Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ but he was expected by the parents and the school governors to foster in the students those ideas which would enable them to fit easily into a society for which the education they were receiving was a necessary qualification. He needed to encourage his students to develop their own ideas, but these ideas should not run counter to the ideas that their parents and the school governors wanted them to hold. He could have done what most parents and teachers do. They make it very clear to the children that their ideas are wrong, stupid and wicked. They have to give up their own ideas and accept those of the adults because the adults’ ideas are right, intelligent and good. When children do this, they become what adults call ‘good children’. As a result, many children grow up believing that, if they think anything which is different from what they have been taught to believe, there is something seriously wrong with them. They feel guilty when one of their own truths creeps into their consciousness, and they look for and follow those leaders who demand uncritical devotion. How else would people like Hitler in Germany in the twentieth century and Kim Jong Il in North Korea in the twenty-first century get such blindly obedient followers?

      This was not the kind of education the headmaster wanted to give his students, but his was a high-achieving school. As he told me, the governors expected him to maintain this high standard; parents sent their children to the school in order that they do well, both at school and in their subsequent careers. Most of the children wanted to achieve, but some of the students took the need to achieve too seriously. They worked too hard and worried too much. He wanted to tell these students that such anxious effort was un necessary, and that they should enjoy their schooldays, but would the governors and the parents see this advice as being in the interests of the students?

      Small children know that they see things differently from their parents. Some children manage to hang on to this knowledge and to value their own point of view, despite the authoritarian adults they encounter. Some lucky children have parents who take the child’s point of view seriously. When we take another person’s view seriously we are not necessarily agreeing with that person. A parent can say, ‘I appreciate that you have good reasons for staying up late, but I have good reasons to want you to go to bed now. In this particular situation my reasons are going to prevail. Go to bed now.’

      When we take other people’s point of view seriously, we are implicitly acknowledging that our different points of view arise from the way we are as human beings. Many religious leaders talk about how important it is that we all accept people of other faiths, and there are many ecumenical gatherings of priests, rabbis, vicars, ministers and imams. In these meetings, are all these clerics saying that their different beliefs are of equal value? Or are they merely being polite to one another while secretly thinking, ‘I’m the only one that is in possession of the absolute truth and the rest of you are going to burn in hell’s fires’?

      When the charge of being subversive is levelled at me by believers, I am always told that I am saying that all relative truths are equally valid. I immediately point out that I would not be so stupid as to say this. What I am saying is that we cannot help but have our own individual truths, but to show that our own truths are valid we have to test them by gathering evidence that this is so. This usually brings the discussion to an end, because those ideas which are claimed to be the absolute truths of a religion are usually the kind of ideas for which good evidence is hard to find.

      There were no questions about religion after my lecture. Rather, parents wanted to know about their children’s future. My answers were not particularly comforting. I said that no one was in a pos ition to predict what the future of these students would be. The parents’ belief that success at school led to a successful career was based on the parents’ experience. They were assuming that the future would, more or less, be the same as the past. It is unlikely that the students saw the future in the same way as their parents did. Most children learn a good deal about climate change in school, so many of the students would probably know more about climate change than their parents did, and they probably did what all of us do when we hear of some likely but unpleasant outcome of climate change. We calculate what age we will be when it is predicted to occur. It is not so easy for teenagers to comfort themselves with the thought, ‘I’ll be dead by then.’ On the BBC Radio 4 programme Leading Edge the scientist Richard Sellay, talking about how climate change will affect wine production in Britain, said, ‘By 2080 the temperature in summer England is going to increase by 4.5 to 5 °C. So there’ll be Riesling on the slopes of Snowdonia, Manchester Merlot, and Sheffield Shiraz.’¹⁰ This sounds all very jolly, but, if this prediction is close to being correct, there will be a steady warming of the planet over the students’ lifetime. However, there are so many variables involved that scientists cannot make precise predictions. Most scientists were surprised when, in the summer of 2007, the Northwest Passage became clear enough for shipping to pass through it. That the ice was melting was known, but that it would melt so quickly was not expected.

       Chapter Two The Curious World We Live In

      Even as it reveals the world to us in increasing detail, science uncovers greater and greater uncertainties. This is why many people scorn science, and reject its findings, especially when these findings throw doubt on the way they see themselves and their world.

      Anthropologists can only guess when our species acquired self-consciousness, but, whenever this happened, our ancestors lost the ability to accept the world around them simply as a fact of life with which they had to deal as best they could. Now they became aware of how puny they were in the vastness of the world. They could ask themselves, ‘What is my place in the world?’ ‘How can I control what happens?’ They had developed technologies for finding food and shelter, but, for this knowledge to be reliable, events such as the rising and setting of the sun had to be reliable. Now they doubted, and, in doubting, became aware of their utter helplessness in a world they neither understood nor controlled. Their lives depended on the rising of the sun, and now they could ask, ‘What shall I do if the sun does not rise tomorrow?’ They were learning more and more about the world, but, rather than accepting their helplessness and then working piecemeal to achieve understanding and control over parts of their world (the way science works), many people preferred the easy but delusional solution of creating a fantasy of complete power. The Incas believed that they could make the sun rise each morning by carrying out the ritual of plucking the beating heart from a human sacrifice and presenting it to their sun god. The process seemed to be effective because every morning the sun rose. They could say to themselves, as many people still do, ‘I might be weak but I have access to total power through my gods.’

      People create their gods in their own image. Jesus was born a Jew in Palestine but, as Christianity moved westward, Jesus acquired blond hair and blue eyes. As Howard Jacobson said, ‘The last thing Jesus looks on the cross is Jewish.’¹

      Humans understand themselves through stories, and so they understood their gods through stories, including stories that explained how the world began and why it operates as it does. Gods, like parents, gave rewards and punishments. The gods punished the wicked with droughts and rewarded the good with a bountiful harvest.

      Within each small society different individuals would have created a variety of gods with their stories, but such a variety would have reminded everyone that these gods and stories were fantasies. A fantasy’s capacity to comfort and embolden is very limited. What was needed was an absolute truth. Very likely each person claimed that his god was the one true god, while all the others were im agin ary ones. However, the mark of power is being able to force other people to abandon their ideas and to accept yours. Thus in each society the most powerful person, aided by some skilful deception masquerading as magic, could insist that his god was real and powerful, and therefore must be obeyed.

      Gods have their own dogmas, and these include how the world should СКАЧАТЬ