musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Dost thou conspire against thy friend?


What is it that makes us believe? For that matter, what is belief? If it has evidence to support it, does it transmute into knowledge -a different Magisterium? When I was a child, every once in a while when I happened to think about somebody, the phone would ring and it would be them. It didn’t take very many of these coincidences to make me wonder whether my thinking of their name had, in fact, caused them to phone. At that age, it was easy enough to confuse cause and effect. It was easy to believe.

In fact, it was all quite exciting, actually. I would sometimes think really hard about somebody -the little girl with curly hair that sat in front of me in grade 7, for example- certain that it was just a matter of time before she realized I was thinking about her and decide to call me at home. And, when it didn’t happen, I would stare at her (even more) at school just to imprint the command. It only served to annoy her, but I was as certain as a 12 year old boy could be that it was just a matter of practice. Magical thinking is seductive.

I thought the same might be true of prayer as well, but I sensed I had to be really careful with it; there were rules. Like, don’t ask for anything that might disadvantage somebody else or it might seem selfish. And don’t inundate the heavens with too many silly requests -like having hotdogs for dinner twice a week, or helping me find somebody at school that would consent to go out with me- those are bound to fail.

No, tempered reasonable requests that flaunted my altruism might have had a better chance of earning me the hoped-for rewards, deserved or not. But failures to earn heavenly beneficence gradually wore me down, and as I aged, it occurred to me that more than wishing, more than belief alone, was required for earthly results.

I don’t want to suggest that it made me bitter, but the lessons of the years certainly disentangled any consistent or reliable rewards from magical thinking –any rewards, actually. So, it is with the skeptical wisdom of Age that I regard much of the wishful-thinking I see paraded on many of the social media sites -the Conspiracy theories, for example, or the even more fanciful misdirections that occasionally pop up unheralded on my Facebook page.

Frankly I don’t understand their genesis, let alone their appeal, but I admit to being an ageing white male who no longer bothers much about the silly theories that manage to recruit people who are desperate for a change in their status, or who, perhaps, just need something to believe in again. It’s not that I don’t care about them, or wish to ignore their plight, but merely that they seem to have fallen into a variation of Samuel Johnson’s famous trap: the triumph of hope over experience.

What’s more interesting for me, however, is that the impetus to believe in the fantastical is not a recent fad, nor a result of mere dissatisfaction with the direction in which modern life is headed. In fact, the seeds were sown far back in history, as is pointed out in an essay by Timothy Pettipiece from Carleton University: https://theconversation.com/history-repeats-itself-from-the-new-testament-to-qanon-156915

 ‘[T]he first Christians… viewed their world as a cosmic battleground and struggled to interpret an often violent and chaotic social context. Like QAnon today, some early Christians speculated about overturning their contemporary socio-political order using imagery of demons and holy war.’

I have to admit that the logic of that approach totally escapes me, but then again, I’m not at all dissatisfied with my life so far. Apparently, many see the world differently though -the followers of QAnon have a more gnostic view of reality: ‘the basic premise of the gnostic worldview is that reality is not what it appears. Ancient gnostics believed that the world we perceive is, in fact, a prison constructed by demonic powers to enslave the soul and that only a small spiritual elite are blessed with special knowledge — or gnosis — that enables them to unmask this deception.’

Stranger still, and perhaps only tenable for the modern cognoscenti, some ‘QAnon followers appear to believe that the real cause of the crisis is an underground religious war being waged against legions of illuminati demons. Building on the Pizzagate conspiracy theory of 2016, this belief morphed into a more expansive “end of the world” narrative.’ Uhmm…

And yet as an outsider only peeking through curtains on the window, those features I can identify bear more of a resemblance to a Gothic horror story, or maybe a bedtime story gone horribly wrong in which Hansel and Gretel do not escape from the witch, or in which the three bears come back before Goldilocks can escape out the back door.

And yet fairy stories, like social interactions, work better when attempting to smooth the hard edges of life with hope. It’s how we want our children to think about things: that rewards are more effective than punishments for changing behaviour; that frightening others, or threatening them with consequences they are not equipped to handle, may only make them withdraw, only make them relinquish power to those who promise they have the solution, however untenable it may seem at first glance.

I’m glad I remember different types of bedtime stories from my parents; there always seemed to be a better way out of uncomfortable situations so I could sleep undisturbed by menacing dreams. I did worry about the mice in the ‘Who will bell the Cat?‘ one, though. My father closed the book and turned off the light without giving me an answer.

Still, I suppose you have to figure some things out for yourself, no matter how old you are. And anyway, there are always the Reader’s Digest books in the bathroom, eh?

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gozzter

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