How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [36]
Given the uncertainty and tenuousness of life in the Middle Ages, such superstitions should come as no surprise. In 1662 in England, for example, sixty out of every one hundred children never saw their seventeenth birthday. Life expectancy at birth of boys born in 1675 was thirty. Food supplies were unpredictable and plagues decimated dense but weakened populations. In London alone, there were six epidemics in the one hundred years spanning 1563 to 1665, wiping out between one-tenth and one-sixth of the population each time. Devastating fires routinely destroyed entire neighborhoods. Houses were made with thatched roofs and wooden chimneys, candles were the only source of light, and there were no safety matches. Firefighting techniques consisted of nothing more than throwing buckets of water, usually too little too late. There were no insurance companies, banks for personal savings, or any of the other security measures we take for granted in the modern world. Life really was, in Thomas Hobbes’s apt phrase, “nasty, brutish, and short.”
For the medieval mind, magical thinking provided an understanding of how the world worked: It attenuated anxiety and allowed people to shed personal responsibility by blaming events on bad luck, evil spirits, mischievous fairies, or God’s will, and permitted one to cast blame on others through curses and witchcraft. Astrology, the most popular science of the day, invoked the alignment of the stars and planets to explain all manner of human and natural phenomena, the past, present, and future, and life’s vagaries from daily events to yearly cycles. Only religion could rival astrology as an all-embracing explanation for the vicissitudes of life.
By the end of the seventeenth century Newton’s mechanical astronomy had replaced astrology; the mathematical understanding of chance and probability displaced luck and fortune; chemistry succeeded alchemy; banking and insurance decreased human misfortune and its attendant anxiety; city planning and social hygiene greatly attenuated the power of plagues; and medicine began its long road toward a germ theory of disease. Cumulatively, these events pushed us into the Age of Science, reducing the number of thinking errors and attenuating the power of superstition. Nevertheless, magical thinking is still with us, rearing its head wherever uncertainties arise.
THE MODERN BELIEF ENGINE
Ancestral and medieval superstitions survive in the modern high-tech world because the Belief Engine is a part of human nature. We see instances of this in everything from gambling (lucky streaks, cards, and dice) to athletic performances. In baseball, for example, where players are expected to hit a small, white ball traveling at nearly 100 miles per hour, superstition leads to all sorts of bizarre behaviors on the part of fully modern, educated human beings. Wade Boggs was famous for his superstitions, insisting on running his wind sprints at precisely 7:17 P.M., ending his grounder drill by stepping on the bases in backward order, never stepping on the foul line when taking the field but always stepping on it returning to the dugout, and eating chicken before every game. It is worth noting, however, that such superstitions are not at all uncommon among hitters where connecting with the baseball is so difficult and so fraught with uncertainties that the very best in the business fail a full seven out of every ten times at bat. Fielders, by contrast, typically succeed in excess of nine out of every ten times a ball is hit to them (the best succeed better than 95 percent of the time), and they have correspondingly fewer superstitions associated with fielding. But as soon as these same fielders pick up a bat, magical thinking goes into full swing.
Psychologist Stuart Vyse has documented such modern superstitions in an attempt to provide a psychological explanation for believing in magic. In addition to Boggs’s bizarre behavior,