Overwhelmed by fear: beware the “low road” of emotion

It is because we tout ourselves as the smartest animal on the planet we are oh-so-vulnerable.  As one can read in Proverbs 16:18, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

Human cognition is an unwieldy and fallible bag of mental tricks. Anyone who has seriously studied human cognition knows this. As Leda Cosmides and John Toby wrote: 

“The mind consists of a set of adaptations, designed to solve the long standing adaptive problems humans encountered as hunter-gatherers.”

Many people think, however, that they know how they think; they have faith that conscious common sense is always accurate and on target.  Common sense fails consider Freud’s rock solid finding: conscious awareness is only the tip of the cognitive iceberg. 

Common sense seduces us with powerful illusions, illusions that look like “uncontestable facts” to those of us who believe we can merely sit around and think in order to figure out how we think. Although common sense has led us well us for eons, it often leads to errors.  The Sun does not circle the Earth.  Our ears do not operate like microphones and our eyes do not work like cameras. “I” am not really a little person who seems to dwell in my head.  Science has shown that what the “thing” that constitutes me is a complicated and often self-contradictory bag of skills and strategies.  For many good examples of how we are often misled by the same heuristics on which we usually depend, see the …

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An atheist living in an evangelical world? How novel.

Morgan Spurlock, filmmaker and creator of the successful fast food critical documentary Super Size Me, has a groundbreaking program running on the cable network FX called 30 Days. The premise of the show goes like this: every episode details the journey of one person, either Spurlock or another willing participant,…

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Iraq is a domestic issue.

The Nation explains that Ned Lamont was successful tonight because he was much more than an anti-war candidate.  Lamont continually pointed to the domestic losses caused by the diversion of big money to finance the Iraq occupation: How did Lamont succeed where others – including 2004 presidential contender and current Democratic…

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War and Rumors of War

[Note: I wrote this piece in 2003, shortly before the U.S. invaded Iraq].
 
The trouble with writing these opinion pieces is they require such intense emotional energy to write.  It’s a very exhausting business.  But then, so is life these days.  We all go about our lives quite admirably, but the low hum of threat, the “war and rumors of war” is wearing on us all.  

The intense emotion that I’m experiencing these days is sadness, produced by the news, produced by the innocence of so many of our students who are willing to fling themselves into the fray in the name of God, president and country.  It’s all too reminiscent of those equally innocent boys who threw themselves, during my parents’ lifetimes, into the defense of God, king and country.  One way or another, those boys were not innocent for long.

What amazes me is how surprised some of us are by all this, and I’m including myself in the “us.”  I shouldn’t be surprised.  After all, my parents survived two world wars in Great Britain and described the horrors of the second in vivid detail.  I think, though, it’s only been since September 11, 2001, I’ve truly understood what my parents experienced.  The stories they told me when I was a child enthralled me, kept me spellbound as they recounted them to me.  But I, too, was innocent.  The stories were family saga, not reality, shrouded in the mists of mythology for me.

My parents described the adventure …

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Demi-gogs R Us

I wondered recently, during an idle conversation, whatever became of that monumental media presence Rush Limbaugh.  Now I know.  He's been upstaged.  Check out the following quote: "They're almost always biologists—the "science" with the greatest preponderance of women. The distaff MIT "scientist" who fled the room in response to Larry…

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