Appocalypse Special! Ancient Secrets Revealed!

I do a lot of stupid shit.  I'm bad with money.  I drink too much.  I mess around with Jim.  I think the stupidest thing I do, however, is continue to obey superstitions. 

To be fair, half of mine are completely innocuous (knocking on wood, saying "Gesundheit" after someone sneezes, etc) and the other half are a result of my OCD which I just call "lucky" (eg taking an even number of steps to cross the street, touching something with my left hand if I touch it with my right, etc).  I don't honestly think the devil is going to give someone a wytchye pox of the fyve humours if I don't bless them after sneezing, nor do I actually think that somehow taking 20 steps instead of 21 to cross the lobby will get me a job or something.

Nobody really quite seems to know what "lucky" means, do they?  I mean, if I rub a rabbit's foot and win the lotto, that seems like a pretty good corollary, but if I rub a rabbit's foot, get struck by a car, break every bone in my body, but survive, is it really quite the same when they say I'm "lucky to be alive?" 

In any case, I did some digging on the nature of superstition.  B.F. Skinner found that pigeons of all things display superstitious behavior - that pigeons in a box which happened to wobble their head back and forth before feeding would assume that it was the head-wobbling that got them fed, without noticing that the food was coming at regular timed intervals.  Still, the pigeons would wobble their heads or turn counter-clockwise or what have you while the uncaring Skinner just doled out food every hour on the hour. 

Sometimes the pigeons would notice that if they weren't fed when they wobbled their heads, they might be fed when they flapped their wings, so they would bob their heads and flap their wings.  After a long enough time, they combined enough of these behaviors to form what might be called a sort of animalistic ritual of spinning, bobbing, and flapping.  Before long, the pigeons spent all their time spinning, bobbing, and flapping, and there was much contention over which combination worked the best.  Did they bob, spin and flap?  Flap, bob, and spin?   Each pigeon devised its own sort of wild energetic dance, each pigeon continued to be fed every hour, on the hour, but unable to conceptualize time they continued to believe that it was the ritual that brought them food, and not the calloused hands of BF skinner who, upon seeing his pigeons given over to apoplectic fits, wrung their necks and fed them to some poor orphan children whom he had also locked up in boxes for observation.

Just as the pigeons weren't really conjuring food by their happy little dances, neither does my blessing a person keep illness away, nor does crossing a street with an even number of steps keep me safe or happy.

But in all cases, there are these warm fuzzy occurrences of correlation, which do not necessarily (read, probably don't) imply causality.  The fallacy of thinking otherwise is called "cum hoc ergo propter hoc," and once you get done giggling over the word "cum"...well no, that's not going to happen, so get it out of your system.

Right, okay, the fallacy means "with this, therefore because of this," and it is best exemplified by Lisa Simpson's description of her anti-tiger rock to Homer, in which she explains that a rock (which she picks up out of the yard) keeps man-eating tigers away.  Homer asks if it really works, and she explains that she is holding the rock, and certainly doesn't see any tigers around, at which point Homer insists on buying the rock ...hilarity ensues. 

But I know that, technically, when I kiss the dice before an important roll in D&D it doesn't do anything put put my cheeto-and-mountain-dew spit on the 20, and possibly spread my SARS to the next person to do so.  When I knock on wood, it doesn't do anything more than make my knuckles sore. 

One of the more common arguments I hear in defense of superstition is that it gives people comfort, or gives them a way of feeling that they have some control over things which they actually do not. Well big F'ing deal!  I thought that's what we had Charles Swindoll for, to make you feel good about the fact that every day is a vertical climb up the windy west face of crap mountain, and wanting to have control over things does not give you that control.  In other words, hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster.

This is to a large degree why the whole 2012 thing irks me. 

Nothing is going to happen in 2012. Okay, sure, I mean, we'll all still be alive and thus _something_ is going to happen, like you'll probably slip on a banana peel and fall face-first into a coconut cream pie while a nearby trombone goes Wah-wah-wah-waaaaahhhh, but the apocalypse is not coming.  I promise everyone that with every fiber of my being, and I'm just so awfully sick of seeing anything saying otherwise.  It's orientalism, plain and simple - the idea that mystic brown people have a deep connection with gaia earth mother that white people just don't get, or rather, white people who don't wear head scarves, buy hundreds of dollars worth of crystals, and hang dream catchers from the rear-view mirrors of their Prius's don't get.

But, people say, the I-Ching points to 2012, and the Mayan Calendar, and also the Freemason Illuminati Crop Circle Visitor Area 51 Art Bell!  To which I can only mostly respond with completely dumb silence, but really ought to start pointing out that in 1999, I was paid a middle-class wage to go into an office for eight hours a day and install the Windows NT Y2K compliance pack so as to ward off the horrors of approaching digital Armageddon.  

On the morning of January 1, 2000, life continued as normal: with a massive hangover and someone else's underwear in my mouth.  Nothing happened, and it seems likely that a lot of our preparations were just so much voodoo. 2012 will pass just like 2000, and I will wake up on the morning of December 13, 2012 to make myself coffee and eat too much bacon for breakfast since, thankfully, that 13th does not fall on a Friday.