Do humans have a ‘certainty gene’?
Sometimes I think humans must have some sort of a “certainty gene.” We decide we’re certain about something, that we know, and then that’s it, no matter the reality.
We take whatever facts are at hand that fit our purpose in order to assure ourselves that we know. We read articles beginning “a study suggests….” and speed right over the “suggests” part to the part that confirms what we already know we know: A study suggests that staring at gulls can deter them from swooping in to snatch our food. A study suggests that air pollution ages the brain. A study suggests a link between word choices and extraverts.
Studies showed that sugar was not good for a child’s brain development; that “time on screens” had little impact on kids’ social skills; that sleep played a part in healing traumatic brain injuries; that language learning made the brain grow; that where you lived had a significant impact on whether you’d live to be 100 or not; that adding more wine and cheese to the diet might help reduce cognitive decline; that climate change had likely driven some early human species to extinction; that antibodies from llamas could have helped in the fight against COVID-19.
A study had found that regular tea drinkers had “better organized brain regions” than non-tea drinkers. (Studies like this one made me say, “Aha! I knew that!”)
These were balanced, though, by studies we felt must surely be wrong, or rigged.
Plugging “study suggests” into the search bar of the website of ScienceDaily.com awhile back returned 121,000 results. We are awash in an ocean of information, facts, presuppositions, conjecture, conviction.
In reality, though, it seems we know far less than we believe.
We insist pundits tell us the future. What will happen when the planet gets hotter? Will Trump be convicted? Who will win the election? What will the new administration do?
And pundits comply. One week just for fun I conducted my own study: I counted the number of pieces sent out in email newsletters from places like The Washington Post and The New York Times, purportedly “news” stories. The vast majority of them were not news at all. They were simply speculation about what was going to happen.
We love it; we need it; we require it.
Rousseau had evidently said that with things we considered important, we preferred to be wrong than to believe nothing.
I wonder if “belief” is the right word. But maybe it is. Maybe belief in fact is what it is all about. We have transferred our belief in what we once called “spiritual” things to the things of the material world. Because those, we feel, we can know. And so we believe. In her book Strongmen, Ruth Ben Ghiat says that people believe strongmen — authoritarians like Trump — because they believe in them.
One of our techniques for being certain, which seems to have been hit upon several centuries ago in the Enlightenment, is to get rid of uncertainty by declaring that things we cannot understand do not in fact exist. It was pretty refreshing when our government finally came out and said they simply didn’t know what a lot of the things spotted in the sky actually are. They’ve even changed the name from “Unidentified Flying Objects” — which every body took to mean space aliens — to “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” Eventually people will attach the “space alien” meaning to that, too, of course. And I’m sure they knew that. So they just finally admitted that nobody knew.
Thomas Jefferson, having studied John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton, concluded that “the world was eminently knowable.” Perhaps it was with this in mind that he hit upon his project of rewriting the Christian bible so it made sense; to get rid of all the spiritual stuff. What Jefferson wanted to weed out of the Jesus story seemed to be things “beyond us” in a manner of speaking. It seems to me it’s a good example of what the Enlightenment was about: Mystery vs. no mystery, or mysterium that we are unable to figure out, vs. mystery that is such just until we figure it out, which we most certainly will be able to. That kind of thing. To me it seems like hubris.
“What we don’t know about the brain still eclipses what we do. We don’t know how the brain generates consciousness. We aren’t sure why we sleep and dream. The precise causes of many common mental illnesses and neurological disorders elude us. What is the physical form of a memory? We have only inklings,” wrote Ferris Jabr. This was in 2017. We are not all that much further along now.
We know a lot, and we keep finding out more — yet it is all of a type. We seem to learn about things, but the things themselves, we do not know — not in that Biblical sense. It seems today that we dismiss any other way of knowing, as if no other way of knowing were real.
“In moving from a childhood in the woods to the university I had unknowingly shifted between worldviews,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist, author, and enrolled member of the Potawatomi tribe,
from a natural history of experience, in which I knew plants as teachers and companions to whom I was linked with mutual responsibility, into the realm of science. The questions scientists raised were not “Who are you?” but “What is it?” No one asked plants, “What can you tell us?” The primary question was “How does it work?” The botany I was taught was reductionist, mechanistic, and strictly objective.
I’ve read other stories like Kimmerer’s, where someone who knew something — but not in a scientific way — was dismissed; sometimes ridiculed.
