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| Eastern Milksnake (Lampropeltis triangulatum) from Wikipedia |
Thankfully I've learned to chill the fuck out, and to accept that at least some of the weird, inexplicable things of the universe might be true (and even developed my own theories about, say, UFOs and psychics); but I'm stilled fascinated and puzzled by belief. I'm not talking about religious belief per sé here, but rather the beliefs of people - often deeply-held - about particular subjects that seem to run counter to objective reality. How is it that a person can insist, under pain of ostracism, that they've seen Bigfoot walking through a swamp in Minnesota when we know (a) wild non-human primates haven't existed in North America for 26 million years, and (b) no definitive proof of any Bigfoots (-Feet?) has ever been found? Are they lying? Were they intoxicated? Or did they see something, like a black bear, that they misinterpreted as a Bigfoot? Or - and this is the most troubling possibility - did they actually see a Bigfoot, and Bigfoots are really real, and therefore our concrete "armor of reality" has just cracked a tiny bit, allowing other possibilities to leak through...?
What I think is missing in these several explanations is that the human relation to objective reality - that is, the way our astoundingly powerful brains make sense of the world - is murky at best: humans have always believed in Spirit Worlds, for instance, which are dreamlike mirrors of the world we typically see and experience. Traditional cultures tend not to draw a sharp line between the two, and while we, with our "modern" anthropological understanding tend to condescendingly say, "The so-and-so tribe believe the wind is the spirit of their ancestors" and whatnot, a member of the tribe would counter, "Of course we know it's the fucking wind, nitwit. But the spirits speak through the wind. It's both." Far from being some kind of aberrant superstition that is "corrected" by modern rationalism, such traditional understandings of the world actually represent a sophisticated mode of being, developed over thousands of years and threading throughout and within the world, knitting all things together. In that sense, this "irrationality" is actually a much richer and deeper human experience than the dry, flat empiricism that we moderns tend to champion. I would go so far as to say that, going all the way back to Australopithecus, the humanoid understanding of the world was shaped first by imagination, before we began to interrogate the world as objective observers.
Now is the part where I'm supposed to say, "We've lost this traditional understanding of the world, and we need to return to it in order to..." I dunno, "heal the world" or "raise our kids better" or who the hell knows. I'm not going to say that, because we don't need to return to it: we're still living it. I'm not saying that we, as 21st century Americans believe our dead relatives can walk in and out of the house like normal visitors, or that a small ghost lives in the hollow tree down the block and must be propitiated with bowls of milk. Rather, I'm saying that we still experience the world in a sort of waking dream. Our experience of objective reality is completely subjective: the vast amounts of information we receive through even our limited senses is then gatekeeped, stepped-down as it were to a much lower voltage so that our vast, ungainly, overdeveloped brains can make sense of it and decide how to interpret and react to our circumstances. And those reactions are still largely "irrational". Our beliefs are shaped not by any objective standard, but by our mushed-up interpretation of reality, augmented by previous traumas, self-understanding, emotional reactions, and group allegiances, or lack thereof. We still believe, for instance, that plane travel is inherently more dangerous than car travel, despite the fact that road accidents kill thousands every year while plane travel is mostly just dehumanizing. Damn the facts, we say - we're "going with our gut", assigning a kind of admirable "intuitive decisiveness" to what is, in fact, a set of neurons already primed to fire in the most efficient way possible. In effect, beliefs are the psychological equivalent of motor reflexes, a kind of shorthand that (at least initially) helped us react to our circumstances without having to sit down and puzzle out every detail. What we modern Americans have lost, if anything, is the adaptive power of "irrational" thought that helped us survive and thrive pre-civilization. That rich and well-acknowledged mysticism, that powerful nerve that ran throughout the world and connected us to it and each other, shriveled into vague superstition, hearsay, and ghost stories.
