Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? Page #7

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to a different place.

It could well be a property of

urban industrialized societies.

I'm not sure it's true

of peasant societies,

a farming society

where you learn the skills

and you apply the skills

and you transmit them

to your children and so on.

I mean, for example, one thing

that has been discovered

that surprised a lot

of anthropologists

and agricultural scientists

is that when there have been

development programs in which...

say, you know, Liberia

happened to be one...

where scientific agriculture

was introduced.

You know, peasants were taught

the most sophisticated

techniques of agriculture

and so on.

And they determined

that yield dropped.

And when it was investigated,

it turned...

Eel dropped?

- Yield, the production.

- Oh, yeah, okay.

So they were producing less

with scientific agriculture

than with traditional

peasant agriculture.

And at first, nobody knew why,

but when it was investigated,

it turned out that agriculture

had, in fact, become a science

known only to women.

So women had extensive

detailed lore about planting.

You know, you plant this

seed under this rock

at this hour of the day

and so on and so forth.

And it was transmitted

from mother to daughter

for maybe thousands of years.

And it got more and

more sophisticated,

and it got to give very high yields

in not very productive soil,

and the men in the community

didn't even know about it.

Nor, of course, did

the outsiders who came in.

Well, you know, that's a case

where people kind of reproduce,

improve...

I doubt that, say,

those little girls

would have had the feelings

that you were describing.

You're getting something

from your mother,

which is a repository of,

you know, endless tradition,

and maybe you find ways

of adapting it

or slightly improving it,

but you're essentially reproducing

what you grew up with.

And so how do you balance

this knowledge

that's come from the ages

to the improvement of science?

Like, now science and

the technology has advanced,

you would feel that previous

knowledge would be obsolete,

but yet there is an instinct...

or I don't know if it's correct

to call it an instinct,

but people know there is a science

of knowing what plant to use.

It's lore, not instinct.

Yeah, how do you call that? Lo?

Lore, just accumulated

unarticulated knowledge.

It's like you know how to behave.

I mean, you know, you're taught

or you learn in childhood

how to behave in social situations.

You can't articulate it.

You're not conscious of it.

So if you find a child who has,

let's say, Asperger's syndrome,

I mean, they just don't pick up

social cues.

They don't understand when you're

supposed to talk to someone

and when you're not supposed

to talk to them

and how you're supposed to act

towards them.

I mean, these are children

who have a lot of problem

from nursery school on.

I once asked a mental

health specialist

what it was.

I didn't know what

Asperger's syndrome was.

Of course, I'd heard about it.

And she laughed, and she told me,

"Walk down the halls of MIT,

and half the people you see

have Asperger's syndrome."

How do you deal with somebody

come to you

and talk about astrology?

- Astrology?

- Yeah.

Because a lot of women,

for instance...

And it's terrible to generalize.

Michle here,

she's going to kill me.

But my girlfriend, for instance,

she gets mad at me

if I dismiss her belief

in astrology.

And I want to maintain

my relationship.

I don't dismiss

the person's interest in it.

People have all sorts

of irrational beliefs.

You know, I may think

they're irrational,

but to them, they're meaningful.

And after all,

some pretty smart people

were interested in astrology,

like Isaac Newton, for example.

So it's not... you know,

it's not imbecility.

I mean, humans have kind of like

an automatic, in this case,

instinctive drive

to find causal relations,

to explain things that are

happening in terms of causes.

When you can't see the causes,

you postulate hidden causes.

I mean, infants do this.

You can do experiments with infants

in which, you know,

something is moving along

and then something

starts moving this way.

They'll make up in their minds

that there's some hidden contact

there that you can't see,

you know, and we just do this

instinctively.

I mean, if things are happening

around us,

we try to find some agent

behind it...

often an agent, you know,

like an active intelligence

that's doing it sometimes,

something mechanical.

So it pretty naturally leads

to beliefs like astrology,

especially because you find...

I mean, life is full

of coincidences.

So you try to make a connection

between the coincidences,

and you find a pattern in the stars

or, "it's a full moon,

so this is going to happen,"

and so on and so forth.

Because I notice

in what you're saying,

like, you're not a believer.

If I do some research on you,

you're not going to

come up as atheist,

and I think because the religion

is really for a lot of people,

you don't want to hurt that.

Well, I think one or another

kind of religious belief is...

It's a real cultural universal.

I don't think any group

has ever been discovered

that doesn't have some sort

of belief in something,

you know, beyond

their conscious experience

that's directing things

or that's somewhere

in the background

and giving their lives meaning.

I mean, they may not believe

in a divinity, you know,

but some sort of a spirit

in the world

that we can't grasp

that's making sense of things,

that's giving meaning to life.

Throughout history

and throughout every society

we know,

people are just not satisfied

to think,

"Look, I go from dust to dust,

and there's no meaning to my life."

Well, what's your personal

feeling on that?

I think you go from dust to dust

and there's no meaning

in your life.

But that's hard for...

I can easily understand

why plenty of people wouldn't

be happy to accept this.

I mean,

you can easily understand if...

Let's suppose a mother

has a dying child

and wants to believe

that she's going to see him

again in heaven.

Okay,

that's an understandable belief,

and I certainly don't ridicule it

or try to teach her that...

give her a lecture

in epistemology or something.

You don't want to hurt people.

It's something

that I don't personally have,

and I don't listen

to rock music either,

but it doesn't mean that

other people shouldn't do it.

And, furthermore,

the fact of the matter

is that religious beliefs

do create communities.

They weld communities together,

and we're a tribal society.

You know, people form families

and clans and groups,

social groups, professional groups.

You want to be part of something.

And religion happens to be,

in fact, again cross-culturally,

one of the ways

in which the group coheres

and gets something more out of life

than just my individual existence.

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