That recent news item I found about cargo cults has really sparked my imagination. If you’re not familiar with cargo cults, the term refers to indigenous Pacific island cultures which didn’t interact with Western civilization until fairly recently (the 1930’s, I think) . That article has a nice quick summation of the phenomenon:

Cargo cults believe that Western goods or cargo, first encountered through missionaries and explorers, are created by ancestral spirits. They have been known to build airstrips in the jungles in the belief that planes would land with cargo.

Though there seems to be some debate about the historical veracity of such events, the basic idea is that people who’d never encountered a technological innovation were suddenly forced to. To minimize the cognitive dissonance this new experience caused, they naturally and automatically create a mythological container to understand or explain what’s happening to them. In these cases, since they already had a belief in ancestral spirits and magic, they used those terms to explain and to control phenomena.

Here’s another decent explanation of what’s going on here:

The cargo cult is founded on a familiar, and popular, bit of fallacious reasoning: post hoc ergo propter hoc. The residents of Papua, Yaliwan, Vanuatu and other places noticed that when the colonial occupiers built wharves and airstrips, the wharves and airstrips were soon visited by ships and airplanes which delivered cargos of goods. They concluded that the ships and airplanes arrived as a consequence of the building of the wharves and airstrips, so they built their own wharves and airstrips in the expectation of receiving their own cargoes.

This reasoning seems naive to us, since we already know that the correct chain of reasoning is the reverse: the wharves and airstrips were built because ships and airplanes were going to be arriving.

Wikipedia explains post hoc reasoning as:

Post hoc, also known as “coincidental correlation” or “false cause,” is a logical fallacy which assumes or asserts that if one event happens after another, then the first must be the cause of the second. It is a particularly tempting error because temporal sequence is integral to causality — it is true that a cause always happens before its effect.

It’s tempting to call these kinds of things logical fallacies from our “higher” vantage point - we know why airfields happen, and we know if doesn’t have anything to do with our ancestral spirits or magic. Or does it? In a way, all of our civilization is built on the magic wrought by our ancestors, and we spend our time struggling to find a way to fit in and relate to the whole thing. So perhaps these islanders aren’t so wrong after all. More importantly though, calling this kind of thinking “illogical” isn’t quite as accurate as calling it simply mythical. I’ve always liked this quote about mythical thinking:

How does myth think? Myth thinks by providing “a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction”. Since this is an impossible achievement, myth “grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse which has produced it is exhausted. Its growth is a continuous process, whereas its structure remains discontinuous.”

We need not necessarily use the word contradiction as our starting point for mythical thinking though. We could choose almost anything as our core. In the example of cargo cults, the appearance of these planes, white Westerners, cargo supplies, etc is not really a contradiction. It’s simply something which is psychologically significant. And though it’s easy to say they are violating rules of logic, really what they are doing is perfectly logical when viewed from their perspective. That is, it fits the commonly accepted rules about how things work, why they happen, and how to control and interact with them.

Could it be that this isn’t just the foundation of a “primitive” religion in a land far away, but that this is simply how all human thinking works? We think we’re being logical, or that the reasons and motivation we have for something are totally sound. But in actuality, all that has happened is that we experience something and then we create in our minds a reason for it and a story-system that supports it. We find a twenty dollar bill in the street, and we attribute it to “luck”. From then on out, we’re more careful to look for money in the street - in other words, we create a ritual to make it happen again. A girlfriend or boyfriend dumps us. We focus on the characteristics in the other person which caused our relationship to fail, and then avoid people in the future who exhibit similar characteristics. We could come up with hundreds of thousands of examples like this.

Interestingly, this is part of the teaching I unearthed while studying documents related to the Landmark Forum (which some people also accuse of being a cult in it’s own right). In that program, they like to make a distinction between “what happened” and “the story about what happened.”

What we humans do, it is explained, is take the simple facts (reality) and combine them with the meanings and interpretations we make up in life, and then begin to relate to the interpretations as though they were the reality.

[…] We take what we made up, we live as though it were real, and finally we begin to make things happen out of the stories which have come to believe are reality.

And since the topic of weird entities, aliens and ultraterrestrials is on everybody’s lips these days, I thought it’d be fun if we brought this all back home. A while back I found an article which basically posits that in relation to more advanced beings, we should try to imagine ourselves in the same role as these “primitive” islanders who founded the cargo cults. The following passage comes from a page which correlates UFO experiences to mythological experiences throughout history, such as fairies (although we could just as readily use demons, angels, gods, etc):

Just as human beings capture and tag various species, UFO abductees report experiences of extreme similarity. Many people report being “tagged” during frightening sessions on a UFO operating table. Some of these “tags” have even been recovered, or show up on MRI exams, and remain unexplained.

… Imagine when a bear is shot with a drugged dart from a helicopter hovering above him. Imagine how terrified the bear is of the bizarre flying monster and the noise and lights that come out of it. Now imagine that the bear thinks of the strange beings that come out of the flying monster. The strange beings poke and prod him, look inside his mouth, apply a tag to his ear, and then let him go. Why?

How can a bear understand or interpret the meaning of this incident on its level of consciousness? It can’t. It just doesn’t seem to make any sense. Human beings are so advanced and superior as to incomprehensible.

Is it possible that what we know of as religion is simply the weird meddling of entities so far beyond us that we simply can’t comprehend them? The fun part, of course, is that if you accept that as an explanation for religion, you’re once again delving into mythological thinking, creating a cargo cult in your mind to explain, support and control an event - getting caught up in “the story about what happened” at the expense of what really happened. Is there any way out of all this? It seems like as soon as you become aware of the outlines of your own mental cargo cults, you’re suddenly stuck in a newer bigger one which is at first invisible to you, but allows you to look down with superiority at your previous state. That’s the inherent trap in all this wrangling. Perhaps the good part of it though is that since we seem to be story-based creatures, all this stuff unleashes the most wild creative parts of us - spinning tales long into the night after all the airplanes, UFO’s and angels have flown off and left us alone.

[For more thoughts and conversations on all this, I also posted some other stuff about cargo cults to the forum here. There’s also been a good bit of rumbling in the old blogosphere on the topic of cargo cults because of all this. Here’s a sampling of some blog posts which approach the subject from a variety of different ways, each building a cargo cult of their own.]

1. Mostly real news. You judge
2. Cargo Cult Scientology
3. Harry Papua and the Sorcery Conviction
4. Menstrual Magic, Spirit Airplanes, USA Worship, Prophetic Femurs & Leviticus: Say Hello to Cargo Cultism
5. Cargo Cults
6. 320 people arrested for sorcery
7. Shadowfoot
8. The Gaping Hole We Have Left
9. Thursday’s Bizarre International News
10. Bad dreams
11. Cargo Cult Science