“Prognostic Myopia”

Corporate executives are under immense pressure
to deliver quarterly earnings,
not to save science, democracy, or the planet.
—Jennifer Jacquet

Evolution is still deciding what to make
of the human capacity for causal reasoning.
—Justin Gregg

For most of my career, when I have taught my unit on the brain to my advanced biology courses, I have challenged my students to recognize that the “evolutionary jury” of natural selection is still out when it comes to the value of our large prefrontal cortex.  I point out that every other species of the genus Homo has gone extinct (and in the case of our closest cousins, neanderthalensis, directly because of we sapiens), and that, therefore, the ultimate survival value of our proportionally bigger brains amongst the animals is still very much up for grabs.

Recently, though, I came across a book by animal behaviorist, Justin Gregg, that systematically makes the case that the uniquely human cognitive capacities that set our brains apart from those of the other animals actually puts us at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the process of natural selection.  Gregg does not mince words when he challenges that the human mind puts us at greater risk of extinction as a species, and as he puts it, “what if we acknowledge that sometimes our so-called human achievements are actually rather shitty solutions evolutionarily speaking?” (p. 16).

The case he makes is quite compelling, and he starts with the relative value of our capacity for causal thinking.  As he puts it, we are “ ‘why?’ specialists,” who can determine how the world works in ways no other animal can, and yet the world is full of animals making successful decisions all the time without needing to know the “why?” of things.  Moreover, the paleontological data shows that for the first roughly 200,000 of our quarter of a million year heritage, we got by just find as well without answering questions of cause and effect.  Hence, causal thinking doesn’t seem to add much survival value for animals in general (including us), and in fact, a strong argument can be made that as we humans have employed this unique capacity of ours more and more in the past 50,000 years, we have steadily decimated the environments in which we live because “with an understanding of how the world has been built comes the knowledge to break it” (p. 15).

Compounding our brain’s ability to do deliberate damage and harm, Gregg argues, is the fact that the human mind has taken the animal capacity for deception to whole new levels.  “Lying” is nothing new in the animal kingdom; from unintentional mimicry to deliberately “playing dead” to the tactical deceptions of male mourning cuttlefish (check it out!), animals of all kinds engage in generating a variety of falsehoods for purposes of survival and reproduction.  However, as Gregg puts it, “our species has taken it to absurd lengths” (p. 59) because of our capacity for language and the theory of mind.  We can lie about any thought we have, and we don’t just lie to protect ourselves; we lie to try and change other people’s thoughts and beliefs.  Furthermore, because we are a social species, we are hard-wired for credulity—to believe what other people tell us to maintain our bonds—and therefore, “we cannot remove the human capacity to both produce and believe lies anymore than we can remove our capacity for walking upright.  It’s who we are” (p. 88).

Yet in a world of social media, 24/7 news cycles, and the world-wide web, the scale of human lying now has the capacity to threaten our very survival.  Misinformation, disinformation, propaganda…we live emersed in lies, and we can employ all of it to justify whatever harm our causal thinking has enabled us to do—from climate change to genocide.  What’s more, our capacity for lying has started to attack the very tools we use to generate actual truth—science, scholarship, public institutions—and therefore, as Gregg puts it, “the question is: can we save us from ourselves before the firehose of falsehoods washes our species from the planet?” (p. 89).

Interestingly enough, I think Gregg’s response to his own rhetorical question would be a qualified “maybe.”  He is not a cynic; he simply takes a non-blindered approach to examining our uniquely human cognitive capacities through the lens of evolution and finds no grounds at all for our self-declared exceptionalism as a species within the animal kingdom. 

Moreover, where he finds this delusion of exceptionalism most problematic is our cognitive tendancy for what he calls “prognostic myopia.”  Basically, he argues that “because our minds evolved primarily to deal with immediate—not future—outcomes, we rarely experience or even understand the consequences of these long-term decisions [i.e. burning fossil fuels, modern food production methods, etc.].  It is the most dangerous flaw in human thinking” (p. 195), and it is compounded by the reality revealed through modern neuroscience that we make nearly all our daily decisions at the subconscious level.  Those parts of our brains involved in this process, he points out, evolved over hundreds of millions of years to deal with the needs of the immediate present for survival; there is no “future” for these mental elements.  Therefore, “our capacity to understand the future and even envision ourselves in it is competing with decision-making systems whose component parts do not truly understand what they are being asked to do” (p. 207).

Or to put it another way:

urgent survival needs mean that we still engage in impulsive behaviors.  And those behaviors, which once promoted our survival and reproductive success, are now suboptimal because we live in an environment in which long-term contingencies play an increasingly important part in our lives (p. 212).

Basically, our brains did not evolve to live in the world those same brains have now created, and Gregg’s ultimate point is that “depending on where we go from here, human intelligence may just be the stupidest thing that has ever happened” (p. 256) from an evolutionary perspective. 

