We all appreciate that human individuals progress through stages of cognitive development on the way to adulthood. A toddler is simply not equipped to run a country (hold your quips): the brain hasn’t fully developed. Infants love the game of peek-a-boo precisely because they have not yet cemented the idea of object permanence. Language capability improves over many years—decades, actually. Brains are not “fully” developed until the late twenties (yet assert mastery starting in the teen years).
But, what does “fully” developed mean? It means significant further development in structure or capability is not to be expected. Does it mean that brains reach some theoretical ultimate capability—no more improvements possible—or do they maybe stop short of perfection? Why would evolution produce anything substantially better than what provides sufficient selective advantage in an ecological context, in simultaneous consideration of all other organism attributes and the biodiverse and social environments in which they operate? The tangled difficulty of that sentence barely hints at the immense contextual complexity involved.
So, every last one of us ceases brain development well short of some notional limit. Does that stopping point cross the threshold of being able to master all knowledge or understanding about Life, the Universe, and Everything? Of course not. Evidence abounds. So, we will never comprehend it all, given our limited meat-brains.
All this echoes things I’ve said before. What’s new in this post is what I hope will be a helpful analogy to how adults present ideas to children possessing less-developed brains—thus the Nursery Rhyme title. Since adult human brains also stop short of “full” development, how might we expect our imperfect brains to interact with what we can’t fully understand? We encounter this conundrum all the time in giving “sufficient” accounts to children that are effective, even if they must be over-simplified or distorted to get the point across. So, how would a hypothetical species possessing far more wisdom explain the incomprehensible to us, as if we were children to them?
To cut off a potential misunderstanding, I’m not about to assume the role of this imaginary hyper-intelligent being. I have the same limited model of meat-brain, of course. But just as evaluating how three-dimensional objects might be perceived by someone limited to two dimensions (e.g., Flatland) can help us 3-D creatures grasp the merest contours of how four-dimensional objects might be shaped, I hope the analogy to familiar child brains can help us appreciate our own limitations.
It may be unavoidable that some are offended by what seems like condescension. My advice is: don’t take it personally. I’m in the same boat, insulting myself along with everyone else. But, reactions are not under any of our control.
Packaging for Kids
Let’s start by evaluating how we explain difficult concepts to children: concepts that they are not yet mentally prepared to grasp. Many strategies emerge. I go through these examples to remind us of kids’ limitations, all the while carrying a faint echo of our own—which becomes the essential point.
Death and Heaven
Death is a difficult concept for a child. That’s just great: here they are—having just mastered object permanence—and Grandpa just disappears. No fair! What do we tell the kid?
I only know our (twisted) culture well, so I can’t speak to the universality of this approach across cultures and deep time, but a very common one is something like: “Oh, sweetie, Grandpa isn’t really gone. He lives on in another place: a happy place free of pain and annoying grandchildren.” Okay, I couldn’t resist. But, right? Granted, the adults telling these stories often also believe some version of the same. I wonder if the stories we tell kids get stuck as a convenient way for adults to avoid facing difficult realities, codified into more sophisticated dogma.
A clearer case might be when the family dog dies, and is said to be in “Doggie Heaven.” As this is not an explicit teaching of human supremacist religions, it is less likely that the adult buys into the story, yet still casts the event in similar terms. “She’s up there Bumpussing around with all her doggie friends.” (Extra points for catching the cinematic reference.)
Consequences
Children have a shaky handle on the existence of a future beyond the present. “I want the cookie now, and the jar is on the shelf, a chair available nearby for climbing.” Not much thought goes into the many ways this could go wrong: maybe a shattered cookie jar; incriminating sounds audible from the other room; tell-tale crumbs or chocolate smears; suspiciously not hungry for dinner (“growing food”). They have enough capacity to envision the reward of the narrow goal, but not enough to envision the breadth of unintended consequences. Am I really just talking about children, here?
Adults step in with extremely helpful advice that kids totally understand (being facetious), like: “you’ll fall and hurt yourself;” “you might break the cookie jar;” “you’ll spoil your appetite for broccoli.” What the kid actually hears is more like: “Mom doesn’t want me to eat a cookie, and to avoid punishment I had better not do it while she’s in the room.”
When a child is wrestling with a decision as to whether or not to defy stern warnings from parents who are right in front of them, it is well known that it takes until the count of three for them to work it out and back down. Some kids might need higher numbers, or even a Zeno-type approach via a series of bungled fractions that don’t come easily to either adult or child.
