The Potential Impact of the Irrational on the Success of Science

The Potential Impact of the Irrational on the Success of Science

presented by

John, Lord Alderdice FRCPsych

to a World Federation of Scientists/Ettore Majorana Foundation meeting on ‘Science in the Third Millennium’ at the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture, Erice, Sicily,

20 August 2010

According to a Pew Research survey of 3,003 Americans, conducted in recent days (but just before 13 August 2010 when President Obama defended Muslims' right to build an Islamic centre near Ground Zero in New York) a growing number of Americans incorrectly believe that President Barack Obama is a Muslim. Some 18% said the President was a Muslim (up from 11% in March 2009) and among Republican supporters, that number was 34%. Just less than that (a third of those quizzed) correctly identified Mr Obama as a Christian, despite his regular public observations of his faith. Forty-three per cent of those questioned said they did not know what Mr Obama's religion was.

This finding is even more startling than the regular observation of the high percentages of people in the Muslim world who believe that the 9/11 attacks were conducted either by the CIA or by Israel in order to implicate Muslims and justify the subsequent attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq and possibly in the future on Iran.

It is clear that whole populations, including in some of the most highly educated parts of the world, can be held in the grip of wholly false beliefs that have potentially enormous and damaging implications for international relations and world peace. It is also clear that such false beliefs have a number of specific characteristics. They usually have some piece of material that can be misinterpreted – the President is called Barack Hussein Obama. His name is unusual and his middle name is a common Muslim name. The misinterpretation has negative connotations – in the aftermath of 9/11 the implication that he is a Muslim is not just randomly negative, it implies that he is an enemy or in league with the enemy of the country. There is a negative and clearly paranoid colouring to the delusion, and it is not reducing in strength through exposure to reality – on the contrary as his overall popularity rating slides, so the idea that he is a Muslim gains strength. The false belief fulfils a function. It expresses feelings of fear and anger in an American community which sees the eclipse of its pre-eminent place in the world, the demise of its remarkable prosperity, the failure in a number of military adventures and the sense that it is losing the so-called ‘wars’ on terrorism, drugs, poverty and so on. The delusionary belief that their President is actually a closet enemy of the state, out to bring it to its knees expresses profound fears and anger about these threats and losses to an America which has positively defined its very identity in the ‘American Dream’ of success and a good life based on its political and economic freedoms, religious faith and educated population. One should not ignore the fact that many people in the country do not share the enthusiasm of the rest of the world that the United States has elected a black President, but to express criticism of the President on account of his skin colour or race is not acceptable in a country which has had such profound struggles, and indeed a civil war, on this very question of the place of Americans of African origin in US society.

It is crucial to observe that this irrational belief is emerging in a country with a free press and an educated population which has access to more information than at any time in history. One is reminded that the Germany in which National Socialism emerged was also one of the most highly educated and advanced countries in the world at the time and had a profoundly democratic Weimar constitution, but its population felt deeply the sense of loss and humiliation represented by the defeat in the First World War, the reparations of the Treaty of Versailles and the economic crisis of the 1930’s and the last Great Depression. In such circumstances education and democratic freedoms are not a sufficient protection against the rise of powerful irrational and dangerous paranoid beliefs, indeed the educated population in Germany turned their abilities to the use and abuse of science itself with the catastrophic consequences which still leave a profound legacy on our world two generations on.

Professor Zichichi, in his important presentation today Why Science is needed for the Culture of the Third Millenium, has emphasized that without the development of language and subsequently of logic it would not have been possible for human beings to move on to the science on which so much of the progress of the modern world is based. Language enabled mankind to step away from the rest of the animal kingdom by being able to exert some more control, inhibition, delay and transformation of his physical emotions of hunger, aggression, anxiety, terror, envy and the sexual drives. The development of language also facilitated communication between individuals and within the self by enabling the capacities of reflection and memory. In addition language made communication and learning possible between groups of people and succeeding generations, especially when it became possible to record thoughts and ideas in written form. Language made possible the growth of logic and the rationality through which it was possible to distinguish between what one wished or feared on the one hand, and external reality on the other. Science took this further by testing thinking against reality in a very powerful way.

