Read Online Don't Even Think About It by George Marshall - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: George Marshall
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hyperactive mind that is fascinated by everything.
Gilbert argues that our long psychological evolution has prepared us to respond strongly to four key triggers that he neatly summarizes with the acronym PAIN:
Personal : Our brains are most highly attuned to identifying friends, enemies, defectors, and human agency.
Abrupt : We are most sensitive to sudden relative changes and tend to ignore slow-moving threats.
Immoral : We respond to things that we find to be indecent, impious, repulsive, or disgusting.
Now : Our ability to look into the future is one of our most stunning abilities, but, he says, it is “still in the early stages of R&D.”
As Gilbert sees it, the problem with climate change is that it doesn’t trigger any of these. Of the four, he is most inclined to emphasize the lack of Abrupt and Now, which “are things that even a rabbit understands.” But he would not underestimate the importance of Immoral. While we recognize that climate change is bad, it does not make us feel noxious or disgraced. He adds, “If global warming were caused by eating puppies, millions of Americans would be massing in the streets.”
Unless, I suggest, Americans already eat puppies. The taboo is socially constructed, and one could readily imagine an alternative culture in which, following the lead of the hungry pilgrim settlers, it was roast puppy that had become the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving table.
Gilbert concedes the point but not the distinction. “To me,” he says, “socially constructed and evolutionary are different ways of spelling the same thing. The most interesting thing about us as a species from an evolutionary standpoint is not really our opposable thumb or our ability with language; it’s our social life.” It is this that determines the social cues, norms, enemies, and in-group, out-group dynamics that, as I have already argued, are so important in shaping our response to climate change.
Gilbert draws on a large body of research, some of it his own, in the field of evolutionary psychology. The founders of modern evolutionary psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, like to say that “our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind,” which developed to address the specific threats in what they call the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness.”
In this primeval environment, the main avoidable risks were in our immediate surroundings, and it was this that led us to give such a high priority to proximity and certainty in our judgment of risk. This also makes us innately conservative and defensive of our current circumstances—what cognitive psychologists call our status quo . After all, survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty.
Cosmides and Tooby describe the brain as being a “Swiss Army knife” containing specialized tools designed to deal with different tasks. Thus, they argue, we are relatively poor at dealing with large issues (like climate change) and can engage with them only by breaking them down into individual tool-oriented tasks.
Like a Swiss Army knife, the brain also contains things that you never need or don’t even know what they are for. Evolutionary psychologists call these “exaptations”: behaviors that may have been selected in the past for completely different reasons and become co-opted into their present role following a change in environmental circumstances.
Without entering into the intense debate surrounding exaptation, suffice it to say that it contains a highly relevant core concept: that we apply to climate change the psychological tools we have evolved to cope with previous challenges, and that these may turn out to be inappropriate for this new threat. The in-group loyalties and defensiveness that evolved to support small hunter-gatherer groups may be an obstacle when dealing with a universal shared threat. As I suggest later, our avoidance of the issue of climate change may be driven by still-deeper mechanisms
Gilbert argues that our long psychological evolution has prepared us to respond strongly to four key triggers that he neatly summarizes with the acronym PAIN:
Personal : Our brains are most highly attuned to identifying friends, enemies, defectors, and human agency.
Abrupt : We are most sensitive to sudden relative changes and tend to ignore slow-moving threats.
Immoral : We respond to things that we find to be indecent, impious, repulsive, or disgusting.
Now : Our ability to look into the future is one of our most stunning abilities, but, he says, it is “still in the early stages of R&D.”
As Gilbert sees it, the problem with climate change is that it doesn’t trigger any of these. Of the four, he is most inclined to emphasize the lack of Abrupt and Now, which “are things that even a rabbit understands.” But he would not underestimate the importance of Immoral. While we recognize that climate change is bad, it does not make us feel noxious or disgraced. He adds, “If global warming were caused by eating puppies, millions of Americans would be massing in the streets.”
Unless, I suggest, Americans already eat puppies. The taboo is socially constructed, and one could readily imagine an alternative culture in which, following the lead of the hungry pilgrim settlers, it was roast puppy that had become the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving table.
Gilbert concedes the point but not the distinction. “To me,” he says, “socially constructed and evolutionary are different ways of spelling the same thing. The most interesting thing about us as a species from an evolutionary standpoint is not really our opposable thumb or our ability with language; it’s our social life.” It is this that determines the social cues, norms, enemies, and in-group, out-group dynamics that, as I have already argued, are so important in shaping our response to climate change.
Gilbert draws on a large body of research, some of it his own, in the field of evolutionary psychology. The founders of modern evolutionary psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, like to say that “our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind,” which developed to address the specific threats in what they call the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness.”
In this primeval environment, the main avoidable risks were in our immediate surroundings, and it was this that led us to give such a high priority to proximity and certainty in our judgment of risk. This also makes us innately conservative and defensive of our current circumstances—what cognitive psychologists call our status quo . After all, survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty.
Cosmides and Tooby describe the brain as being a “Swiss Army knife” containing specialized tools designed to deal with different tasks. Thus, they argue, we are relatively poor at dealing with large issues (like climate change) and can engage with them only by breaking them down into individual tool-oriented tasks.
Like a Swiss Army knife, the brain also contains things that you never need or don’t even know what they are for. Evolutionary psychologists call these “exaptations”: behaviors that may have been selected in the past for completely different reasons and become co-opted into their present role following a change in environmental circumstances.
Without entering into the intense debate surrounding exaptation, suffice it to say that it contains a highly relevant core concept: that we apply to climate change the psychological tools we have evolved to cope with previous challenges, and that these may turn out to be inappropriate for this new threat. The in-group loyalties and defensiveness that evolved to support small hunter-gatherer groups may be an obstacle when dealing with a universal shared threat. As I suggest later, our avoidance of the issue of climate change may be driven by still-deeper mechanisms
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