Apparently the first mention of “cargo cults” was in an unlikely and unlikable movie, called “Mondo Cane” (the world of Dogs). The cargo cult phenomenon was recorded by Richard Feynmann[1] as Cargo Cult Science. He noted the similarity of the “cults” thought processes to empirical science, and used the empirical aspect to discuss scientific integrity, a favorite topic and concern of his.
Recently Richard Dawkins[2] resurrected the cults with additional inputs from David Attenborough[3], and which are now taken to be examples of how a religion can appear out of a silly and ignorant superstition virtually overnight. They are copiously ridiculed and compared with Christianity. Here’s the gag:
During WWII, U.S. troops occupied numerous Pacific islands, many that were occupied by natives that were completely unfamiliar with technology of any kind. The natives observed that the troops would build landing runways, small terminal buildings, and then install radio antennas and communication systems. Suddenly airplanes would arrive bearing loads of cargo for the troops.
When the war was over, the natives decided to try that for themselves. So they carved out runways, built huts and put up poles for antennas. One place covered a woman with wire to be a radio. Then they sat back and waited for the cargo to roll in. They waited for inordinately long times, with a report of one native manning his runway post for over 19 years. One reports that John Frum, a white man from South America will return on February 15… year unknown. So every Feb 15 a welcome ceremony is prepared for the coming of John Frum.
This is said to be an indication of an irrational faith built on an ignorant and irrational basis. It is therefore a model of how religion developed, from ignorant and irrational starting premises. Attenborough quotes “anthropologists” who call the cults “religions”. Dawkins calls the welcome ceremony a “religious” ceremony; several “evolution of religions” conclusions are drawn from these behaviors, including “memetic selection” of religions such as Christianity.
Is this so? Not likely. What actually was happening was rational behavior at its empirical best. The natives observed a phenomenon; they deduced a cause and effect relationship with the best knowledge that they had available to them. They tried to reproduce the cause, and then waited for the effect. After all, the two went hand in hand according to their preliminary observation. With dogged determination, they pursued their experiment, in the same manner as modern empiricists. And as we know, modern empiricists frequently get negative results, too. The only difference with the native empiricists is that they had much less technical background to draw from, and their inferences were flawed. These flawed inferences have been ridiculed by Atheists as superstitious nonsense, and religious cultism. The empirical and rational aspects are totally ignored.
However, there is no report of real worship or occultism in the cargo cults. The welcoming committee was spuriously termed religious by Dawkins out of presuppositions of his own, and totally ignoring the purely non-religious aspect of just welcoming a visitor. The one report of a soldier saying that he would come back is presupposed as a messiah story; but it is more correctly seen to be another data point in the native’s expectation of the correctness of the cause and effect relationship between runways / radios, and the imminent arrival of cargo.
Richard Feynmann interpreted the activities of these people to be science. It went awry because it was uninformed; it lacked scientific integrity in the sense that the natives did not have the ability to investigate the basics: What does a radio actually do? So the natives fooled themselves, in much the same way that Feynmann cautions modern science against. But still, the endeavor was one of primitive empirical science, not religion. Dawkins and Attenborough missed that completely and totally, and they are “scientists” by title at least. What else have they totally missed by not exercising scientific integrity? What else has been misconstrued due to dearly held presuppositions that interfere with objectivity?
The misinterpretation of the cargo cult phenomenon points to the failure of flawed observers having deep seated presuppositions, in this case about supposedly ignorant and unintelligent natives, in the same vein as the Margaret Mead assumptions. It is not only presumptuously wrong, it is blatantly racist, and elitist. But presuppositional prejudice now seems to infect entire areas of “science”, which refuse to differentiate between circumstantial evidence and the hard evidence of empiricism. Dawkins and Attenborough belong to infected threads of such sciences.