One of the many things that baffles me about my fellow humans is how hard it is for people to say, "Well, I guess I was wrong, then."
I mean, I'm sure I've got as many idées fixes as the next guy. There are parts of my worldview I'm pretty attached to, and models for how the universe works that I would be absolutely astonished to find out were incorrect. But I'd like to think that if I were to be presented with hard evidence, I'd have no choice but to shrug aside my astonishment and say it.
"Well, I guess I was wrong, then."
This attitude, however, seems to be in the minority. Many more people will hang onto their preconceived notions like grim death, sometimes even denying evidence that is right in front of their eyes. I distinctly recall one student who, despite being a young-earth creationist, elected to take my AP Biology class, about which I was up front that it was taught from an evolutionary perspective. She was quite friendly and not at all antagonistic, and one time I asked her what her basis was for rejecting the evolutionary model. Did she doubt the evidence? Did it strike her as an illogical stance? Did the whole thing simply not make sense to her?
No, she assured me -- she knew the evidence was real (and overwhelming); the whole argument was impeccably logical and made good sense to her.
She simply didn't believe it. Despite all of the science she knew (and excelled at; she damn near aced my class, which was no mean feat), she simply knew that the Bible was literally true.
I didn't question further -- my aim, after all, was understanding, not conversion -- but I left the conversation feeling nothing but puzzlement. My only conclusion was that she defined the word knowledge very differently than I did.
To take a less emotionally-charged example, let me tell you a story about a man named John Murray Spear.
Spear was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1804, and from a young age attended the Universalist Church, eventually studying theology and being ordained. He became minister of the congregation in Barnstable, and using his position fought for a bunch of righteous causes -- women's rights, labor reform, the abolition of slavery, and the elimination of the death penalty.
Spear, though, had another set of interests that were a little... odder.
He was a thoroughgoing Spiritualist, believing not only in the afterlife -- after all, that belief is shared by most Christian sects -- but that the spirits of the dead could and did communicate with the living. He delved into the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, both of whom had attempted to give a scientific basis for spirit survival (and for the related belief in a soul as a substance or energy independent of the body). Spear's obsession eventually brought him into conflict with the Universalist Church leaders, and in the end he followed his heart, giving up his ministerial position and breaking all ties with the church.
In 1852 he wrote a tract in which he claimed to be in contact with a group called the "Association of Electrizers," which included not only Spear's namesake, the Universalist minister John Murray, but Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin Rush.
You have probably already figured out that all of these men were dead at the time.
This didn't stop Spear. He produced documents with texts from Murray et al., and which included their signatures. Asked by skeptics how ghosts could sign their names, Spear claimed that okay, he'd held the pen, but the ghosts had guided his hand. The texts contained information on how to combine technology and Spiritualism to create a source of energy that would elevate humanity to new levels, so he set about building a machine in a shed on a hill in Lynn, Massachusetts that he claimed would release a "New Motive Power" using a "messianic perpetual motion machine."
Whatever the fuck that means.
So Spear and a few followers got to work building their machine out of copper wire, zinc plates, magnets, and one (1) dining room table. After months of effort, Spear and an unnamed woman he called "the New Mary" held a ceremony where they "ritualistically birthed" the machine in an attempt to give it life. Then they turned it on.
Nothing happened.
After a couple more abortive attempts to get it going, Spear's Spiritualist friends got fed up, destroyed the machine, and told Spear he could go to hell.
This is the point where you'd think anyone would have said that magic phrase -- "Well, I guess I was wrong, then." Not Spear. Spear became even more determined. He seemed to follow that famous example of a faulty logical chain, "Many geniuses were laughed at in their time. I'm being laughed at, so I must be a genius." He kept at it for another two decades, never achieving success, which you no doubt could have predicted by my use of the phrase "perpetual motion machine." It was only in 1872 that he said he'd received a message from the Association of Electrizers telling him it was time to retire.
But until his death in Philadelphia in 1887, he handed out business cards to all and sundry saying, "Guided and assisted by beneficent Spirit-Intelligences, Mr. S. will examine and prescribe for disease of body and mind, will delineate the character of persons when present, or by letter, and indicate their future as impressions are given him; will sketch the special capacities of young persons... Applications to lecture, or hold conversations on Spiritualism, will be welcomed."
On the one hand, you have to admire Spear's tenacity. On the other... well, how much evidence do you need? Surely on some level he was aware that he was making it all up, right? He doesn't seem to have simply been mentally ill; his writings on other topics show tremendous lucidity.
But he had an idea that he wanted to be true so badly that he just couldn't resign himself to its falsehood.
I have to wonder, though, if there might be a strain of that in all of us. How would I react if I learned something that completely overturned my understanding? Would I really shift ground as easily as I claim, or would I cling tenaciously to my preconceived notions? I wonder how big a catastrophe in my thinking it would take to make me rebel, and like my long-ago student, say, "Okay, I see it, I understand it, but I don't believe it"?
It's easy for me to chuckle at Spear with his Association of Electrizers and New Motive Forces and messianic perpetual motion machines, but honestly, it's because I already didn't believe in any of that stuff. Maybe I'm as locked into my worldview as he was. As journalist Kathryn Schulz put it, "Okay, we all know we're fallible, but in a purely theoretical sense. Try to think of one thing, right now, that you're wrong about. You can't, can you?"
The facile response is, "Of course not, because if I knew I was wrong, I would change my mind," but I think that misses the point. We all are trapped in our own conceptual frameworks, and fight like mad when anything threatens them. The result is that most of us can be presented with arguments showing us that we're wrong, and we still don't change our minds. Sometimes, in fact, being challenged makes us hang on even harder. It's so common that psychologists have invented a name for the phenomenon -- the backfire effect.
Perhaps Spear is not that much of an aberration after all. And how is this desperate clinging to being right at the heart of the political morass we currently find ourselves in here in the United States?
Once again, how much evidence do you need?
So those are my rather depressing thoughts for the day. A nineteenth-century Spiritualist, and an attitude that is still all too common today. At least, for all Spear's unscientific claptrap, he still found time to support some important causes, which is more than I can say for the modern crop of evidence-deniers.
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