Consider the milk snake (Lampropeltus triangulum sp.). This medium-sized, nonvenemous colubrid constrictor, often decked out in bright colors (mimicking deadly coral snakes), eats small rodents such as mice and rats that otherwise cause problems for humans. Its presence around barns and farmhouses should be a welcome alternative to a million feral barn cats. And yet, for 300 years of European settlement in North America, it has been hunted down and killed by farmers. Why? Because it was believed to suckle milk from cows, causing the bovine to sicken and die. If the previous sentence caused you to say "What the hell?!", you're in for a story (if it caused you to say, "Well yes, of course," we'll get to you later). The idea that snakes have a fondness for milk is an ancient European folk tradition, and may date back thousands of years; there are many variations on the story, including the (erotic?) notion that snakes would attach themselves to the breasts of maidens and drain their milk away at night. In the same way, snakes were thought to "milk" cattle, attaching to their udders and poisoning them or draining their life-force in the process. When Europeans settled in North America, the presence of large-ish, alarmingly-colored serpents lurking around their barns only confirmed this belief and caused the legend to settle strongly around Lampropeltus. If your milk-cow was struck by a wasting disease, or somehow stopped giving milk, you knew the milk snake was to blame.
Now, obviously this is an old superstition that was stopped cold at the gates of the 20th Century, right? There's no way our beloved agricultural heroes, the men of the soil, could continue to indulge such superstitious nonsense...right? Dollars to donuts, I'll guarantee that if you spend enough time with enough old farmers, you will find the belief very much alive. And not only will it be attested as fact, but you will even have certain individuals swear, on pain of dismemberment and the graves of various close relatives, that they themselves have seen a snake sucking milk out of a cow's teat just before it took sick. With their own eyes, they saw it. Now suddenly we have a confrontation: between what we know to be true about the poor maligned milk snake, and what an individual (and probably several others) profess to have experienced for themselves. In the face of several grave, grimly-nodding farmers, hands thick and leathery from years of toil, all those fancy "facts" from hoighty-toighty "biologists" start to seem a little bit weak.
So we're faced with several possibilities: 1) That Old Jeb is flat-out lying. This seems out of character for Old Jeb, who isn't much of a fabulist (maybe Old Zeke, but he's a wine-bibber and not to be trusted). And what would he have to gain from lying? Does he run a "Anti-Milk Sucking Ointment" business that relies on the legend for sales? 2) That Old Jeb saw something that looked like a snake sucking milk out of his cow - perhaps likely in the dim barn, especially in the wee hours of the morning. But if not a snake, what the hell could it have been? A shadow? The refraction of Venus through swamp gas? 3) A hallucination? We're pretty certain Old Jeb isn't cultivating mushrooms out of cow pies, or growing cash crop behind the barn, or secretly a wizard with a chemistry set; if he was feverish enough to see things, he wouldn't be staggering out to milk the cows anyway. Or maybe he's going senile? 4) Old Jeb heard the legend from an older farmer, who heard it from an older farmer, who heard it from an older farmer, etc. all the way back to the Mayflower, and then conflated the "experience" of his elders with his own "experience". The image conjured was so vivid, so heavy with the weight of centuries of tradition, that Old Jeb simply accepted it as an experienced event, a kind of implanted memory, and had no reason to doubt it. And since the image has been accepted as a memory, it is therefore clearly something he himself experienced, and so will stand up against any amount of inquiry and experiment, world without end amen.
And if you're still not convinced, there's always THE INTERNET! To your immediate reaction, "Snakes can't drink milk!" Old Jeb can just whip out his smartphone, jump on YouTube (quite tech-savvy, our Jeb) and pull up a dozen videos of "SNAEK DRINKS MILK - CONFIRMED" showing what is purported to be a serpent imbibing liquid dairy product. Nevermind that it might have been faked. Nevermind that the snake was probably extremely dehydrated, due to abuse by an unscrupulous snake-charmer. Nevermind that the snake is not shown actually suckling from a cow. Your protest was against the reality of a milk-drinking snake; the video shows a realistic image of a snake drinking milk; Q.E.D. snakes drink milk. And if you were "proven wrong" about galactophagus herps, couldn't you be "wrong" about snakes suckling from cows? And with that little bit of doubt - that crack in the armor of reality - you are shown foolish, and Old Jeb and his ilk are confirmed in their beliefs.
