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Journalism of Courage
The greatest ability of our species is foresight. The biggest facilitator of foresight is hindsight. To speculate on the future, we need to study not only the last century or millennium, but the three billion year history of evolution. If cause and effect in history depend on where you enter it, then we must invest in studying the primal causes.
Within an hour of emerging from its shell, a Herring seagull chick starts looking for its mother’s beak, a large yellow one, with a big red dot on it. It begins pecking at it, demanding to be fed. In a famous experiment, Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen presented a seagull chick with a disembodied beak of an adult Herring gull. The chick still pecked at the beak, expecting to be fed, notwithstanding the fact that there was no bird attached to it. Tinbergen then isolated a recipe for the beak from its key visual ingredients. With slight exaggerations, he made a fake beak and offered it to the chicks. They pecked at it, even more excitedly. Then he added three white lines to the bottom, to enhance the contrast, and reduced the thickness by half. When he showed this object to the chicks, they became hyper excited, pecking at it with an unprecedented wild enthusiasm.
Does it remind us of any of our behaviours? The way we respond, perhaps, to concentrated amounts of oil and sugar in our junk food, to sex and violence in our cinema, to cosmetic modifications of the face and the body, to the notion of “us” and “them” in sports, or to the promise of eternal survival in religions, even? Since Tinbergen, a generation of animal behaviour researchers have observed how “supernormal” stimuli release “fixed action patterns” of behaviour even more powerfully than the natural objects for which the behaviours had originally evolved.
When it comes to vastly fixed and predictable responses to recurring stimuli, we are not very different from the Herring gulls or bees or bacteria. We have evolved, like every other species, to reproduce before death catches up, and in order to do so, hunt, gather, fend and mate (or just pass on the genes, in case of asexually reproducing species). To perform these life-sustaining actions, a wide array of behavioural response systems have evolved as sets of if/ then/ or else algorithms, manifesting as emotions — the language our “sub-conscious” processor uses to communicate to the “conscious” us, stored in genetic sentences.
Our species evolved in an environment very unlike the one most of us find ourselves in, today. Life was very different in the forests and savannahs millions of years ago — predatory threats were high, food was scarce, so were mating opportunities. We are genetically and anatomically the same species that we were 2,00,000 years ago. Which means, our behaviour is still guided by response systems that evolved in these environments.
While we are shockingly similar to birds and bees, the first significant difference arises from our ability to store a massive amount of new memories in our brain, allowing us to retrain and rescale our genetic impulses and modify our bodies and behaviour to some extent. We are born with physical and emotional abilities. As we grow up, we learn when and where to use them and in what proportion. Our genetic personality starts getting layered by modules of memories and the connections formed within our lifetime. The exponentially accumulating ability to augment our strength, skills, memory and intelligence, non-biologically, using technologies like law, language, ideas, tools and machines, creates the second significant difference. The identification of “kin” and the “other”, fending for your “kin” against the hostile “other”, strategies of symbiosis, cooperation, coercion and cheating all make up the remote actions leading up to long-term sustenance and replication.
Recognising fixed action patterns in human behaviour and hacking into emotional response systems using synthesised stimuli is the fundamental basis of a huge portion of human industry. Junk food manufacturers trigger supernormal responses evolved to incentivise the search and consumption of energy-releasing chemicals in an environment of great physical stress. Political and religious leaders reassert “kinship” and constantly manufacture the “other” to manipulate mass behaviour.
This framework may seem narrow or reductive, if not examined in its hyperlinked complexity. Like all emergent phenomena resulting from constantly evolving synergies, evolution of human behaviour should be studied as a whole that is greater than or different from the sum of its parts.
Decades before real estate companies came knocking at your door, offering you a ready price for your house, even before the possibility of getting a divorce and selling off the jointly-owned property had barely started simmering at the periphery of your thought, the realtor software had patiently connected the dots — the absence of a vacation in the last year, the absence of your partner in pictures shared on social media, the sharp increase in buying low calorie food along with simultaneous purchase of new expensive clothes, cuing the intention to look better if you indeed find yourself back on the boogie street. Decades before Target figured out that a teenager was pregnant way before her family did, inferred so from a connection between her recent purchases of fragrance-free soaps, mineral supplements and cocoa butter lotion (as told and retold in the viral, and possibly apocryphal, modern big data story), decades before the futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted the fall of the Soviet Union by looking at the rise in availability of cell phones and fax machines, the visionary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov had imagined it in his 1951 novel Foundation.
In Foundation, Hari Seldon of planet Trantor mathematically determines the oncoming collapse of the Galactic Empire, using an integrated speculative system “psychohistory”. He proposes a plan that will restore civilisation over a 1,000-year time span, rather than the 30,000-year time span that may be required otherwise. The proposal? To create the Encyclopaedia Galactica, a vast repository of all knowledge of the current civilisation, and place it on a remote planet in the care of scientists, mathematicians and their kin. When the time is right, the enlightenment stored in the Encyclopaedia will be used to replace the primitivism that would have prevailed by then.
Not very unlike Seldon, US scientists recently made multiple copies of all their climate data on international servers, just before Donald Trump took office. Last year, the people of the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan, with support from Chinese inventors, 3D laser-projected giant Buddha sculptures into the sandstone cavities left behind from the Taliban’s destruction of the ancient monumental Buddhas in 2001. Closer home, history was reinterpreted with state board textbooks in Gujarat hailing Hitler a hero who “lent dignity and prestige to the German government within a short time by establishing a strong administrative set up.”
Attempts at controlling the future by controlling the facts and narratives of the past have empirically proven two things — that human behaviour is predictable and that it is susceptible to manipulation. The next time we pop that potato chip, the next time we watch a potboiler, the next time we root for “our” IPL team, the next time we feel a sense of pride and belonging, even, we need to ask ourselves, like we did as children — what’s going on inside me and where did all these thoughts and feelings come from?
