If at every 27th day of the month you always get some money on your bank account that is a correlation. The 27th of the month is only associated with the swelling of your bank account but does not cause the swelling in your bank account. This is easy to understand, but what about random events? What if it rains every time you go out without an umbrella? What if one morning you saw a dead bird at your gate, then as you drove to work you had a fender bender, at work your boss bites your head off, you receive news of the death of a relative and in the evening you came home and found your wife has been cuckolding you? Did the dead bird you saw in the morning have something to do with your day? It is human nature to infect causality in many things, especially random occurrences. We are naturally intolerant to randomness. We are inherently superstitious. Apparently we did not just inherit our ancestors’ genes but also their gods, beliefs, and way of thinking.
Most of us may pride ourselves on being educated and more enlightened than our ancestors. Although we may lie to ourselves that our predecessors had primitive beliefs and ways of thinking, the fact is, we still have similar beliefs and patterns of thinking, only that we have dressed them in the so-called science and modern religions. We are hardwired to view two events as causally related. If I observe event A and event B together, it is inevitable that I will conclude that A causes B or vice versa, even when they have no relationship at all. It is human nature. We are naive scientists.
We have an innate need to interpret life in a manner we can understand. We abhor random occurrences and therefore seek to attribute some powerful force to such occurrences. The birth of twins in some ancient societies was a sign of misfortune. In modern society it is a foregone conclusion that the birth of twins is a normal occurrence. But what will we say if you jumped and floated in the air, defying the laws of gravity? Our ancestors did not question their assumptions but so do we. Superstitious do not arise out of thin air but are grounded on experience.
Our primordial tendency to interpret everything can even be seen in our education system. In school, we are trained to interpret and find the hidden meaning of storybooks and poems. We come up with wild imaginations on why Shakespeare wrote a play or the meaning of Chinua Achebe’s things fall apart. They may as well have written the beautiful pieces of art while high on some substance. What’s the big deal with the Monalisa painting? Why don’t we just see the painting like any other painting? Is there always a hidden meaning in a story or poem?
Just like our ancestors we are hard-wired to look for causality in rare occurrences. In the “gods must be crazy” film, a Coca-Cola bottle falling from the sky had to come from the gods. There was no way a hard thing that looks like water (the bottle) will fall from the sky and you on with life as usual. They had to find its meaning. Superstitions spice our lives. They give us a sense of control over things we can’t control. Gamblers and Sportsmen have rituals that they believe improve their chances of winning. We all have beliefs about cause and effect: some believe in prayer, some in hard work; some in education; others in science, others believe in God. The assumptions are different, the thinking is the same.
If we go for a year without rain and then one day you scratch your butt and it rains, we will have discovered a new way of making rain!
Fabio