(I want to pause here and say, I'm not saying Old Jeb (or any of my other strawmen, real or imagined) is "stupid". We tend to think of people with strong, irrational beliefs as mentally deficient; but this is quite far from the truth - cult members, for instance, are actually quite intelligent. Belief runs much deeper than intelligence, to the point that intelligence is used to ratify and justify beliefs. Geocentricism, for instance, engages in some fairly impressive mental gymnastics to maintain Earth's place at the center of the universe. It's important to remember that we can't just dismiss QAnon adherents or even (God help me) white supremacists as "ignorant hillbillies", because some very cunning minds are constantly working to uphold and strengthen their belief systems - we have to reckon with their intelligence).
In this present dire moment, the strength of strange beliefs seems wildly out of character with the 21st century. We continually shake our heads, gobsmacked with disbelief when we witness anti-vaxxers, QAnon conspiracy nuts - hell, conservatism in general (sorry, Dad...) We constantly point to some great breakdown in society or education to explain these things. And yet the fact is, we've never been rational. Scratch the surface on even the most coldly calculating android of a scientist, and you'll discover a whole nest of milk-sucking snakes - a tangle of beliefs the individual takes for granted, never interrogating their own understanding of reality even as they snort at the "superstitions" of others. I think it's fascinating (and I hate to admit, gratifying) that many self-professed skeptics have turned out to be misogynists, using their own appeal to empirical reality and intellectualism to mask their ugly bigotry. Bigotry is never rational, it is emotional, and this emotion is based on a framework of values, crafted over years of misinterpreted experiences, hearsay, and dogma, handed down from generation to generation.
What do we make of anti-vaxxers, then? Are these formerly rational people who (mostly) had their children rightly vaccinated against a battery of childhood diseases, taking on a very very small risk of side-effects for the sake of immunity against crippling and deadly illness, only to suddenly go mad and refuse to receive protection against a modern plague? Are they a tree full of parrots, screeching "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" as justification for their own irrationality? Are they a bunch of pop-eyed morons, babbling about government conspiracies and Armageddon? What the hell happened to make Americans suddenly lose their ever-fucking minds?
Honestly, the current anti-vaxxing craze (never quite as large or monolithic as we think it is) isn't some "new" thing. People have always been hesitant about getting vaccines. If you think about it, vaccines are very counterintuitive: "You want to push a sharp object under my skin, and put dead viruses into me, in order to protect against the possibility that I might get sick from that same virus?" This literally goes against zillions of years of evolution. Our skin was formed as a barrier against the outside world. And yes, people get surgeries all the time, and yet needles are more invasive somehow - surgery is just a kind of managed wounding, and wounds are something we deal with all the time; but needles are the purview of venomous creatures, of scorpions and spiders and serpents whose horrid peptides twist and ravage the body. Needles are, to our deepest brains, Bad. So when a harried, underpaid nurse comes along to jab us, we have to do some serious suppression of all our evolutionary misgivings. We have to be utterly convinced that this is good for us. And if you think about it, yes, a vaccine that was rushed out in months, where most take years to approve, does somewhat erode the suppressive power of the forebrain.
"But the FDA said it was okay..." Oh, and you believe the government? Sheep! What we have here, in this moment of toxic belief, is a perfect storm of years of simmering anti-government resentment mixing with medicinal misgivings, economic turmoil, and the simple weird fact that this plague is...mostly remote. Quick show of hands, who knows someone who had COVID? I knew at least two, both of them coworkers. Both survived. I've heard of several more. I live in a small town, off the beaten path, in a majority white, rural community; COVID is mostly a "city" virus, striking high concentrations of people. I've seen the images on TV, heard the stories about hospitals turning people away. I am rightly concerned and frightened, and I take precautions - both vaccines, and looking to get the booster when it's my turn.
