Supersense

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.

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.