Clouded minds

Now what is the explanation for this phenomenon? It may be that there is a living energy field which connects everything on Earth and that consciousness shapes this field, which is why faces and man’s best friend are the most common shapes taken by clouds.

Moreover, the field is so sensitive that even artefacts are reflected by the forces that create clouds.

On the other hand, it may be that our brains are predisposed to find patterns, and facial features and animal shapes are the dominant patterns our brains search for.

The latter explanation is, of course, the correct one. Neuropsychologists have discovered that our memory system for faces is immense, capable of holding over 10,000 different facial images. Even babies recognise faces before any other objects. The trait would have necessarily evolved in a social species like homo sapiens, not merely in order to track friends and kin but, perhaps even more importantly, to identify enemies: that is, anyone you didn’t recognise.

Now the scientific explanation is backed up by proof, by logic, and by parsimoniousness. By “parsimoniousness”, I mean that the explanation for cloud shapes invokes only the agents involved in the phenomenon: the clouds and the person watching the clouds. There is no need to invoke a third agency, such as an undetectable “energy field”. Even so, there are many people who would find the mystical explanation more convincing than the scientific one.

Such persons, because of their individual traits and because of cultural signals, are predisposed to reject reality.

This may not matter very much in respect to why clouds look like faces, but the superstitious mindset can have more pernicious effects. In May this year, two St Lucian Rastafarians had their death sentences for the 2003 murders of a Roman Catholic nun and priest quashed by the Privy Council. The Law Lords noted that the St Lucia Criminal Code holds that a person shall be deemed insane “if he did the act in respect of which he is accused under the influence of a delusion of such a nature as to render him, in the opinion of the jury or of the Court, an unfit subject for punishment of any kind in respect of such act”.

They held that the law “carries the connotation of a delusion of the presence of some outside influence which operates upon the defendant’s mind in such a way that he is impelled or persuaded to commit acts which he knows to be forbidden.”

This legal principle is an acknowledgement that human beings are social creatures and, as such, may be held not responsible for their actions because of social influences. This was the basis on which the death sentence was quashed, since the Rastas made familiar rants about Babylon and white oppressors and being Africans. The law here is an interesting extension of the defence by reason of insanity, which allows the individual to be freed of responsibility for their actions because of psychological maladies. But the correctness of the legal principle of delusion hinges on whether it is psychologically accurate – ie are human beings so vulnerable to social influence?

American psychologist Philip Zimbardo has devoted his career to examining this question, and his answer is Yes. “Social situations can have more profound effects on the behaviour and mental functioning of individuals, groups, and national leaders than we might believe possible,” he writes in The Lucifer Effect (available at The Reader’s Bookshop). It is this effect, says Zimbardo, which explains the atrocities committed by ordinary people in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and the Abu Ghraib prison. He also notes that such atrocities are usually validated by ideology, which he defines as “a slogan or proposition that usually legitimises whatever means are necessary to attain an ultimate goal.”

This being the case, it follows that the dominant ideologies in a society play a big part in determining whether that society can resist atrocity or whether it is vulnerable to barbarism. So here we are in a place where people praise Hugo Chavez for closing a TV station, where taxpayers’ dollars are spent to convince Afro-Trinidadians that they are victims of the success of other groups, where religious men gather to plot violence, and where superstition shapes official policy. In that context, it is no wonder that Laventille is the country’s centre of violence. But it is not the young black men who should be held responsible for this, but those politicians and commentators and demagogues who keep them angry, deprived, and in ignorance. These are the persons pushing socialism and ethnocentrism and religion: all ideologies of delusion. And, when economic and political factors slip the leash on those deceptive beasts, will we have any cultural shields of rationality and open-mindedness and compassion to fend them off?

Email: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com