Mightier Acorns

The human brain is incredible.

I mean that in every sense of the word. The things a human brain is capable of doing are “impossible or difficult to believe,” and yet, we owe our existence and continued survival to our brains doing those unbelievable things.

“Belief” is the focus of this essay, by the way. Belief and stories, and the place where they run up against reason and evidence.

Where Stories Come From

We tell ourselves stories for several reasons. The earliest known writing system, cuneiform, was used by ancient Mesopotamians living in what is now the modern Iraq to record transactions in clay tablets, but the same Sumerian culture also wrote down The Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest known work of fiction.

We know that before writing was invented, human cultures relied on oral traditions, passing down their histories and their genealogies through memorization and repetition. This continued even after the invention of writing. African griot traditions carry into the modern age even though the power structure of the kings who used to sustain the griot caste no longer exists. Evidence found through archaeology tells us that art, whether the music of the griot or the paintings found in caves from 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, has always been a part of human life.

The writer John Green talks about the paintings found in a cave in Lascaux, France, in 1940, and I often think about what he said in his Anthropocene Reviewed essay, after pointing out that the hand stencils found in the cave tell us how different life was for early humans:

But they also remind us that the humans of the past were as human as we are. Their hands indistinguishable from ours. These communities hunted and gathered and there were no large caloric surpluses so every healthy person would’ve had to contribute to the acquisition of food and water. And yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn’t optional for humans.

I don’t believe art or storytelling is optional for humans. Our brains constantly process information received through our senses, and making sense of all of that information requires us to build a framework, a story, to explain what we see, hear, or feel.

Sometimes, as we do with our family history research, we create scenarios to explain the information we find, and to help predict where to look for more evidence. But often we find ourselves without evidence or an easy explanation, and that’s where our storytelling and imagination tend to run wild.

“Not Knowing” Is Scary

We don’t like to sit with “I don’t know” for very long.

How many times have you run into a dead end in your family history research and told yourself a “placeholder” story to explain the gap you have found? I didn’t know for a long time what happened to William Zardy Sly, the grandson of Harriet E. Callin (1838–1907), so I told myself that he must have died after 1907, leaving a widow and a small child behind. Telling myself that story led me to stop looking for evidence, until another cousin filled me in on the Double Life of Uncle Jack! Without the evidence of cousin Leanne’s testimony and personal knowledge that Zardy had left behind his old life, created a new identity, and became her Uncle Jack St. Clair, there is no way I could have arrived at the truth using my usual sources of evidence.

When genealogists run into dead ends like these, it is tempting to make leaps or to rely on the hearsay and guesswork of others. We ran into an example of this with my Livingston ancestors in Two Steps Back. I’m sure you have your own frustrating examples of someone stringing together a version of your tree that doesn’t hold up when more evidence is found.

And it can be frustrating to try to correct the record when the person who strung that fanciful version together doesn’t want to let go of the story they have been telling themselves.

Invested In Stories

There are a lot of reasons why someone might insist that a story they tell themselves is true even when the evidence shows otherwise.

We are social primates whose survival depends on our family and community, and so if the community has decided that something must be true, we risk losing that community if we don’t accept it, too. This can lead to a range of consequences, from simply having to admit to being wrong to losing jobs or relationships that we value.

The stakes aren’t always that high, but as human beings, we tend to prefer the first version of a story we hear, especially if it has some emotional core that appeals to us.

Take the story I first learned about my Hessian soldier ancestor, Leopold Zindle. I really liked the version of his story that I found in 2014. The story that he defied a British officer who struck him with a sword in the street, and that the people of Morristown, NJ, came together to protect him and accept him held a deep appeal to me. But as I learned later, in the story behind the story, Leopold did not defy a British officer (it was a German-speaking American officer), he did not defy him alone (there were two of them involved), and the event did not happen in front of the town (it happened on the road to Philadelphia, and led to the return of the German prisoners to Morristown).

I liked the romance of the first version of Leopold’s story, but as I found new facts and evidence, I had to let go of that romance so that I could get at the truth of what happened to him. And the truth was much more interesting and complicated, even if it was less appealing to my romantic sense of story.

In the case of Zardy Sly, I wasn’t deeply invested in his story. I am not his direct descendant, and I didn’t have an idea in my head of what kind of person he was. But I imagine that his abandoned daughter might have built a story to explain why her father was gone. And if she told herself a story that gave her comfort or helped her heal from his loss, finding out that he had a second life with a second wife (one that his parents and siblings knew about) could be emotionally devastating.

If you spend any time in a genealogy forum (like r/Genealogy on Reddit) examples abound of what can happen when DNA evidence reveals a “non-parental event” (NPE) that upends years of research.

Revising our personal stories and histories can be upsetting, and sometimes we are motivated to resist that revision, no matter what the evidence says.

Magical Thinking: What You “Believe In”

I’m using the phrase “Magical thinking” to describe the idea that wanting something to be true badly enough can make it true.

This goes beyond the countless examples of people inventing stories to explain evidence that doesn’t make sense to them. People often fall back on magical thinking to explain away new evidence that contradicts a story they love. Magical thinking is never about what you can prove; it is always about what you believe in.

For example, even though we have seen 400 years of advancements in astronomy, archaeology, and biology – discoveries about DNA, the finding of new burial sites and ancient settlements, and the building of more powerful telescopes – despite the growing body of evidence that shows with greater and greater precision the age of our planet and our universe, and how our ancestors came to be, there is an alarming number of people who insist that their story about an Earth that is only 6,000 years old is real.

And if you have encountered someone who believes that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, you know how upsetting any argument about it can get. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that other people who share their faith have found ways to reconcile the old stories with the new science. The idea that they should let go of this story becomes an attack on their identity, on their sense of who they are, and on their community.

When you are in a conversation with someone and you realize that they feel that their beliefs are being challenged, the best course of action is usually to back off. If they arrived at their position without evidence, it is unlikely that any amount of evidence will convince them to change their position. At least, not in the moment. And forcing the issue can lead them to double down on their beliefs, dismiss you and your evidence, and make it harder for you to present your case to them in the long run.

Such is the power of magical thinking.

So, What Do We Do?

The truth is, I don’t know an easy way to convince people to change their minds once they have decided to protect their story from evidence to the contrary.

The best suggestions I can offer are to model the behaviors you wish they would adopt. Do your best not to alienate the other person, and then demonstrate how you work:

Document the evidence you have, including the context needed to understand it.

Be open about your doubts; allow for the fact that your interpretation of the evidence could be wrong. But also make it clear what evidence you would need to either prove or refute your story.

Build on what you can prove without a doubt, and on facts that are not in dispute. Frame your disagreement around the points that you agree on. “We know that grandpa enlisted in the army, but we don’t know what happened to him afterward. If he died, we would expect to see a document; if he started a new life with a new name, we might see DNA evidence.”

Avoid absolutes. And avoid framing your conclusions as “beliefs.” Rather than saying, “I believe the newspapers version of Leopold’s story is false,” say, “The evidence provided by his commanders and the letters of his fellow prisoners suggest that Leopold’s story was this, instead…”

Above all else, you have to be willing to let people be wrong. Especially when their being wrong presents no threat of harm.

If we were talking about the welfare of a child or a case where being wrong does present a harm (like, allowing someone who doesn’t “believe in” vaccines to put your health at risk), you wouldn’t just “let it go.” But if we’re talking about the stories of people who are long dead, there is no reason to try to force someone to accept your facts.

Sometimes, the wisest course is to let the elephant think the magic feather allows him to fly. Just make sure he doesn’t try to jump off the roof.