My friend, supposedly part time lover and much more prolific blogger, Ted, over at Painting Fakes, threw me bait that I could not resist. In accounting for the kindness shown to me in a moment of trauma, according to Ted, I displayed confirmation bias (the tendency to explain things according to a belief already held, thereby confirming it) by attributing the assistance I was given to human qualities of altruism, contradicting, as I quite provocativingly challenged my relatives to consider, their belief that all humans are 'fallen', inherently sinful and thus prone to sin requiring both redemption and a redeemer, thus lending credence to their belief that's Jesus's mission on earth was messianic, not simply, like all the rest of us, quite pedestrian.
Of course, the only way around confirmation bias is objective testing. If more and more people can see that something is true, then the probability of it just being confirmation bias by all those people is less. Additionally, some objective measures can be agreed upon to, at the very minimum, highlight the bias, or, at best, remove the bias.
Let's establish a few things which probably won't be that controversial. First, in the midst of trauma, where your anxiety levels are high, any kind of help seems almost 'god given' - improbably fortuitous. Everybody who provides assistance seems like an angel. Second, trauma narrows your focus. The world seems to rotate around you and your injury, as do the actions of emergency services, and the opportunities for broader reflection, over a cup of tea, are limited.
These are both interesting in where they might lead. I guess, in retrospect, the fortune of the location of my injury on my body and the ready assistance at hand should have led me to believe that the 'hand of god' was present. 'He' manipulated circumstances to, perhaps, bring me to some glorious revelation. But, as Tim Minchin so ably satirises in Thank you God for fixing the cataracts of Sam's mum, such a conclusion is so massively illogical. It means that the women who suffered a massive heart attack the week before in the same park and was unable to be resuscitated must likewise have been denied the hand of god - the unsurprising conclusion is that all good outcomes are the hand of god and all adverse are the work of nature (or god's eternal plan, whichever version of god you subscribe to).
If ever there was confirmation bias, that is it. As plausibility goes, there is another thesis.
I had been riding well - feeling fit and healthy. I had just completed my favourite track and was moving onto a track that was very familiar, mainly so my son could go a little further and I would get some more fitness out of him. My confidence was high, which probably means I took more risks than I normally would. The track was familiar, which probably means I took less notice, explicitly, of features and rode it more automatically.
Recent storms had deposited loose sand at various places, especially corners, which tend to be in gullies where water flows. Since they were a 'new' feature in the familiar track, I would not be expecting them. Only minutes before, I had been shocked that a large tree had fallen on my favourite track, just around a blind corner, and its roots protruded dangerously into track space. I had narrowly averted a collision and had made a mental note to inform SEQ Water. But this new feature was 'in my face' - it came to my notice readily where excess sand might not.
I had also stopped just previous to the track where I had the accident and adjusted my son's brakes. In stopping, I got talking to a guy I saw frequently at the park and we discovered we were both teachers and had common experiences. My conversation with him had lasted almost 20 minutes and by the time I resumed riding, my muscles were cold.
On the corner that I had the accident, sand had accumulated on the side of the track that was the natural line for the corner. Sand has a significant braking effect when riding. My front wheel simply stopped and the force of cornering flicked it around so that one end of the handle bar faced my groin and, as my bike and I rotated around the stationary front wheel, the other end of the bar pierced the ground. The ground and handlebar did not give way, so my groin absorbed the impact of 90kg of weight travelling at 20km/h.
Of course, this is just conjecture - but it is at least scientific, plausible and based on objective facts that we could test. I can match my wound with the end of the handlebar, I can revisit the site and find sand, I can match the track surface with that still in my handlebar, I can interview my new friend Don and so on. All of this is verifiable.
Of course, if you must, you can still insist on the hand of god and I leave you to that if you can't live without it. Needless to say, whether the hand of god is there or not, it matters not a jot - the hand of god is eminently disposable without changing the facts.
Of course, we could then turn to the human aspect of the event and find something that might deny or affirm our beliefs. On a previous ride in the same park, I was furious when my chain broke within 20 minutes of the start of the ride and I had no means of fixing it. As a rider, I am no less determined to get a fix to satisfy my addiction than the next rider. All riders want their fix.
At least half a dozen riders that day truncated their rides to provide assistance. One pushed my bike (and his) 1 kilometre to a clearing and then rode it back to the car park and then returned on foot to get his own bike. One stayed as his partner returned to the car park so they could be in contact to give the ambulance updates on how to find me. Another encouraged me to relax and lie back - important to slow my racing heart rate (driven mostly by anxiety - my rest heart rate after rides is much lower) and stayed for a good while to makes sure I was OK.
At one time, I was rather embarrassed that Peter from Kalbar was bringing my bike and his rather awkwardly along the track as I hobbled out to a clearing that an ambulance could access. I apologised for upsetting his day. "I hope you got a good ride in." I said.
His reply is so salient to this discussion. Peter doesn't have to confirm my bias. Regardless of what I read into his actions, he is not obliged to affirm these in his words. He could have said, "I'm happy to help." He could have said, "Jesus said that we should love one another and that's what I am doing." He could even have said, "It is more blessed to give than to receive."
What he actually said might surprise.
He said, "I'd expect someone to help me if I was injured." He did what he did because of an unwritten code amongst riders that, regardless of your intentions for gratifying your addiction to riding, you stop to help those who are in need.
But such a code is not exclusive to riders. It permeates so many circumstances to the point that we are shocked when someone is so callous as to pass by someone in trauma and first-aid classes counsel participants to examine, as the first point in coming upon trauma, whether they can really be useful in assisting the person; such is the tendency of people to stop and help. Helping others is natural. We have an in-built tendency to altruism, especially when someone else is in dire straits. This is played out over and over again.
Without getting too deeply into religious argumentation, attempting to align this tendency with the concept of 'fallen' humanity, driven to sin by an inherited propensity to hate, steal, deceive and lust, just doesn't work. If Peter had stolen my bike, if Stu had asked me for a retainer for his services, if the lady giving first aid had rifled through my things, if the ambulance personnel had been casual about interrupting their New Year's Eve, if the doctor's had been aloof and uncaring instead of attentive and apologetic that I was not attended to when they rightly attended to others with higher needs, if my friends had scorned my recklessness instead of joking about it in an attempt to make me feel better, if my family had simply continued their day as intended and left me to my own devices - this might have made me convinced of a fallen world and humanity on the road to hell.
But, instead, the actions of each human I encountered affirmed, yes affirmed, my belief that humans are essentially good and that they display altruism at every possible opportunity because it feels good - it triggers a dopamine rush just as surely as flinging your body and bike around a tight hairpin. To nominate those who assisted me in the time of need as being in need of redemption is arrogance and presumption on a breath-taking scale. Likewise, to simply consider these non-random acts of kindness as just a delusion, as a perception through rose coloured glasses, is to ignore real events and real actions and devalue the efforts of others.
'Random' acts of kindness are not random at all - they are natural and expected, inherent in us all. We do not need the hand of god to explain them, nor do we need to be created in the image of a kind God. Like Peter, the next time I encounter a trauma, I will act as a human would, fullfilling an expectation of humans.