Authority
When kids are younger, it goes without saying that the parent/adult has absolute authority. The fact that you may be bodily removed, kicking and screaming, together with a helplessness to meet basic needs without parental help puts a damper on effective resistance (but not a damper on wailing, empirically-speaking).
As an aside, I think I figured out why young kids believe their parents are the ultimate authority—not only of the household, but of the entire community. If a kid asks any other adult if they can have that cookie, the very most likely response is something like: “Let me ask your mom/dad if that’s okay.” What is the kid to deduce other than that all adults defer to their own parents?
As kids age, learn to open the refrigerator and cupboards on their own, and are less likely to be physically carried off, authority is increasingly questioned. Yet, parents tend to maintain enough power so that when a kid is unable to grasp the full context of an unpopular parental decision, the frequent fallback of: “Because I said so!” is still available for use. The more understanding parent might offer the “helpful” and always-welcomed addition: “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
Morality and Social Complexity
Early on, behaviors are shaped by simple reward and punishment schemes. Conforming to rules plays a huge role for kids. They don’t need to understand the rationale for the rules, only that failure to obey carries unpleasant consequences. Sometime later, the approval of others begins to exert its own influence, leading to awareness of societal standards and a sort of inexplicit contract. Eventually, one might appreciate that the letter of the law is an imperfect, skeletal, baseline construct that does not offer guidance to all—or even most—interactions and nuances.
It can be hard to even articulate why we behave the way we do, as our actions simultaneously weigh a number of considerations that interact and counterbalance—many beyond our direct awareness. Plus, there is no one right answer that can be logically defended. We just do our best. How do you explain to a child what you yourself can’t fully articulate to your own satisfaction?
Stories
Stories are perhaps our most powerful means of conveying concepts that are difficult (or ineffective) to spell out directly. Stories start early. Almost every children’s book—besides cajoling the kid to go to sleep—carries a lesson. That lesson is seldom “don’t listen to your silly parents, who know nothing and are making it up as they go,” but tends to reinforce the behaviors parents and our society wish to encourage. Nothing wrong with that: it’s how humans have worked for hundreds of thousands of years.
Our stories provide digestible models that needn’t hash out the withertos and whyfors in order to be effective. Character A took these actions in relation to Character B, and these were the consequences. Don’t be like Character A-hole.
In short, adults cleverly craft stories for children aiming to pass on some kernel of wisdom that would not be well-received in the form of didactic exposition, no matter how elegantly constructed.
Amateur Stories
Okay, so what effective stories can we craft for adult humans to cleverly package ideas that adult humans are cognitively incapable of mastering? Can you spot the flaw? If the authors of the stories suffer the same limitations as the target audience, how can it work? If you asked a five-year-old to construct a story for other five-year-olds about why it’s a bad idea for a brother and sister to marry and have kids, what might you expect to emerge?
The kid will feel that they know all they need to know about brothers and sisters, based on direct experience with their own family and those of cousins and friends. They’ll feel they know plenty about marriage, based on observations of their parents and other parents in their circles. They’ll feel they know about babies and growing families based on plenty of exposure. They’ve got this. Sound familiar?
Just think about the wild variants kids would come up with. Kids say the darndest things! The stories would be all over the place, often quite amusing, and certainly creative. I could predict a common theme: brother-sister marriage is a bad idea because brothers and sisters fight all the time, while married people… oh wait. But would their stories be useful? Maybe sometimes by accident, if the stories effectively instilled a sense that incest is bad news. The main problem is that the stories would tend to be a bit unhinged, in terms of capturing the actual (realistic) pitfalls, and thus would be hard to take seriously: not much sticking power. Just as lies are most effective if generously suffused with truth, stories are most effective if containing a healthy dose of reality, so that real-world examples make numerous contact-points with the story.
The adult version crafted for kids would probably contain crucial elements like birth defects, social exclusion, loss of livelihood, and general sadness/regret (fewer toys). The five-year-old, not steeped in these concepts would be very unlikely to conjure a story featuring these elements.
Wanted: Wise Storytellers
We still need stories to guide us. But, just as children are not the best authors of stories that can teach other children what children don’t understand, humans are not the best authors of stories that can teach humans what humans don’t understand. Echoing Erin Brockovich: because we suck at it.
