Meditation Mondays: How Tribalistic Is Your Thinking?

Why is it that so many of us find the history we learned in school so boring? Why is it that when someone goes on about numbers and dates that our eyes glaze over? There are some people who have an amazing capacity to retain huge levels of information and data but most of us are more prone to remember things that we connect to on an emotional level. And that’s okay, emotions can be like the compression algorithm that our brains use to maintain huge amounts of information. We may lose some of the fidelity but we can quickly pull the gist of the memory quickly, depending on the level of importance that we give to the memory. The problem is that most of us want to also maintain the image that we make our most important life choices through rational processes with minimal emotional baggage attached. That might be the case, but we are not machines that collect and store memories without some emotional glue attached. 

Getting back to my opening questions, the reason we might have found high school history boring is because if we were just given a list of dates and names and places with no meaning or story attached, then that information probably didn’t even make it to the exam. Why do you think people make up rhymes and stories and songs when they are trying to memorize data? Why is it that when someone is slowly losing their memories through age or dementia that a song will immediately trigger something remembered? We are not machines and the process of analyzing and retaining information isn’t just the application of an electrical charge to a memory cell. 

On a recent episode of the Thinking Atheist Podcast, host, Seth Andrews  discussed with Melanie Trecek-King from ThinkingIsPower.com, the role of emotions in critical thinking. Andrews and Trecek-King feel strongly about the importance of critical thinking, but we have to begin by acknowledging the role that emotions play in the process, especially in areas of tribal identity. This tendency that all humans engage in, can and usually does get in the way of us really being able to assess new information and change our minds when new facts come to light. Remember emotions are a compression algorithm freeing us from having to hold on to every small bit of information and just hold on to the gist of the story. But if someone holds on to their information “differently” are you able to unwind your process enough to really examine this “other way”? That’s the problem is that we might have compressed the information down so far that we don’t want to entertain things in any other fashion. Just look at the “certainty” quotient that each side claims when they say that God exists or doesn’t exist. How can you really say, if you are not free to consider the arguments of those who are not your tribe? 

I was raised in a specific set of tribes, mixing ethnicity with values, with a sense of the world, with a community and family history. I imagine for much of human history most of us never ventured far from the ethnicity, values, world view, community/family history that they were born into. Why recreate the wheel, for them it worked or it didn’t but there was nothing that they could do about it, so they passed it on to the following generations. I happened to come along at a time and in a place where I found myself crossing ethnic and religious and lifestyle borders continually. I learned early that “certainty” was often achieved for some people by cutting off other possibilities, sometimes because it was just too much work to consider other points of view.  Some people aren’t comfortable with ambiguity and want a world that can be summed up with Ten Commandments, or with one book that contains 66 smaller “books.” I used to think that way. Sometimes I remember how helpful it was in my teenage years when everything beginning with my own body was confusing, to think that there was a book that I could read that had all the answers to all of my questions. It helped me get through those years, in as much as it let me delay dealing with much of this until I was much older. Fortunately, and probably in part, because I had gone through being a part of so many tribes that I knew that, for me, there was never just one tribe. My own sense of self was the result of combining and synthesizing all the previous tribes into me. 

Resources: 

• Don’t Debate? Rogan, Reality, & Science Theater, The Thinking Atheist with Seth Andrews (2023-07-04), https://www.thethinkingatheist.com/podcast-1/episode/7a3c0d48/dont-debate-rogan-reality-and-science-theater