HYPERTROPHY OF SOCIAL COGNITION--THE END TIMES

I'd say the world is truly in uniquely dire straits. For example, the Planet has experienced previous waxings and wanings of climate changes, but never has it had the huge human population numbers it now has. For example, with the fully documented melting of the Himalayan glaciers, one-third of humanity--in South Asia, mainland Southeast Asia, and East Asia--soon will be lacking in fresh water supplies.

Yet, I'd say, from observing global history, the world has always been in a steady-state "end-times." Look at 14th-century Europe (with its Hundred-Years' War and the Black Death, when one-third of Europeans perished) as explicated by Barbara Tuchmann, in "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century." What would the Incans have concluded when the Spaniards invaded in 1520, or the Aztecs, or the Mayans, or the North American Native Americans when their civilizations were being destroyed? Or, the people of Alsace-Lorraine when their region changed hands seven times due to seven wars between France and Germany in the four decades before World War I? Or, the tumultuous and mind-boggling events of 20th-century China with its great famines and warlords stalking the land, the invasion of Japan and WW II, and the communist takeover with the human disasters of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution--that affected hundreds of millions of people? Or, Europe from WW I, through the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler, the Holocaust, and WW II?

It seems that any peaceful lull in history was only a time when dark forces were gathering for the punctuated disasters looming over the horizon. It should be obvious that human history over its entire time-frame has rarely been peaceful. Social breakdown? Read about it any time in the 20th or even 19th-century. Economic recession or even depression in America? Nineteen, I believe, since 1776. Wars? Too many to count. Pestilence? How about the plague of London, in 1665, or the 1917 world-around Great Influenza Epidemic, when perhaps 40 million people died?

The quote above, when the Archbishop Wolfstan stated that the world was rushing toward its end, came just 14 years after a great panic in Europe, when it was widely believed the world would "end" with the turning over of the millennium. Seems humans have in their psychological apparatus a great capacity for "hypertrophy of social cognition," which induces us to see purpose, design, even intention when it is not there. As a boy, I spent some wonderful moments in my side yard picking out the faces in the clouds. Studies have shown that when people are presented with truly random numbers, they do not believe the randomicity, as they believe they detect patterns. Think of John Forbes Nash, Jr. (the Russel Crowe character) in the film "A Beautiful Mind." The human mind is beautiful alright--or, at least adept--in imagining patterns in historical events, especially when it has been influenced by 2000-year-old apocalyptic writings, and a belief in teleological programming. Look for patterns, "patterns" will be there.

It has been a rather steady-state apocalyptic times for humanity in most all world regions. The Four Horsemen have always been galloping toward us. When were they ever not?

AMAZING ACTS OR HYPERACTIVE IMAGINATION?

Perhaps you have read the long-lived story perennially circulating since the President Kennedy assassination which purports to demonstrate "amazing coincidences" between that event and the Lincoln assassination one century previous. The endlessly forwarded email attachment that I received (Feb. 2008), titled "crazy history story," leads with an injunction: "Have a history teacher explain this--if they can." Feeling personally challenged, I began thinking about visiting the respective presidential libraries (Boston and Springfield) to begin many months of historical research to investigate the veracity of the claims. However, being a prudent investigator who understands the importance of evaluating resources at one's disposal to carry out research, I instead visited snopes.com at http://snopes.com/history/american/lincoln-kennedy.asp This Snopes specializes in debunking urban legends and provides an adequate explanation of the Lincoln-Kennedy "amazing coincidences" hoax, rating it "unclassifiable veracity."

Snopes labels the account as a catalog of "mere superficial coincidences that fail to touch upon the substantial differences and dissimilarities that underlie them." For example, I have read elsewhere that some medical historians claim that Lincoln exhibited symptoms of Marfan syndrome, which explains the abnormal elongation of his limbs. How does one compare this disorder of Lincoln's (if true) to Kennedy? This is the problem inherent in a list of "coincidences": there are myriads of other facts that might be more salient, but are not comparable in any meaningful way.

What for me is an even more interesting question is why we seem to have a need to believe such "amazing coincidences" in the first place? Anthropologist Pascal Boyer has written that we see purpose, intention and design even when they are not there. He calls it hypertrophy of social cognition. It is a hypersensitivity to agency, in that we attribute intention (by Providence, God, the Universe, Divine intervention) where only randomness exists. Have you ever seen faces in clouds? People claimed to have seen Satan in the billowing smoke issuing from the World Trade Center on 9/11. Our imagination creates what is not there outside our imagination. Humans have an overdeveloped sense which creates patterns in randomness. When people are shown a string of heads and tails produced by a random-number generator, they tend to believe they are not truly random--they look too orderly and thus rigged.

This is not to assert that there is not considerable nonrandomness in the world, but to answer the question of why we are inclined to believe a catalog of supposed "amazing coincidences?" The answer seems to be that we want to believe there are deeper meanings in our everyday lives and in historical events, meanings that dispel what otherwise seems to us to be reality too random and lacking sufficient purpose and meaning. We do not want to feel our lives are random and purposeless; we would like to believe that we as individuals lead lives that are filled with amazing coincidences. And, if we can detect nonrandomness within historical events, then we feel we are justified in believing that everything--including our own lives--are actually much more than just random acts of a random-number-generator Universe. We desperately want to believe that "amazing coincidences" are actually attributes and acts of an Amazing Creation--and we are its amazing nonrandom Acts.