Wait, what have I just said? If human authors are unequal to the task, and we can’t exactly dial up (non-existent?) hyper-intelligent aliens, we’re out of luck, right? No: soooo wrong. Humans are a tiny and very recent part of the cosmos, or even of life on Earth. Where, then, might we find wisdom?
I’m suggesting that we listen more carefully to lessons whose origins lie beyond humans. Rather than leave it to us to concoct, fabricate, manufacture, conjure stories out of our meat-brains, let the much older and wiser natural world write the script for us to read.
At the most fundamental scale, we can watch the way the actual real universe (and its constituent matter) works. This is what physics does. Contrary to what post-modernists would claim, physics is not a human creation, but a human reading of a much older, broader reality. Quarks and electrons obeyed the same rules well before life took notice, While we will never comprehend the full glory of emergent complexity, we can appreciate the stable wisdom embedded in an ancient code: a code to which we owe our existence: the ultimate authority. Because it says so.
But perhaps the most instructive source is other life—which invariably abides by physics, thus acting as a messenger of that base wisdom. Because humans have dangerously deviated from an ecologically-rooted tradition, we have invited ruinous consequences for our own species and a multitude of others by heeding deeply flawed stories of our own concoction.
I really love Indigenous traditions that speak of our older brothers and sisters—the plants and animals—who can teach us much about how to live on this planet. It’s not just a romantic notion. Great wisdom—only tiny facets of which we ourselves are capable of generating—is encoded in the community of life. Having been shaped over an inconceivable yawning gulf of time by the most clever feedback mechanism ever, species who are able to survive are performing countless genius acts that are vetted to work in the long term. By contrast, notions spun out of human brains have essentially none of that enormous contextual grounding, vetting, or track record—and the results are on display all around us.
In the introduction to this post, when your came across “hypothetical species possessing far more wisdom [than us],” did your thoughts go straight to “space alien?” Did it occur to you that other species on this planet might possess a non-cerebral type of wisdom that is missing in our shortcut mental models?
Members of modernity are not trained to attend to lessons from “inferior” life. After all, a hedgehog can’t help me build a skyscraper or launch a communication satellite. Worthless! A hedgehog, however, wisely perceives no value in such ventures. So, wait: was the “worthless” comment above directed at the hedgehog, or the hedgehog’s take on artificial satellites?” Rather than dismiss the hedgehog, it bears asking why it perceives no value, and what it might be getting right.
It will take some time and training to listen to external stories. My own journey has barely begun, but my posts on wasps and newts contain hints.
What Rhymes?
The title of this post has the word rhyme in it, yet I have not offered a single one (not deliberately, anyway). I’ll throw out a few cheap ones, in the context of how we interpret stories that are meant to be metaphorical.
It’s fine to have a story with trolls, elves, dwarfs, goblins, etc. if these devices help us navigate our complex world. The problem is in taking story elements literally. That’s a rookie mistake, all too common among children, and not at all absent among infantilized members of modernity.
Many of the stories we tell about who we are, fundamentally, involve not trolls and elves but souls and selves. There, I did it. Moving on… It might be fine to tell stories of mind, consciousness, God, or whatever, but maybe the peril is in taking them literally. These are inventions/interpretations of our brains, not handed to us by direct observation of the wise world as it is and as it does.
I ended the post on Shortcut Brains with a quote from Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity about the question of truth in stories. As the book goes on to explain, more important than truth is the question: what does the story move? My concern about mind, consciousness, souls, etc. and why my posts continue taking issue is out of unease over what those self-aggrandizing notions move. I believe we already have the answer in the form of our modern culture hurtling toward a sixth mass extinction. Narcissism, human supremacy, individualism (separate selves), and brain-worship go hand-in-hand with stories of the transcendent specialness of mind, consciousness or souls: no longer mere animals or insultingly bound by nasty, brutish physics!
It’s possible that I’m barking up the wrong tree, here. Maybe humans need to have their egos inflated, to be aggrandized, before they’ll suffer a story. But humans of modernity don’t represent all of humanity (over time, especially). The main hint comes from the relentlessly persistent call for humility among Indigenous traditions that have stood the test of time, and lived in approximate ecological balance. By contrast, no examples exist of a hubristic culture tucking into right-relationship with the community of life for long-term success.
Thus, I seek stories that teach humility, and how to live ecologically. The best avenue seems to be stories that come from the tried-and-true more-than-human world, not the self-flattering drivel we fabricate.
