Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World by Hank Davis
Authors: Hank Davis
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who minutely weighed guilt against merit.”) Because of our tendency toward social exchange, we can also beseech this agent each time we or our loved ones are about to cross the bridge. That’s one additional way to stack the cards in our favor and gain some apparent measure of control. The occasional sacrificial lamb won’t hurt as well. (It won’t do a lot for the lamb’s health, but it will allow us to sleep more soundly.) Of course, every successful journey across this bridge (remembering that most of them are successful, or the bridge would have been abandoned years ago) further reinforces the notion of a causal agent who can be successfully bribed. Oravi , transivi , vixi . “I prayed, I crossed, I lived.”
And so the search begins for some indication of why God, the causal agent, would have found fault with some or all of the five people in question. It’s likely that any of our lives would have yielded up more than a few glimpses of things that might displease a vengeful deity, but that is irrelevant here. We are not on trial, so to speak. It is our poor, deceased Peruvian friends in 1714 who have presumably brought this on themselves, thus reaffirming our belief that cause and effect or control are always there, if you look hard enough for them.
Two additional points about The Bridge of San Luis Rey : First, Brother Juniper never did determine what it was about the five victims that might have brought about God’s wrath. They all, including two children, had their share of foibles, but nothing particularly noteworthy. Worse yet, for his trouble, Brother Juniper and his document were burned as sacrilegious by the Spanish Inquisition.
The second point is worth considering the next time you hear somebody making prospiritual arguments. Despite his Pulitzer Prize, Wilder is a bit of a cheat in the way he frames his case. Quoting directly from the book, “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.” That’s just not so. There is at least one additional possibility with more to recommend it than either of Wilder’s two extremes. Setting aside the question of whether there is any real comfort in living one’s life in lockstep with a divine plan (which amounts to predestination), the larger problem stems from how the alternative is phrased. The word “accident” has such negative connotations to most people that it would send them screaming into the arms of God. Accidents are bad things. What do we think of when we hear the word “accident”? A wreck on the highway. A child whose birth was unplanned and, often, unwanted. The negative connotations pile up as we dwell on the word. Does anyone really want to believe that the events of our lives and deaths are “accidental”?
So what’s the real alternative? I prefer to see the events of my life as unfolding in a lawful, orderly universe. While it’s true that I don’t have ultimate control over all of the things that befall me, and I can’t predict many of them, I have enough mastery to feel some degree of competence in my day-to-day affairs. The presence of laws, whether the laws of physics or laws made by my fellow humans to regulate our treatment of each other, gives me a sense of mastery over what happens around me. Plainly it is not perfect mastery, but I am not arrogant enough to think I’ll be any safer if I invent a few supernatural agents for the things that are truly beyond my control.
Forget accidents. This is a world full of regularities. It provides us with enough information to make informed choices that will maximize the probability of our successes and pleasures and minimize the probabilities of our failures and pain. Most of the time, the bridges work and do not send you plummeting into a Peruvian gorge or San Francisco Bay or the Hudson River. If I were magically transported back to Peru in 1714, things might have been different. I might have had one look at the material and construction of
And so the search begins for some indication of why God, the causal agent, would have found fault with some or all of the five people in question. It’s likely that any of our lives would have yielded up more than a few glimpses of things that might displease a vengeful deity, but that is irrelevant here. We are not on trial, so to speak. It is our poor, deceased Peruvian friends in 1714 who have presumably brought this on themselves, thus reaffirming our belief that cause and effect or control are always there, if you look hard enough for them.
Two additional points about The Bridge of San Luis Rey : First, Brother Juniper never did determine what it was about the five victims that might have brought about God’s wrath. They all, including two children, had their share of foibles, but nothing particularly noteworthy. Worse yet, for his trouble, Brother Juniper and his document were burned as sacrilegious by the Spanish Inquisition.
The second point is worth considering the next time you hear somebody making prospiritual arguments. Despite his Pulitzer Prize, Wilder is a bit of a cheat in the way he frames his case. Quoting directly from the book, “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.” That’s just not so. There is at least one additional possibility with more to recommend it than either of Wilder’s two extremes. Setting aside the question of whether there is any real comfort in living one’s life in lockstep with a divine plan (which amounts to predestination), the larger problem stems from how the alternative is phrased. The word “accident” has such negative connotations to most people that it would send them screaming into the arms of God. Accidents are bad things. What do we think of when we hear the word “accident”? A wreck on the highway. A child whose birth was unplanned and, often, unwanted. The negative connotations pile up as we dwell on the word. Does anyone really want to believe that the events of our lives and deaths are “accidental”?
So what’s the real alternative? I prefer to see the events of my life as unfolding in a lawful, orderly universe. While it’s true that I don’t have ultimate control over all of the things that befall me, and I can’t predict many of them, I have enough mastery to feel some degree of competence in my day-to-day affairs. The presence of laws, whether the laws of physics or laws made by my fellow humans to regulate our treatment of each other, gives me a sense of mastery over what happens around me. Plainly it is not perfect mastery, but I am not arrogant enough to think I’ll be any safer if I invent a few supernatural agents for the things that are truly beyond my control.
Forget accidents. This is a world full of regularities. It provides us with enough information to make informed choices that will maximize the probability of our successes and pleasures and minimize the probabilities of our failures and pain. Most of the time, the bridges work and do not send you plummeting into a Peruvian gorge or San Francisco Bay or the Hudson River. If I were magically transported back to Peru in 1714, things might have been different. I might have had one look at the material and construction of
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