Why People Swooned for Elvis More than Einstein

Something I didn’t know growing up: somebody like Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley will be a bigger deal than almost any thinker. Was even Einstein as big a deal as Taylor Swift has lately been?

But in my family, the power of song was more modest, and the power of original good ideas was a preferred ticket to being a big deal.

The way people went CRAZY for the Beatles tells us that something is going on when people sing and hear songs that doesn’t happen when someone presents a great idea.

There’s deep color and voltage in what might be called the Emotional Sphere, which music touches so effectively, and there’s a paler world, less plugged into motivation, in the Cognitive Sphere.

(The primacy of feeling is well captured in a quotation, variously attributed: “They may forget what you said—but they will never forget how you made them feel.”)

One could look at all this in an evolutionary perspective. Before our ancestors had much going on of a cognitive nature, they had full emotional lives, as chimpanzees do. Those emotions supplied the motivations that directed their actions along paths that had enabled their ancestors to survive. As we evolved into humans—the cultural animal—cognition grew in importance. But cognition was a latecomer, entering a system in which the emotional machinery of motivation was already well established.

(And in our lives today, as in politics, people don’t always “vote” on the basis of a rational assessment of the situation.)

When the throng is given a choice between attending the performance of a songster who will move people to tears and to dancing, and that of a deep thinker who will provide listeners with a good understanding of something people need to understand, smart money will bet on the far bigger crowd being at the singer’s performance.

For most of our evolutionary history, the predominance of feeling over thinking was well suited to our circumstances. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t have to figure out how to organize the world in which they lived. The evolutionary process had already done most of that organizing. Their inherited ways of living generally worked well enough to keep them alive, without running afoul of the rest of life on Earth.

But then, when human beings began departing from the niche in which they had evolved biologically—by inventing a new way of life through the domestication of plants and animals—something fundamental began to change. Increasingly, their world would necessarily be organized more by human choices, and less by the biologically evolved system they’d inherited. And increasingly, the success of their arrangements would depend on their ability to understand how their world worked and to make choices whose consequences would be beneficial.

And as civilization developed, the importance of having a good understanding of a world increasingly different from the one in which our inborn nature evolved continued to grow. Human beings acquired ever greater powers to shape the world in which they lived. The choices shaping human civilization grew increasingly consequential for the whole species, and increasingly for the entire system of life on Earth. The greater our power to alter the world, the greater our need to understand the consequences of what we do.

What had been, for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, a viable balance between feeling and thought in governing human motivation remained largely in place, even as our needs changed radically with our circumstances. The cognitive dimension remained the junior partner, even as the viability of our species has increasingly required correcting that motivational imbalance.

Which brings us back to the songster and the thinker. The singer’s power to move us draws upon emotional machinery that evolution has been developing for hundreds of millions of years. The thinker appeals to capacities that emerged much later, and that have never acquired comparable power over human motivation. Yet it is increasingly upon those capacities that the fate of our civilization—and perhaps of life on Earth—depends.

Of course, we humans—with our exceptionally big brains and, as would be required of a cultural animal, an overgrown neocortex—do a lot of thinking. And over the millennia humankind has hit upon a great many insights. But there remains the problem of motivation. It is one thing to understand something, but another to be moved to act on that understanding.

For centuries, people have understood that preventing war requires an international order not based on the unrestricted freedom of sovereign nations to act as they please. Yet even as the destructive potential of warfare has grown to threaten humanity’s very survival, large portions of humankind continue to regard national sovereignty as non-negotiable.

So humankind has developed the means for a whole field of science to discover how we are disrupting the climate system of our planet, much to our peril. But that understanding has not been sufficient to move humankind to take the kinds of action the scientists’ warnings would call for.

Thinking shows that the Central Challenge facing humankind is to order our civilization well enough — and soon enough — to prevent our self-destruction. With everything we care deeply about at stake, one would hope that that understanding would motivate us to meet that challenge.