“A man who had learned to throw a grain of millet through the eye of a needle with unfailing accuracy performed this feat for another man, whose response to it I applaud. He was asked afterwards for some present as a reward for such rare ability; whereupon he ordered, very humorously and in my opinion justly, that the performer should be given two or three bushels of millet, so that so fine an art should not remain exercised.” Montaigne, “On Vain Subtleties”
It is hardly news that, as a species, we are more gullible than we should be. The poet Horace once wrote that “Unless the vessel’s pure, all you pour in turn sour.” Scriptures teach the same, and yet we, as putatively rational creatures, have the wool pulled over our eyes more often than a daily made bed. We believe in the most outrageous things and hold onto the most improbable of outcomes. Whole books have been written about our gullibility.[1] We tend to see this better in others than we do in ourselves. How many a freshman, after failing a couple of courses, figures she can graduate summa cum laude, forgetting that the math of the freshman year will militate against that hope.
It’s why we often say, with a sigh, that hope springs eternal. It does, of course, but often under the most umbrageous clouds of hopelessness. The pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus once said that gods and animals had more acute senses than man, whom he placed at a middle level. You’ll recall that it was Democritus, the philosopher, who came up with the idea that particles were made up of atoms, an idea that, once Aristotle debunked it, lay hidden for more than 500 years thereafter.
Which brings us to the so-called brilliant. Gullibility reigns supreme there as well. The genius Benjamin Franklin, who invented much that we enjoy today, found the alphabet too repetitive and redundant. Ever the inventor, he threw away six of the letters we have today and replaced them with six others that we do not now have. Needless to say, that invention did not make the cut, so to speak. Hardly anyone among us can forget Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes. Two swindlers tell the king that they can make a fabulous set of new clothes that are invisible to anyone stupid or unfit for the position they hold. Not wanting to appear stupid or unfit, the emperor falls for the ruse, and he parades about in public, nekkid, as we are wont to say in the South. And yes, a little child leads them out of their stupidity.
But almost nothing exceeds the insanity over the Piltdown Man. As late as 1912, Charles Dawson (though we cannot be certain it was he), an amateur archaeologist, found nearly all the remains of the said “missing link” and published his findings in that year. So eager were scientists to declare the missing link found that the deception lasted for decades. By decades, I mean it wasn’t until 1953 that the forgery was discovered. An entire generation of students was fed a lie that only science can tell…plausibly.
Perhaps nothing quite resonates in the halls of gullibility more than Vaucanson’s mechanical duck. Kant, d’Almbert, and Diderot all saw it and claimed that it “proved” Descartes’ view that animals were mere complex machines (see the image below). De la Mettrie, another philosopher celebrated for his rational thinking, contended that this duck could also apply to mankind. He even went so far as to write a book, L’homme Machine, Man a Machine.
The duck emerged during what we refer to as “The Enlightenment” or, as Comus likes to call it, Fool’s Gold. To be fair, the duck could flap its wings on command. It could, of course, quack, and, mirabile dictu, drink water. If a visitor held out a grain of corn, the duck would promptly eat it.
Moreover, the duck would appear to “digest” the grain in actions that were sent down the “alimentary canal,” where, after a time, the duck would “defecate” what appeared to be digested food. All of this seems more like a circus sideshow than science, but so intent were these thinkers on believing what they thought to be true, they saw the duck as more of a proof of their own parti pris, or preconceived opinion, what we might call bias, than the scientific method.
Gullibility is not limited to mechanical ducks or bones from a fake ‘missing link.’ During the silly season of politics in which we are now awash, voters believe almost anything a politician says, but only if it’s the one we’re voting for. Plutarch wrote about our being unpersuaded by truth because we hold not to it but to what we want to be true, however wrong it may be. And how many among us have sought out fortune tellers, scryers, and psychics, hoping to ascertain our futures. Most who visit them know, in the back of their minds, that they are paying for so many ashes, but the desire exceeds their understanding. It isn’t that we abhor the truth. It’s more than we are allergic to truths that are not of our own making.
In the end, it’s all part of being human. Virgil wrote about it when he penned,
“Like ghosts that, after death, are said to flit
Or visions that delude slumbering wit.”
Lest readers think that Comus views himself as standing above the rest, do not deceive yourselves. Comus was ten years old before he began even to think Santa Claus might not be real.
On the other hand, he still hopes to see gifts under the tree.
[1] See for example, Charles MacKay. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. (1841).
