One great discovery of the Enlightenment, which put us on the road to modern science and technology, was that the key to accumulating vast storehouses of useful knowledge was for many people to seek many small truths, even consciously resisting the urge to sum up the "big picture".
A fundamental aspect of human nature is how easily we tend to accept any reasonable sounding explanation, and how attached we become to these "understandings" (or beliefs) that we pick up so casually.
| Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind provide some sense of how we convince ourselves of the utter rationality of stuff that doesn't in fact come from a rational place. He cites Benjamin Franklin's quip that "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for anything one has a mind to do" based on his finding himself on an ocean voyage, attracted to the smell of cooked fish, when at the time he had been a vegetarian for some years. He noticed that inside the stomach of one of the fish were several smaller fish. Well,"if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you" |
While the anecdote illustrates our rationalizing tendency, many of our deepest beliefs were formed in a social environment, and we have hardly any recollection of how we got them.
I think it fits human nature to say our basic mental architecture was a response to at least a couple of hundred thousand years of never having much contact beyond a group of around 100 people, none capable of writing anything down. Attempts to understand the few pockets of people still living this way (more or less) seem to nearly always reveal that like most of us, they feel they they have pretty satisfactorily made sense of the world around them.
The several dozen people, who make up a world for eachother, uses little means other than memory to create and maintain a rudimentary understanding of the world, and a small set of practices (including how to make a few weapons and other tools). This mental universe cannot grow beyond fairly narrow bounds. If new needs come along, then old understandings and practices must be jettisoned to make room.
In this manner, however, with nothing like modern ways of accumulating knowledge, human beings spread over the world unlike any other species. No other species could go from the plains to the mountains or from south to north, from desert to savanna to jungle to swamp to temporate forest land, adapting as they went.
Everywhere from all over Africa to all over Europe and Asia to islands spread over thousands of miles of the Pacific and finally (in just the last 10-20 thousand years) all over the Americas, small groups of humans thought they had the world reasonably well figured in the only way that made any sense, but if you went from one to the other you would find hundreds of these "only reasonable ways of making sense of the world". The systems tended to remain tidy, free of confusion, and ready to teach to the next generation due largely to not interacting. The small groups had a natural tendency to repulsion that kept them from getting bogged down in each others contradictory explanations and ways of acting in the world. In this preliterate world, one only had to go a few miles to encounter people whose very speech was incomprehensible.
The explanations for matters of cosmic significance, like the shape of the world, and how it all began bore virtually no resemblance to reality, and it is something of a puzzle why they bothered. I strongly suspect an innate drive to "fill in" the picture of the world as long as it did not feel quite complete - an early innate drive to produce a "theory of everything".
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