by Will Storr
Analysis of one hundred such papers by researchers at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina concluded that religious believers have more positive emotions and show a greater satisfaction with their lives than others. Anthropologists at the University of Connecticut found that Israeli women who recited psalms during the second intifada experienced less anxiety and an increased sense of control compared with those who did not.
Professor Wilson believes that a central benefit of story-making is the sense of certainty it offers. He tells of an examination of a group of people who had a 50 per cent chance of developing fatal Huntingdon’s disease. They were given the opportunity to discover their fate using a simple test. Some participants took the test, while others chose to remain in ignorance. Those who tested positive were devastated: they would likely die in middle age. When they were seen again, though, six months later, their happiness levels had lifted back to normal. After a year, they remained stable. But the group who had chosen not to find out were significantly more depressed.
Surprisingly, the individuals who knew that they would die young were happier than those who were not sure. Says Professor Wilson, ‘Those who had learned that they had inherited the Huntingdon’s gene found a way to come to terms with it, by incorporating this news into their narratives and finding some meaning in it … those who remained uncertain about their health status could not undergo this restorative process of narrative change.’
We create stories because they make us happy. They are how we learn about the world. They are how we predict the future. They provide certainty. They are a source of power and motivation. They tell us why good things happen and bad things happen and why we are better than most. They are arks of meaning, the method by which we navigate our lives through a dangerous and confusing world. At every moment, night and day, we are acting in our own first-person narrative dramas. Not only do our brains make a world for our story to play out in, they also create its hero. Us.
12
‘I came of exceptional parents’
I cannot work out what it is with that shirt – but it is beautiful. Its top button is unfastened and its pristine cotton is firm and yet soft. It is behaving in all the right ways – in all of its angles, in the soaring confidence of its collar’s upright points, in the inviting shadows that it is painting on its owner’s skin. How does a simple white shirt come to look so elegant? What, exactly, is it that makes it so different from any of mine? Probably, I think, it is expensive. The young man who is wearing it certainly looks expensive. He sounds it, too. The whole carriage can hear him. Whereas everybody else has spent this journey looking softly out of windows or quietly reading, he has spent it on his phone, cufflinks flashing, talking volubly about his many and important activities at university at Oxford, which is where this train terminates. ‘I really don’t know what his problem is with me,’ he says, at one point, and I think, ‘I bet I could tell you. I bet I could give you a fucking list.’
I watch him, through the heads of the passengers in front of me. He is one of those men who are almost handsome. He is an impersonator, executing a flawed performance of beauty – mimicking perfection and failing just enough so that your attention is drawn to his essential flaw. It is his mouth. It is too wide and juts upwards at the sides. Thin lips and billboard teeth give his face a note of imperiousness and cruelty. I wonder about the years he has ahead of him. The gilded, almost-perfect life. I realise that I am staring at him again. He looks at me directly, this lucky prince, this student, and I glance shamefully away.
I am an hour early for my meeting with the famous climate-change sceptic Lord Monckton, so I button up my coat and wander the city. I am in a pedestrian precinct, ten minutes from the station, when I am startled to recognise the scene in front of me – a Tudor-looking building that now houses a chemist. My father has a framed etching of it at home, hanging in the corridor that leads from the bathroom. Ten minutes later I see a magisterial, columned edifice with a distinctive circular frontage. I grew up looking at that one too. Scenes from this city surrounded me when I was young. Oxford University. It is part of my father’s story. I try to picture him – young and thriving, perhaps still with his Yorkshire accent – walking these streets in the 1960s. I wonder what he was like, back then. Which college did he go to? I begin to squint up at the black and gold painted walkers’ signs as I pass them. Christ Church? Was that it?
I am about to enter Christ Church when a man in a booth blankly meets my eyes. There is a smartly painted sign in front of me, declaring this to be a private entrance. Two students move through unimpeded. Flush-cheeked, with big hair and scarves and confident, in their gait and in their echoing chatter, which concerns an audition for a part in a play. They turn off into some secret corridor. I stand in the wind and watch them go.
University is a part of my story too. My parents wanted me to go to a respected one such as this, but I never doubted that their ambition was hopeless. Even towards the end, they seemed convinced that I had a chance. The last time I was in Oxford was for a university open day. My father had sent me there praying, I suspect, that by witnessing the glories that were ultimately possible, I would be inspired, finally, finally, after all these years of trouble, to actually do some work. My only memory of that trip is of sitting in the room of an English professor, who said, ‘Tell me about your favourite Tennessee Williams.’ I don’t recall how I answered. But I do remember the emotion of the moment; the shame that I had no idea at all what a Tennessee Williams was.
When I was at school, I would always argue with my disappointed parents and harried teachers that I wanted to write and that writers don’t need qualifications. I made no attempt to pass my A-levels and when I failed them all, I happily took a job in a record shop and the editorship of a local music fanzine. While my ex-school friends were lounging around student bars, I was working eight-hour days, with four weeks off a year, keeping my spare time for interviewing bands, hustling advertisers and folding thousands of photocopied pages. I spurned university. I never went. I always said I wouldn’t need it to succeed, and I didn’t.
