I think superstition is somewhat misunderstood. Narrowly speaking, I don’t believe in broken mirrors, black cats, or ‘bad omens’ in the cultural sense. I do believe in human intuition as a legitimate form of knowing, and I can see myriad ways it has been devalued and outright undermined in our post-enlightenment, postcolonial society. So while we humans are cognitively predisposed to search for patterns and cause-effect, which is what superstition grew out of, there is a shadow side to that which we are beginning to understand. I believe in order to best, and most ethically, engage with these ways of knowing, we need to be aware of biases and cognitive fallacies that interfere with intuition and undermine it as a legitimate form of knowledge seeking.
We know humans are predisposed to certain cognitive biases. We like to be right. We form groups and assign positive attributes to our groups. We assign negative attributes to other groups. These attributes have little to do with reality, instead formed by culture. This is why racism will never be solved through “colorblind” efforts; our racist thoughts and actions are too deep to be uprooted by pretending everyone is the same. Racist socialization happens subtly to everyone everywhere, regardless of where in the world you are. Yes, it’s different in different places, but it’s pervasive and insidious. Tema Okun lays it out so well on her website, http://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/, which she stewards as a way of helping us all see through the veil of our biases. White supremacy culture is so pervasive because it creates a false dichotomy between ‘us’ with power (and light skin) and the ‘other’ with ‘less ability/capacity/intelligence’ which ‘explains’ their lack of power. Obviously power comes from good justification, right? Might makes right! The president cannot commit treason or break the law, they’re the law! Please see the dripping sarcasm in these statements, but the pervasiveness of this thinking in American culture specifically is staggering. Because our culture is based in white supremacy. Any sort of ‘intuition’ therefore about the flow of power or determination of a leader or potential leader must, must be tempered by a deep interrogation of our own group identity and biases. I personally see this family of bias as one of the worst offenders for clouding intuition, though that could be one of my own cognitive biases.
Logical fallacies (which again, I can’t get into all of them) are another reason we’ve devalued intuitive ways of knowing. There are so many ways thinking can go wrong. It is so easy to be misled even by our own minds. Public discourse loves employing any number of fallacies not in search of truth, but in search of power. So we must first know ourselves and our lens in order to wade through the quagmire of cognitive and group misrepresentation of thought and ideas. We must acknowledge our worldview from the largest formulations to the smallest. Socrates taught us to know nothing as the basis for knowing anything. And I think that’s a pretty good lens to begin with in all of this. Hold every belief, including your most fundamental worldview lightly in order to be able to receive truth when it appears. And I think it always comes like that, in a sudden acknowledgement of what has been there the whole time, but hidden. It is so jarring to some that we throw a cognitive bias or logical fallacy out there to reject the offering of some new way of seeing reality. The path of truth is painful. You might even say it’s easier to put a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to accept a fundamental, self-disintegrative shift in your perspective. But that lens will then become clearer, and you’ll see new realities of the universe you could never have even imagined before.
The story of the Hubble Space Telescope comes to mind. A few years ago my son was in a space-world hyperfixation period, and we watched the same YouTube documentary on the story of the bumbled Hubble deployment easily half a dozen times. I can’t find the exact documentary, but a shorter introduction to this topic is here. Anyway, when it was launched, the mirror defect ruined the promise of Hubble, to peer into the universe and show us wonders farther than we’d ever seen before. The process of repairing Hubble serves as a metaphor for how our worldview operates: we see only with the first lens given to us, and if that first lens is corrupted, then we see only in part. The costly and difficult process for fixing the mirror, and the reward for doing so, is what we gain when we throw off that first worldview for one that is more inclusive, that shows us everything in greater detail. And then eventually, maybe we get to graduate to a James Webb Telescope level of clarity and perception.
I don’t have citations and perfect scientific tables and data for all these claims. For all you might be thinking, I’m full of it and a false prophet! But your intuition is correct if you know your conclusions don’t serve the interests of power and control. You learn to trust this different way of knowing when you start seeing the fruit of that trust: interconnectedness, greater love, patience, and kindness. These ‘fruits of the spirit’ are, to me, my checks and balances to ever-present, perfectly human, cognitive biases and fallacies. They will always draw us in, but we bypass superstition and embrace a fuller selection of ways of knowing when we acknowledge the devaluation of intuition by systems of power put in place centuries ago. And we can trust intuition when we can rationally examine it for signs of manipulation. It’s a nondual path, for sure, but such is the difficulty of passing a camel through that needle’s eye.
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