It is important to appreciate however that the evolution of language and the development of logic did not remove emotion, nor did it remove the possibility of a falling back or regression into emotionally driven mental functioning and behaviour. In the individual we see dissolution of the more advanced thinking capacities in mental illness and the re-appearance of what we call ‘primary process thinking’. Individuals can also lose the capacity to think rationally and logically as a result of organic damage or emotional overload. All of us as individuals can find our capacity to think logically being transiently affected by anger, through a reversal in fortunes or a humiliation, or more positively by falling in love. However when someone falls mentally ill for organic or psychological reasons such a disturbance of their thinking may not be transient, rarely has positive consequences, and is not usually resolved merely by improving the person’s external circumstances.

One of the disturbances of individual thinking which can appear in psychotic mental illness and in organic dementias is the ‘delusion’. This is a fixed false belief, out of line with the person’s cultural context, and from which the person cannot be persuaded by rational argument or reasonable evidence. Their appreciation of reality is distorted to fit their delusionary belief, rather than their delusion being susceptible to disproof by confronting reality. Their behaviour is then disturbed as they act on the basis of their delusionary ideas. As I noted earlier however fixed false beliefs can also arise in groups where they are widely shared by many people with a common cultural context. This is not a sign of widespread individual psychotic illness or organic disturbance. It is a group phenomenon; a disturbance of the functioning of the ‘mind’ of the group. It does indeed appear that while the group does not have a brain in the way we understand individuals to have it can nevertheless have a mind that operates through the relationships between human beings. What is it that makes whole groups or communities hold to fixed false beliefs contrary to reasonable evidence? Why do communities hold to what we would regard as non-scientific thinking even though individuals within the group may be functioning within normal limits?

From the time of the Enlightenment it was generally assumed that such irrational beliefs were simply a matter of ignorance and that a few generations of education, especially scientifically informed education, would relieve communities of irrationality. However while some progress was made in this regard it was not anything like as widespread as scientific thinkers had hoped, nor was rational scientific thinking a permanent achievement. It is clear that it is not only in the mental life of individuals that irrationality can take over, but also in the thinking of a group or community. Our research in the World Federation of Scientists has shown us that such a descent into irrational or non-scientific thinking is often associated with deep group anxiety. Examples of this arise when a community feels it is in danger of economic chaos, physical external attack, or threats to religious faith, culture or other aspects of the group’s identity. Science and scientific thinking, which one can see as the characteristic of healthy, rational functioning in a group or community, can be damaged when communities descend into fundamentalism which is anti-scientific and produces a primitive form of religion or of group thinking in general. It is important to note that all religious thinking does not fall into this category. I am referring specifically to that form of thinking which we describe as ‘fundamentalist’. Any religious family of belief may be held either in a fundamentalist form, or in a more advanced form. Indeed a descent into the irrational is not a specifically religious issue at all and is not only seen where there is a direct attack on scientific thinking from anti-science religious fundamentalists. Even some scientists can become scientific fundamentalists. The scientific approach can be corrupted from ‘inside the camp’ as it were. A properly scientific approach demands that in the face of uncertainty we take a rational approach which accepts that there is uncertainty, and that we may have to live with ‘not knowing’ for a long time until the truth becomes clear. However when there is a serious threat or uncertainty for a group it may seek to remove the uncomfortable anxiety provoked by this uncertainty by jumping to conclusions which are given a cloak of scientific respectability by the fact that it is held by people who are called scientists, rather than by the scientific rigor of the approach. For example the uncertainty and fear over climate change and environmental degradation can lead communities to jump to illusory conclusions about how far humanity can control the forces of nature rather than living with the uncertainty which a rigorous and long-term scientific investigation requires.

Unfortunately the levers of rational enquiry are not strong in the face of passionate anxiety and the resultant regression into a form of thinking dominated by emotion rather than logic. There are a number of problematic implications. Firstly such thinking is by its very nature not very susceptible to rational argument and debate, not least because part of its function is not to facilitate understanding but to express anxiety. Secondly it tends to be held aggressively (though not usually violently) resulting in attacks on those who insist on holding on to scientific uncertainty. The problem of predicting outcomes in certain circumstances, such as where there are a very large number of variables, or where for other reasons prediction is simply not possible, is very frightening to many people who would rather have false certitude than honest uncertainty. The increasing adoption of irrational beliefs in the United States, for example, is not restricted to the religion of the President. School curricula are being changed to set creationism alongside evolution in science classes. In some cases creationism is actually replacing teaching about evolution. Not alone can we not be sure that education can entirely protect us from unscientific thinking, but even worse education can be made to promote irrational anti-scientific thinking.