That is my university story. It is the one I tell everyone, and it is untrue. I didn’t fail all my A-levels, I scraped an E in geography, on account of a project I did on the pH levels of some soil on a Scottish hill that I really quite enjoyed doing. I did attend university – in Luton. My leaving (which took place a matter of weeks into my course) was motivated less by the opportunity of an editorship and more by the fact that I missed my girlfriend, Jenny, so much that I felt as if I was being crushed underwater. I moved in with a drug dealer in Tunbridge Wells, discovered amphetamines and got sacked from the shop when they caught me stealing. I ended up back in my childhood bedroom, for a while, claiming the dole.
In the narrative that I tell everyone, I am the hero, defiantly fighting the authorities at school and at home, bravely choosing the harder path and winning. In the true version, I am an academic failure and a petty criminal. Cognitive psychologist Professor Martin Conway believes that when we recall the events of our lives, we become the accidental victims of a fight between the different ways in which the brain rebuilds memories. It takes sensory information – how we felt in that moment – and combines it with dry facts – dates and so on. But these two processes are in conflict. The rational side wants the truth while the emotional side wants a story that works in service of the ego. And mostly – unsurprisingly – it wants to rebuild you into a hero. I am not sure if I can blame my university myth on these unconscious processes. But the strange thing is that a part of me – most of me, in fact – has somehow come to believe it.
The public entrance of Christ Church takes you past a sign that tells of Lewis Carroll and Albert Einstein and the thirteen prime ministers who have studied there. The college building is fatly magnificent, with its arched windows, carved stone balconies and towering roofs. I wander up and down for a while, just looking, imagining. It costs seven pounds for a non-student such as me to enter
. I buy my ticket and follow the strictly laid-out tourist route, prevented by bowler-hatted guards from wandering the parts from which the public are prohibited. Grand portraits of centuries-past alumni look down at me – pale faces emerge from dark oils as if looming out of death itself. Long fingers, long noses, raised chins, impressive and imperious and gloating. I walk through the dining hall, with its leather seats, its golden lamps and its lit log fires, to see grown men and women shuffling about anxiously in silver-service uniforms, waxing the floor and polishing knives and forks and special little spoons in preparation for the arrival of these miraculous and perfect teenagers, in their miraculous and perfect shirts, who will soon be ruling the world.
Suddenly unaccountably irritable, I decide to leave. On the way out, I hear the sound of an organ coming from the chapel. I pad in quietly, unsure whether or not I am allowed to enter. I find the source of the music – a stunning array of pipes that float high in the medieval shadows – and stand before it. This is the sound of my childhood. My father was – is – obsessed with playing the organ. When he retired, he had one built in a small upstairs room of his house. It was his version of buying a Ferrari, I think – a dream come true. He had to have the floor reinforced.
When I was growing up, I was obsessed with music too. But my father couldn’t bear the pop that I listened to before my adolescence or the heavy metal that I stomped towards when I became a teenager. The records that I would buy, the posters that I would pin to my walls, were the cause of terrible fights. It was all symbolic to him, I think, of my failure at school, my thieving at home, my drinking, my lack of respect for civilisation. My parents hated my music, and they loved God. They worked in education and believed passionately in its principles. I rejected education and God and believed passionately in Zodiac Mindwarp and Faith No More. It made for an uneasy childhood.
Our beliefs and tastes are much more than they are. They signal to distances that lie far beyond their own limits. They are markers, signs that display the culture and moral structure that we have adopted for ourselves to live within. They are chapter titles in our story about the world. My father read the signs that were hidden in those posters, T-shirts and record sleeves, and he did not like what they told him.
Yesterday, I met Dr James Garvey, a secretary of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, at a cafe in the British Museum. He has written a book on the ethics of global warming, and been called a religiously minded eco-fascist by climate-change sceptics because of his refusal to explore the notion that it is all a hoax, or to read obscure papers by non-scientists. He told me that this kind of thinking represents ‘a way of seeing the world. In order to be a conservative person in America you have to be anti-abortion, pro-guns, pro-death-penalty, small government, no regulation – and climate is in there too. If you look at that set of beliefs, that’s an identity. And you can’t change an identity with facts.’
I have begun to realise that I used to blame my parents for their beliefs. I took it personally that their identities did not resemble mine. What I didn’t understand was that we cannot choose the worlds we live within. Dr Garvey told me, ‘David Hume says, “nature hasn’t left it up to us what we believe”. You can’t pick your beliefs. You can, to some extent, have an influence on them, if you are especially open. But evidence cannot shift almost all the things you believe.’
My father’s anger at my music, mine at his spiritual convictions. If these were just confabulations – stories spun atop mute emotional responses – then which emotion was it? Fear, perhaps. My father’s fear of my failure, mine of his rejection. Inevitably, naturally, as I have grown older I have found myself becoming more like he was back then. And so the distance lessens, the understanding gathers itself up from the edges and with it comes empathy and love. It strikes me, as I stand here, that there was a time when the sound of an organ playing would make me fearful. Right now, I find it beautiful.
