Rationally Superstitious?
Just covering all the bases
The voice of an elder is tucked in the folded depths of my brain. She emerges on a near-daily basis. I mostly acknowledge her and then tell her nicely to go away and shut the door behind her. She's my grandmother (surrogate mother) and was an ever-present guide throughout my life. In many ways, this is a good thing. She's given me an overload of compassion, taught me to make soup from anything edible, and kept me safe from a wide range of life's dangers that lurk literally everywhere.
When she was a child at the turn of the 19th century and living on a hardscrabble family farm in Wisconsin, risk was everywhere – from the chicken coop to the hand-crank water pump and the outhouse. She learned to be wary and suspicious about most things, including the dangers of too much happiness. "Watch out," she'd say to me. "If you laugh too much, it means you're going to cry." Which, when you think about it, is actually and inevitably true.
Among many other unbidden warnings that tickle her voice as I go about daily life are: Never walk under a ladder and thus risk imminent bad luck. This widely held belief has ancient roots - a ladder forms a triangle with deep historical meaning. In Egypt, the triangle was sacred because it was 'perfect'– all sides being equal. Disrupting this perfection brings bad luck. And in Christendom, it represents the holy trinity. Passing through the triangle disrupts the perfection of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
How many of us in the Internet era still "knock on wood” for good luck, and why? Because expressing the positive ("Life is good!") activates protective spirits that inhabit trees such as ash, willow, hazel, and others. Admittedly, it's gotten harder to find knock-worthy wood surfaces in our technology-driven cultures. A bad omen?
Do you shy away from taking a hotel room on the 13th floor – indeed, if there even is such a floor? Would you get married on Friday the 13th? This particular dark omen is mostly limited to Western cultures, which believe that Judas showed up at Christ's Last Supper and made a table of 13, creating very bad luck. Or for folks in Nordic countries when the god of mischief, Loki, made himself the 13th guest at a dinner in Valhalla and upset the 12 other gods in attendance. Extreme trepidation over Friday the 13th even has its own polysyllabic, unpronounceable name – paraskevidekatriaphobia. Here, let me help in case you need a medical excuse for missing work on a Friday the 13th – Paras-keveh-deka-tree-ah-fobia. In case you think this is absurd, folks with this malady cause financial losses of more than $800 million every year as they don't show up for work, are hospitalized, refuse to shop in stores or fly anywhere. And they are not alone – Friday the 17th and Tuesday the 13th similarly haunt folks in South America and Greece.
Rationally, most of us say these concerns are fiction. Stories based on irrational beliefs that have no place in the wired, educated world. So why do we do this? (I know, you don't, right?) But, studies reveal that 25 percent of people in the U.S. admit to being superstitious, 70 percent of college students have good luck charms to boost their academic performance, and athletes world over perform good-luck rituals.
Thankfully, smart, overeducated crowds of researchers have explained this phenomenon – generally in language requiring an interpreter or a medium. But, let me try – It appears that superstitious beliefs have survival benefits in natural selection. Over six million years of evolution, humans observed connections between events that may (or may not) impact survival and reproduction. Some of the observations were based in reality (evolutionary science), and others on beliefs … stories passed along through generations. We generally know which are essential for the survival and reproduction of our species. But we have chosen to accept the package of both fact and superstition as a cautionary strategy for survival.
Just one example is the embrace of rituals and beliefs in sports. From the Little League to the pros, athletes are infamous for hanging on to good and bad luck omens. Like covering all the bases – one leveraging talent and the other repeating rituals or using objects that, in the past, have accompanied peak performance. Linking both physical reality and amorphous beliefs helps to calm anxiety, enhance confidence. It provides us a greater sense of control.
Humans are born to survive – and we employ a variety of tactics, conscious and unconscious, toward that end. It's almost as if we have no choice. While we use our keen, big brains to develop artificial intelligence that resembles yesterday's science fiction, we still knock on wood, toss spilled salt over the left shoulder, make a wish when we see a shooting star, pick four leaf clovers, and cross our fingers for good luck.
The evolved pathways in our supercharged human brain allow us to believe we're making conscious decisions based on facts and experience. Rational thought often prevails, but it's never alone. Lurking deep in the medial temporal lobe is the superstition that opening an umbrella indoors disrespects the Sun God, who will punish you and yours. But if you insist you've evolved well beyond such frivolous influences, you may be interested in marking March 13th on your calendar – It's National Open an Umbrella Indoors Day. I won't be participating because my grandmother would shout down from the Hereafter – "Don't do that! It brings bad luck!"
Thanks for your attention, and good luck with your weekend!
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