And an excellent “case study” of this potential truth is the behavior of modern corporations.  In another book to cross my path recently, New York University professor, Jennifer Jacquet, has written a scathing satire in the vein of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal in which she “advises” corporate leaders on how to prevent costly safety and product regulations to maximize profits by attacking the researchers and science that support these regulations.  Some highlights of her “advice” to corporations include:

• There are few communication products that money cannot buy.  Does the Corporation need a scientific journal sympathetic to its research? Fund an editor.  Does the proper journal not exist? Create it.  Establish a popular magazine.  Build a website.  Host a scientific gathering. Put together a group of people who appear to be grassroots activists.  The digital media landscape in particular offers limitless options for shaping public perception (p. 71).
• Another way to make the problem go away is to change the language.  The tobacco industry referred to ‘cancer’ as ‘biological activity.’ A consultant to the fossil fuel industry found that ‘climate change’ sounded less frightening to a focus group than ‘global warming’ and recommended the switch in 2002 (and the switch succeeded).  The chemical manufacturers insisted on the term ‘biosolids’ instead of ‘toxic sludge’ (p. 96).
• The policy might not just hurt people, it could kill them, or already has.  Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, which generated hysteria that led to the banning of DDT, and as a result millions have died of malaria.  In addition, many of the world’s poor died of hunger because the benefits of pesticides were not realized (ignore the unsavory problem of unequal food distribution) (p. 144).
• We cannot fix a problem because we’re not hardwired to fix the problem.  (Never mind that we were also not hardwired to read or to scuba dive or to drink milk) (p. 153).

There is much more like this in Jacquet’s book, but as an example of Gregg’s “prognostic myopia,” I can think of nothing better than the headlong pursuit for immediate corporate profit at the expense of the long-term consequences of corporate actions.  And at the scale of corporations, this use of human intelligence is not only stupid, but I would argue that it is stupidity at its worst because in normalizes and even rewards being shortsighted at a societal scale.  As Jacquet concludes in her appendix to her book:

in the same way that a casino can affect the character of a town, corporate-funded scientific denial has contributed to the erosion of scientific authority and mistrust in the government.  In this casino, however, we are gambling with our health, the planet, and our most reliable way of knowing the world.  The stakes could not get higher (p. 174).

Of course, not only are the stakes as high as Jacquet states them, they are as high as Gregg states them: the potential extinction of our species.  And the problem for all of us is that we are all, in fact, trapped in our own “prognostic myopia.”  My entire retirement portfolio, for example, depends on corporate profits; Gregg writes about raising his daughter and taking her to school each day, knowing that “even though that’s what awaits my family in the future [i.e. ecological collapse from climate change], here I am, driving my Subaru around like everything is fine” (p. 220).  We have no choice but to live in the now, even when that “now” may be preventing “someday” from being possible

Which brings me to teaching, to what I do for a living and whether it is even possible to have any positive impact in the classroom anymore.  Because what actually triggered all this epistolary activity and my reflecting on Gregg’s and Jacquet’s work was some recent stories in the news.

The first, heard on NPR, was about how love songs are in trouble and what this tells us about how younger generations are viewing relationships.  Apparently, the top term searched for in music by Gen Z listeners is the word “sad,” and BYU researcher McKell Jorgensen-Wells has found that 86% of love songs in the recent Billboard Top 100 profess an insecure attachment style, have replaced emotional longing with overt sexuality, and leave the listener assuming that their romantic relationships are supposed to be toxic.  As one of the people being interviewed put it, “one of the songs in the top 100 right now is from a tremendously gifted and talented and beautiful artist named SZA, and she has a song called ‘Saturn.’ In the first verse, she says, I hate this place.”

And if people raised on toxic love songs aren’t bad enough, the other story that caught my attention in the NYT was about a group of middle schoolers in Pennsylvania using TikTok to create an organized and systematic on-line attack of their teachers, creating fake accounts in the teachers’ names and then posting ugly falsehoods about those same teachers as if the teachers had generated the content themselves.  I knew it was only a matter of time before something like this happened, but what disturbed me the most was the fact that when caught and confronted with the evidence, the overwhelming response of the students was that their teachers couldn’t take a joke—as if accusations of pedophilia and spousal infidelity are somehow “joking” matters. 

Taken together—the prognostic myopia of our species, the corporate greed that takes that myopia to world destroying levels, media of all types that empower dysfunctional and destructive relating—it has me pondering if we’ve reached the point as a society where what we do as educators in the classroom is irrelevant.  And what disturbs me most about that thought is that I know I have had a positive impact for most of my career.  I have been blessed to mentor former students into the profession, to attend their dissertation defenses and weddings, and to hold their children in my arms.  I know the good I have helped send out into the world. 

But between my own struggles this past year with my 9^th graders, reading Gregg and Jacquet, and seeing many of my concerns about social media come to pass over the last few months, I find myself compelled to ask whether any of us in education, myself included, can still do that anymore.  Can teachers still have a positive impact? Or are the children now arriving in our classrooms already too damaged by the world we’ve created for them? Right now, I do not have an answer.  I wish I did, but I don’t.

However, what I do know is that I have is an almost congenital compulsion to try, and that itself may have to be my only answer for now.

References

Gregg, J. (2022) If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity.  New York:  Little, Brown and Company.

Jacquet, J. (2022) The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World.  New York: Penguin Books.

Martin, M. (July 3, 2024) Love Songs Are Changing.  What Today’s Love Songs Say About Us.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2024/07/03/nx-s1-4983933/love-songs-are-changing-what-todays-love-songs-say-about-us.

Singer, N. (July 6, 2024) Students Target Teachers in Group TikTok Attack, Shaking Their School.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/06/technology/tiktok-fake-teachers-pennsylvania.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5U0.kN8_.kvXU-e-H7SD-&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.