Here’s a draft of another essay trying to summarize my take on science fiction and my provisional conclusions on the topics I’ve been reading about over the past couple decades.
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The next consideration in this sketch of a critical approach to science fiction is how modern psychology — evolutionary psychology of the past 50 or 60 years — has revealed the ways in which the human mind does not accurately perceive the world, how it uses heuristics instead of rationality, and is subject to psychological biases and cognitive illusions. And further, how these are understandable as components of ancient human nature as optimized for survival in the primeval world.
Popular books on these topics began with E.O. Wilson’s ON HUMAN NATURE in 1978. Its central point was that there *is* a human nature, that the mind is not a “blank slate” shaped only by environment, education, and society. The idea was resisted both on the right and the left, on the right by its denial of evolution and beholden by religious notions of humanity as a failed state in need of redemption, on the left because evolutionary biases might foil efforts to build a truly egalitarian society.
(When I was growing up in the 1970s, progressive ideas prevailed about how boys and girls should be raised, with boys given toy guns, girls given toy dolls, and that these were traditional cultural legacies that could be overcome, with all children given equal opportunities to play with either guns or dolls. Some retailers responded, and have responded to this day, but the premise did not play out. Boys really do like toy guns, and girls really do prefer toy dolls. And the evolutionary understanding of sexual roles explains that. Reading this Wilson book was the first time I *changed my mind* about a fundamental assumption or belief. And my later understanding that most people never change their minds about anything.)
Wilson showed, and expanded upon in later books, that however diverse humans might be across cultures, certain behaviors are consistent across all cultures, and are different than behaviors of other animals, even the other social animals. Such observations were not new, anthropologically, as Wilson acknowledged in his reference to a 1945 list of cultural universals (Wikipedia has this summary), but Wilson brought the logic of evolution to “explain” why such universals arose among humans, and how they continue to work in the modern world, along themes of aggression, sex, altruism, and religion.
As an example, the idea of kin selection — that individuals are more inclined to be altruistic to members of their family than random strangers — though anticipated by Darwin and others, wasn’t mathematically formulated until the 1960s by W.D. Hamilton and others. Similar evolutionary rationales explain the different reproductive strategies of males vs. females, considering the disproportional efforts of males and females in creating a child.
Steven Pinker extended the discussion in THE BLANK SLATE in 2002, considering as much *why* people resist the idea that mind is not a blank slate.
Meanwhile, other writers began identifying the many ways the human mind is subject to irrational beliefs, e.g. the continued beliefs among many in astrology, psychics, creationism, and much else. Key titles in this thread include Thomas Gilovich’s HOW WE KNOW WHAT ISN’T SO: THE FALLIBILITY OF REASON IN EVERYDAY LIFE in 1991, Michael Shermer’s WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS in 1997, and Dan Ariely’s PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: THE HIDDEN FORCES THAT SHAPE OUR DESTINIES in 2008. Meanwhile Carl Sagan studied such beliefs in the context of how science is a corrective, in THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD in 1995, one of his best books, and one of the most important nonfiction books of all time.
Another perspective was discussed in Jesse Bering’s THE BELIEF INSTINCT: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOULS, DESTINY, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE in 2011, which focused on psychological studies of infants, and how their perceptions of the world gradually develop. A key idea here, one that has spread into common parlance, is the “theory of mind,” the idea that other people have their own understandings and beliefs, something infants do not immediately understand; babies assume if they can see something, or not see it, the same is true for everyone.
Somewhat similarly, Andrew Shtulman’s SCIENCEBLIND: WHY OUR INTUITIVE THEORIES ABOUT THE WORLD ARE SO OFTEN WRONG (2017), explores how these intuitive theories set in during early childhood development, and are difficult to dispel without deliberate education. Thus human “common sense” is wrong as often as it is right; we come to understand the world at particular scales and in particular conditions that do not always apply outside of everyday experience. Among the many ways this plays out is the familiar one about heavier objects, intuitively, falling faster than lighter ones. One can see how such intuitive “common sense” lingers on in many adults who, for example, apparently cannot wrap their heads around the idea that the Earth is round, since a glance out the window suggests it’s flat.
Another key title, Jonathan Haidt’s THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: WHY GOOD PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED BY POLITICS AND RELIGION (2012), applies these ideas to a world full of people who disagree with each other, along axes of five or six “moral sentiments.” These foundations of morality have evolutionary rationales, and together broadly explain the difference between conservatives and liberals, each group having its complementary “grand narrative”: the struggle for equality and happiness on the left, the struggle to return to a golden past on the right. It’s much more complex than to think that some people are good, others evil; the narratives are complementary, both necessary (in the same sense that diversity is a strength in a population) for long-term species survival.
Haidt’s even-handedness, moving away from the implicit condemnation of people who believe wacky things for whatever reasons, is the emerging theme of more recent books. Daniel Kahneman’s THINKING, FAST AND SLOW (2011) contrasts two systems of thinking, one that responds quickly and automatically, another than exerts effortful mental attention. They are both useful in different contexts. Haidt describes a similar idea in his metaphor of a rider on an elephant.
Matthew Hutson’s 2012 THE 7 LAWS OF MAGICAL THINKING: HOW IRRATIONAL BELIEFS KEEP US HAPPY, HEALTHY, AND SANE invites the reader to indulge in irrational beliefs even knowing they are irrational, because employing them assuages a deep primitive corner of the brain. More recently, Steven Pinker’s RATIONALITY (2021) and Michael Shermer’s CONSPIRACY: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational (2022) both acknowledge that the attraction to conspiratorial thinking is a feature, not a bug, if human cognition is understood as promoting survival. The standard example is hearing a rustle in the grass, and reacting as if it’s a snake. If most of the time you’re wrong, it’s better to be wrong most of the time (even if to others you seem paranoid) than to be wrong the one time the snake is real and kills you.
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Not all of these ideas apply to, or inform our understanding of, science fiction and/or fantasy, but a few of them do. The most prominent one is the human bias toward “narrative,” thinking of everything in terms of causes and effects. It derives from the early impression of and understanding of cause and effect, and becomes essential for most people even as adults to make “sense” of the world. Human minds are constantly trying to make sense of the world by trying to detect causes, and will invent causes even where objective study shows none exist. Thus so many superstitions – as with conspiracy thinking, better to be safe than sorry, even if you’re wrong about the reality of the world.
Humans extend this thinking to the biggest questions of life. Where did we come from? Why are we here? It’s the pattern-searching engine on overdrive, seeing shapes in clouds and Jesus on a tortilla, projecting the idea of ‘theory of mind’ onto the whole of existence, onto the sun and moon, the winds and the rains, (animism), even naively projecting the protocols of human relationships (parents/children) onto the entirety of existence (god the father). Yet, these narratives not only scratch that itch, they serve a social function to bind members of a tribe into solidarity against rival tribes. Ironically, the more outlandish a tribe’s mythology is, the greater acceptance and belief in it serves to confer loyalty to the tribe.
The journalist David McRaney, in his book YOU ARE NOW LESS DUMB (2013), has an excellent summary about the “narrative bias”. I’ll repeat a quote from my review of that book.
Out of that sense of self and other selves come the narratives that have kept whole societies together. The great mythologies of the ancients and moderns are stories made up to make sense of things on a grand scale. So strong is the narrative bias that people live and die for such stories and devote whole lives to them (as well as take lives for them).