How can we ensure that our societies are not overwhelmed by fear-driven irrationality? Some of the answer is directly political with a large ‘P’ and as such may seem outside of the remit of the WFS. What is however within our purview is to apply our scientific approach to understanding the nature of irrationality itself, not only in the individual (as we do in psychiatry), but also in the group. Only if we focus upon and increase our understanding of group irrationality and how and why it occurs can we hope to prevent our global community from falling victim to ignorance and misinformation which pretends to be knowledge, and an appearance or ‘gloss’ of science contributing to the worsening cycle of panic rather than building a truly scientific approach that may be able to help us out of our problems. This is what we have been trying to do through the Permanent Monitoring Panel on Motivations for Terrorism. We believe we have made significant progress in our understanding of irrational group thinking and behaviour, but as Galileo found more than 400 years ago, new scientific understandings which threaten current views and structures of power are usually not well-received and adopted especially when they are presented to a population whose form of thinking is not dominated by rationality. In the same way when we find ways of understanding how irrational beliefs come about we are often accused by the fundamentalists on one side of sympathizing with the fundamentalists on the other side.

An example, from another field, of how apparent progress can actually lead to a worsening reality is provided by the growth of some of the structures of democracy in Africa. In the past, sub-Saharan African society was largely tribal and its technology was modest. The judgement of the tribal chief was often reached after some consultation with the elders but was final, however in the larger scheme of things it was also of limited effect because the capacity to wage war and cause destruction was modest. Law and the institutions of western style democracy accompanied by the technology of security, defence and the weapons of war were rapidly imported into Africa during the twentieth century without a concomitant fundamental change and development of the indigenous culture and in particular without the time for such processes to properly take place. This meant that old-style chiefs could now use electoral processes and law, not to create liberal democracies but to maintain old tribal attitudes, and in addition to enforce them not with the limited capacities of spears and foot-soldiers, but with a fearsome battery of modern weapons of war, which they could not themselves produce, but which are now available for them to use. It had been believed that if the institutional and physical tools of modernity were provided, a tolerant liberal culture would inevitably develop and in short order. It is by no means clear that this is true. The technology made possible by science may well be used by a society whose culture is enriched by a highly developed and positive view of humanity. In this case we can have some chance (though no certainty) of relative peace, stability and mutual benefit and understanding. On the other hand, without the culture of science, the technology developed out of the science of recent centuries can contribute instead to fear, economic chaos, war, and social destruction. Terrorism is a symptom of such cultural regression of the group through fundamentalist ways of thinking, and in addition political radicalization.

The recent economic chaos is another case where the gloss of economic ‘science’ was used to bolster the wish for cost-free prosperity, but actually led to catastrophe. The illusion of the ‘science’ of economics lies in its failure to recognize that with so many variables, and a very high level of complexity of function, accurate prediction in economics is simply not possible. In this case the irrational way of thinking was a not paranoid one developed in the service of fear, but an illusion in the service of a different emotion – the wish for easy wealth. Economic markets are largely a function of group psychology rather than mathematical calculus, and so psychological contrarians are as likely to be able predict outcomes as the mathematical economic analysts. Markets are not random, but nor (except in certain limited contexts) are they predictable, and to believe otherwise is not rational belief, it is an expression of a wish.

In each of these three areas – the paranoid functioning of a group in a climate of fear and uncertainty; the challenge to a group to adapt quickly to new and unfamiliar technological developments; and the seductiveness of the wish to believe in the rapid, easy creation of wealth - we need the culture of science to protect us from disaster. However since we cannot avoid the development of irrational group thinking we must work on a more scientific understanding of man’s irrationality, especially irrationality in group functioning, to help us protect science and the scientific method from being dismissed by religious fundamentalists who have always been suspicious of it, or abused by some who claim to be adherents of science but are actually themselves fundamentalists who mislead many people and potentially bring on cultural catastrophe.

Let me finish by noting that I have concentrated entirely on the potential negative impact of the irrational on the success of science, however this focus is a function of the shortage of time and the immediate dangers of the negative consequences. Irrationality is also crucial for creativity – the capacity to imagine, to dream, to phantasize and to go beyond and sometimes against the current perceived rational view of reality is as essential for scientific as it is for artistic creativity. But my time is gone and the consideration of these positive aspects of the irrational must wait for another day.