But here's the rub: I don't see the plague happening. I don't see cartloads of bodies being hauled off to mass graves. I don't see depopulated villages, unplanted fields, packs of wolves, Flagellants wandering the byways with whips, scourging their flesh. I don't see breakdowns of government and independent militias setting up roadblocks. For myself, as with the vast majority of Americans, the Plague is remote, a televised event, with only its side-effects - the empty shelves in the stores, the high prices, the closing factories, the mask mandates and vaccines - being readily apparent. We know people who've had it, we hear about people who've had it or died from it, but most of us have never experienced it. Post-lockdown, we're mostly going about our lives. Even as a much more deadly and contagious variant of the virus is now wreaking havoc across the United States, we're acting as though the Pandemic is mostly over. Even the very symptoms of the virus have a peculiar uncertainty to them - like a cold or a flu, just amplified to a deadly level. It is in this kind of weird environment, where one of the deadliest diseases humanity has ever known seems somehow...distant...that doubts begin to trickle up from our hindbrains. And when we begin to doubt one version of reality, however true it might be, we begin to substitute another version that better suits our psychological needs.
And what psychological need could anti-vaccine sentiment possibly meet? Simply, the need for autonomy. It's back to the old fly-vs.-drive debate: driving is 1,000 times more dangerous than flying, statistically, but our need for control and decision-making practically forces us behind the wheel of our personal half-ton chaos missile. It's the emotional reaction again, the horror of plunging to earth trapped in a giant burning metal coffin with hundreds of strangers with absolutely no control over your circumstances - despite the fact that this possibility is extremely remote.* In the same way, we have no control over what is in that needle they're sticking into your arm, and of course they're going to say "You'll be fine", although you saw your cousin re-post an article on Facebook about a woman getting blood clots from the vaccine, nevermind the side-effects they'll actually admit to...in the face of uncertainty and lack of control, it's easy to understand why people would exercise their autonomy not to get the vaccine. Even if their certainty is unfounded, at least it's something to hold onto.
"But Rick," you say. "Isn't the cure for Irrationality the bracing vaccine of Rationality?" To this I say, yikes no. Remember the last time your highly rational comment "owned" an anti-vaxxer on Facebook? How it completely rocked their world and converted them to the True Light of Getting Your Fucking Shots So You Don't Die? Yeah, I don't remember that either. Or remember when you calmly explained to Dad at Thanksgiving that same-sex attraction is a perfectly normal part of the human experience, and he apologized and immediately went out and bought a rainbow flag? Ha. I guarantee that even if you eloquently, rationally discussed him down to a thoughtful "Huh, I'd never thought about it that way", within a day he'll be back to ranting about the "[homophobic slur redacted]'s ruining this country." Changing someone's beliefs with mere rationality is like trying to melt a glacier with a hair dryer. You'd need to change the environment (like say, with "Climate Change"...?) to slowly thaw that rock-hard accumulation of false confirmation and inaccuracies that constitutes their Armor of Reality.
Notice I keep using that phrase? Because the Armor of Reality is, underneath everything, the Armor of Belief. We build it up - or rather, it builds itself up - to protect itself against uncertainty. And that in and of itself is not a bad thing! We humans need that psychic armor, especially in the 21st Century when marketing, scams, and straight-up disinformation become more and more sophisticated and instrusive, trying to ensnare us in a dream-world where their claims seem credulous and not giving them our money and freedom seems completely irrational. But I think it's important that our Armor of Belief must align with objective reality, otherwise we're defending the indefensible. It can't be an unexamined, monolithic, adamantine thing that fools itself; instead it must allow room for doubt, in order to grow and change. The point of this Armor is not to protect our own beliefs in and of themselves, but to defend us against all the false information swirling around us every day.
In conclusion, please remember that milksnakes don't drink milk. They eat vermin. Leave the poor snakes alone.
Rick Out.
*Note that the odds of 1 in 7,178 for dying in an airplane included private flights, which are inherently more dangerous than commercial flights (although still far less dangerous than personal vehicles, considering the amount of training, safety checks, air traffic control, etc.). If personal flights were removed, the odds would be even smaller for dying on a plane.**
**Even as I say this, I'd still rather drive...yes, I'm a hypocrite. Not because I'm afraid of flying, but because I hate the way airlines treat their customers like cattle and get away with it, packing them in and charging exorbitant fees while the TSA gropes and harasses you at the airport with little effect on national security. Also, vehicular travel is pretty cheap. If given the choice I'd prefer a train to all forms of travel, but sleeper cars are super expensive.
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