It is nearly time. I leave the hushed chapel and walk to the Oxford Union, where I have an engagement with the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. It is Dr Garvey’s ‘identity’ problem that has brought me here, to meet one of the world’s most controversial climate-change sceptics. What fascinates me about Lord Monckton is not his explosively heretical defiance of the scientific establishment’s now inarguable case for the dangers and reality of man-made climate change. It is that so many of his views seem to coalesce on the political right. Why do constellations of belief tend to fall so reliably on the left or right wing? Why, for example, would a person who votes for the privatisation of public services also often be a supporter of the foreign policy of Israel? Why would their opponent tend to agitate on behalf of women seeking abortions and also for cheaper fares on local buses?
In Lord Monckton’s case, he is head of policy at the right wing UK Independence Party, an anti-European, anti-regulation Christian, one-time adviser on scientific and domestic policy to Margaret Thatcher and a popular speaker with America’s Tea Party movement. He has labelled climate science the ‘largest fraud of all time,’ believes that ‘the Hitler Youth were left wing and also a green organisation’ and has compared 2009’s Copenhagen Climate Conference to the Nuremberg Rallies.
Monckton’s position on climate differs from that of the mainstream in that he believes that ‘very little’ warming of the earth will take place given the anticipated increase in carbon-dioxide concentration. When the presentation that he gives in service of this opinion was heard by Professor John Abraham – who has published more than eighty papers on heat transfer and fluid mechanics – he spent eight months tracking down ‘the articles and authors that Monckton cited. What I discovered was incredible, even to a scientist who follows the politics of climate change. I found that he had misrepresented the science.’ Monckton responded by accusing Abraham of issuing ‘venomously ad hominem … artful puerilities,’ said he had a face like an ‘overcooked prawn’ and promptly declared legal action.
Our modern notion of ‘left’ and ‘right’ beliefs has its genesis in the 1789 revolution in France, when defenders of the aristocracy, Church and crown placed themselves on the right side of the chamber at the French Assembly, while supporters of the revolutionaries sat opposite. It is remarkable to think that conservatives and progressives still tend to align in this way, as if magnetised. If emotions – unconscious hunches – drive the great mass of our beliefs, then what is the emotional cause of these disparate sets of positions collecting at opposite poles? And why, in the words of clinical psychologist and political strategist Professor Drew Westen, is ‘the biggest single predictor of party affiliation – and of the broader value systems associated with it – the party affiliations of our parents’?
In preparation for my encounter with Lord Monckton, I spoke with Professor Jonathan Haidt about the source of our moral and political beliefs. ‘The place to begin is with these amazing twin studies in the 1980s,’ he told me. ‘They said that every aspect of your personality is partly heritable – what kind of music you like, what food you enjoy, everything. So if your identical twin is separated from you at birth, they will probably have the same politics as you forty years later, and how it works is to do with your genes. You have a particular genome which sets your initial direction – the first draft of your moral and political mind. Your genome does not specify the final form of your brain, it really just specifies the starting conditions. Then, by this mysterious process by which brains are created in utero and run throughout life, you emerge with a certain kind of brain. Brains are what you call “experience expectant”. Evolution, in a sense, knows that we’re going to get lots and lots of experience about what kinds of animals are dangerous, whether society is stable or unstable, hierarchical or egalitarian. So we get all kinds of information from the environment; our brains are expecting that information. As they continue growing, they incorporate that information. So you have to take a genetic view, a developmental view and a cultural view. You have to take all three views at the same time to understand why peo
ple end up where they end up and if you leave any of these three pieces out you won’t have the whole story.’
In The Righteous Mind, Haidt writes that genes account for ‘between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes.’ An analysis of thirteen thousand Australians has indicated that a key commonality among many of the genes that separated conservative from liberal was involved in their responses to threat and fear. ‘Individual genes have tiny effects,’ he writes. However, ‘genes collectively give people brains that are more or less reactive to threat and more or less open to new experience.’ Very broadly speaking, the open ones are more likely to wander leftwards. The fearful, meanwhile, run to the right.
We can be born, then, with a kind of pre-set ‘mood’ – open or fearful. Depending on what happens to us during childhood, aspects of this mood can be counteracted or encouraged. Our behaviour influences the behaviour of those around us which, in turn, re-influences us. Growing up, our personality draws those of a similar nature closer into our circles. Professor Chris Frith has already told me how we are barely aware of our automatic tendency to imitate the people around us, and absorb their goals, knowledge and beliefs. (‘This is why strange narratives work best when they are shared by a group,’ he added, significantly.) As an adult, these crucial choices – where we live, how we socialise, the newspapers we read – create yet more feedback loops.
In this way, our moods create our worlds. Although our destinies are not written in the codes of our genome, we are aimed in a certain direction before we are sluiced from the womb. Our emotions weave a breadcrumb trail of advance or withdraw responses, which we can hardly help but follow. They influence our experiences, which influence the way we understand the world. Unless dramatic life events intercede, we have a tendency to become what we are.