A Tangled Web

‘The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life’ is the subtitle of Robert Trivers’s new book ‘The Folly of Fools’.  Trivers is Rutgers scientist who studies behavior from the point of view of evolutionary biology.  It’s a field that has interested me in a casual way since reading Robert Wright’s ‘The Moral Animal’ almost twenty years ago followed by some E.O. Wilson here and there.  Back then we were fascinated by altruism, and we tried to see the Darwinian advantage it might give to the survival and replication of an individual’s genetic code.  Trivers’s interest is in self-deception, how it helps us and how it can harm us.

First of all Trivers is quite a character.  Yes, he’s a serious scientist, but he’s also out there … sometimes pretty far out there.  He doesn’t mind speculating, and his range is huge.  He reveals something of his personal life.  His politics are close to Noam Chomsky’s.  If that bothers you don’t read this book.  He has a seriously negative (and I think prejudicial) view of psychotherapy.  I’ll bet he’s a fascinating teacher.

There are so many intriguing ideas in this book.  His accounts of many studies are incredibly revealing.  He discusses deception on both individual and collective levels.  Topics include molecular and chemical deception, family life, sex, language analysis, politics, airplane and spacecraft disasters, immunology, and false historical narratives.  Sure does give the reader lots to think about.  There is much work yet to be done in the field, and Trivers is quick to point out that he has few of the answers himself.  Nonetheless the questions themselves are so so provocative.

I think the book suffers from the lack of a clearly targeted readership.  It’s not hard science, though much supporting documentation is offered at the end of the volume.  But it’s not really popular science either.  The writing is not entertaining or engaging.  If anything I found it off-putting.  It sometimes combines the worst of scientific jargon, dry logic, and unimaginative presentation.  It’s popular science that never got properly dressed up for the general public.  Unfortunately the lab coat still prevails, and often with a good dose of dust from the research shelves of the library.  I guess that’s what can happen when a scientist tries to write for the public.  He can’t quite shed his scientific skin.  And that doesn’t serve the general reader very well.

There were times when I thought I might not make it through the book, but I did hold out.  And I’m glad I did.  Just think about your own image of yourself.  Think about the ways you distort reality to create an image for yourself that serves your interests.  Now imagine that everyone else is doing something similar.  And you react to their deception, they react to yours, and the endless contest of distortions goes on and on.  It never ends.  ‘Reality’ is only a starting point.  We manufacture our own reality to suit us.  And we change it when we feel we need to. 

The human brain is an incredible filter and interpreter that needs to make sense of huge amounts of data.  We pay a high price in terms of energy for that processing.  We need to get something useful out of it.  We construct whatever narrative works for us, even if that narrative is at least in part obviously false.  Doesn’t matter.  If it serves us, we’ll use it.  Of course sometimes the deception catches up with us.  But then we just create another narrative to explain that one as well.  It’s what we do.  And we’re damned good at it.