lives by decades, build rockets and fly through space. But we can hardly be surprised if some feel an instinctive hostility towards it, for it is fundamentally inhuman.

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I will never forget my own experience of the brain’s incorrigible story-generating ability. Lying on Vered Kilstein’s massage table, it took hardly a nudge for my mind to produce a vivid and emotional narrative of my life as a wartime widow. To recall its principal scenes, even now, is to slip into the drizzle of genuine melancholy. A part of me becomes that doleful woman. Vered spoke of clients who had reported similarly powerful experiences: the English knight who, after cavorting with his lover, was struck during a fight over his
dishevelled appearance: a fantastic confabulation woven around a humdrum dodgy shoulder.

Consciousness is the first storyteller, and the greatest one of all. Its basis is the illusion that we are coherent individuals, in control of our beliefs and actions and operating freely at the centre of the world. Because we are driven to cause things to happen, and we witness their effects over time, we naturally experience our lives as a constantly flowing narrative. We have victories and failures, enemies and allies. We have hopes. We have goals. We have drama. Philosophers and neuroscientists ask why consciousness is necessary. Why go to the trouble of creating this sensation of singularity when we could just as easily pass on our genes as instinctively behaving zombies? Why have we adapted for this trait?

I believe that consciousness is the Hero-Maker. The mind reorders the world, turning the events of our days into a narrative of crisis, struggle, resolution, and casts us in the leading role. In this way, our lives gain motivation and meaning. We are coaxed into hope, into heroic acts, into braving impossible odds. We are made David against Goliath and, in this way, we become stronger and more successful. How many hero stories have I heard since that night in Gympie? How many people bravely fighting to change the world? John Mackay, giving up his career in an effort to disprove the Devil’s propaganda and save unbelievers from hell. Swami Ramdev creating his paradisal world free of Western medicines. Ron Coleman campaigning to rescue the innocent from the brutish psychiatry industry. The Buddhist S. N. Goenka abandoning his business life to offer tens of thousands of people free meditation. James Randi braving death threats to prevent a coming ‘dark age’. Vered Kilstein, who is ‘one of the millions who are here to help people move to a new consciousness.’

The neural illusions that collude in the Hero-Maker are many. We believe that we are better looking than we are, more moral than we are, less susceptible to bias than we are, that our creations are worth more, that the ‘spotlight’ is always on us and that we are incapable of true evil. Our memories rescript our past in the service of our glory. And yet a witchbag of powerful forces works against us, silently guiding our behaviour: excessive obedience to authority; unconscious prejudices;
genetic predispositions and situational and cultural pressures that can drive us to terrible acts. These forces are made invisible to us. To truly be a hero, we must believe that we are our own captains, and that we possess free will.

Through the Hero-Maker’s lens, religions and ideologies are seen as parasite hero plots; prophets and political leaders become seductive storytellers. They provide ready-made confabulations that have been generalised by use until they fit neatly onto the instincts of a certain kind of brain. Because they match up so well with an individual’s unconscious moral hunches, they can appear to be more than true. They come from
out there
and can seem miraculous, sacred, even worth dying for. These parasite plots serve to make people happy because they validate their emotional instincts and then give them purpose – enemies to fight and the promise of a blissful denouement if their quest is successful. It is an illusion. It can be a profoundly dangerous one. And it can be a profoundly useful one.

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Our lives are lived in two realms – the physical and the narrative. The model that our brain makes of the world of objects has to be accurate. If it wasn’t, we would be bumping into walls and trying to eat chairs. But not so the invisible kingdom of feelings. That soft matrix of beliefs that we exist within – that ever-flowing narrative of loves and feuds and hopes and hatreds – can be a place of tremendous distortion. The story that is woven for us is concerned, primarily, with our hero status, and not objective truth. It is often wrong. The ‘true’ nature of reality can appear so clear and obvious that we frequently underestimate just how wrong it is possible to be. If others persist in seeing things differently, we conclude that they must be corrupt. It is what the Morgellons sufferers believe of the Centers for Disease Control. It is what James Randi thinks of Rupert Sheldrake. It is what the family of Carole Felstead believe of Dr Fleur Fisher. It is what David Irving thinks of his critics and what his critics think of David Irving.

We underestimate how perilous it can be, if we cling too hard to our hero delusion. An expert on the psychology of evil, Professor Roy
Baumeister, has written that
‘dangerous people, from playground bullies to warmongering dictators
, consist mainly of those who have highly favourable views about themselves. They strike out at others who question or dispute those favourable views.’ Perhaps I saw this notion in its mildest form among the UFO-spotters who, when challenged, grumpily hardened their beliefs. And I saw it in a stronger form still in some of those whose dramatic personalities and intensely held positions have made them famous. Heretics are often betrayed by the spotless coherence of their plots. They tell the cleanest tales with the most perfect separations of good guy and bad. It is why they should not be trusted.