Is It Right to Believe?
It
seems to me that many people don’t know what to believe anymore, at least
that’s what they tell me. I’ve also met some recently who think they believe, but don’t know
why; that’s apparent from their clichéd responses to my query about the basis
of their belief. These two groups concern me, but not nearly as much as those
who have simply decided not to
believe anymore at all.
I’m
not talking here about religious
beliefs (though what I’ve said clearly applies to many). Rather, I’m talking
about beliefs regarding our everyday world in general, but especially about beliefs
regarding political discourse,
issues, persons, and events. Too many people have become cynical and
disillusioned, weary with fatigue and suspicious of politicians and what they
say about themselves and their opponents.
For
others, their belief system is impenetrable and more than adequate in
dismissing contrary opinion and disparaging those who hold different views. The
clash that occurs when advocates of incompatible viewpoints encounter one
another is calamitous to the observers, and detrimental to their emotional,
intellectual, and social health. The bellicose nature of our politics has
elevated strident partisanship to new heights, degraded patriotism into tribalism,
and diminished the capacity to enact the virtue of civility. It is little
wonder then that some don’t know what to believe, while others can’t explain
their belief, and still others have abandoned belief altogether and thrown up
their hands in disgust.
This
situation should not surprise us. In 2008, researchers from several major
American universities replicated a study of American voters originally
published in 1960 under the title The
American Voter (University of Chicago Press, 1960). The more recent
replication, entitled The American Voter:
Revisited (University of Michigan, 2008), analyzed survey data generated by
more recent National
Election Studies, and reconfirmed the classification of voters originally
identified in the 1960 study. Their taxonomy consists of four groupings.
First,
and in terms of levels of political knowledge and experience, we note that some
people are deeply immersed in a political ideology to the point where they
function not merely as activists but as the spokespersons—the cognitive elite—of
their political party and its policy positions. These are the persons who have
the prerogative of elucidating the terms and arguments by which a political issue
is defined and corresponding positions taken. This group represents 24.53% of
voters.
Then
there are people whose knowledge and experience are narrower in focus and limited
in scope. Rather than thinking generally, deeply, or abstractly about
ideological positions and policy issues, these people are oriented to the
particular interests of the group or class with which they most identify in
terms of race, sexual identity, or social-economic status. Their concern in
politics is for enhancing the position and well-being of their group. Issues
and candidates that speak to this enhancement are foremost in the minds of
these persons, irrespective of political ideology. This group makes up 30.20%
of American voters.
Another
group consists of people who are little interested in either ideology or group
solidarity, but keenly interested in voting for whomever represents the
likelihood of improving their overall economic conditions. Given neither to
political intellectualizing nor policy wonkishness, individuals in this group
desire either a maintenance or recovery of good times; their political
sophistication is jejune and their preference for one candidate or party over
another is impressionistic. These voters represent 28.93% of the electorate.
Finally,
there remains the number of people whose political conceptuality and policy
understanding are nonexistent. They neither like nor dislike political parties
and candidates at best, or they like all, or dislike all, for trivial reasons
at worst. There is little evidence of organization to their political thinking
and they are prone to voting for a candidate on the basis of the most
superfluous reasons (e.g., some characteristic of the candidate unrelated to
his or her party or policy positions). Fully 16.34% of voters fall into this
group.
Noticeably
missing from this classification scheme is the number of eligible voters who simply
do not vote. In the 2016 national election, the U.S. Elections Project reported
that 46.9% of eligible voters failed to exercise their right to vote. My fear
now is that the malevolence in our politics, the rancor in our discourse, and
the jingoism in our associations will dissuade previously-voting citizens from
exercising the most sacred right of participation in a democracy, the right to
vote. Not knowing what to believe, or
knowing why they believe, or simply
deciding not to believe is a
consequence of the pitiful and contemptable state of our politics.
Journalist
James Surowiecki wrote
that “real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn’t make for a
compelling thriller.” His comment cannot be considered disingenuous,
particularly in view of the recent partisan posturing, pretensions, and
proclamations surrounding the Senate Supreme Court nomination hearings and the
investigation unfolding therefrom. The accusations and counter-accusations surrounding
that nomination indicate that the reach of “the political” in our daily lives is
far more expansive than perhaps we envisioned. In the wake of these hearings, I
recalled an observation George Orwell made in his 1946 article,
“Politics and the English Language,” published in Horizon: “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of
politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of
lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.” Written more than fifty
years ago, this is no less true now than then.
To
many, it feels like we are in the grip of varying forms of political extremism.
No doubt there are deeply committed ideologues in the public square, on both
right and left, but they are too cocksure of their beliefs and positions to be
given the keys to this house we call the United States. As Seymour Martin
Lipset and Earl Raab observe in their book, The
Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (Harper
& Row, 1970), extremism on the right tends primarily to be a retaliatory reaction
to change that dislocates group power and status, while extremism on the left seeks
to compel change that dislodges established power and status groups. Thus, political
extremism is the politics of despair fueling both radical and reactionary backlash.
But
as Lipset and Raab point out, political extremism in any ideological form is “a
generalized measure of deviance from the political norm” and “a specific
tendency to violate democratic procedures” (4). Indeed, the political forms of
extremism we observe in operation today are pressing against, and in some
circumstances passing beyond, the boundaries of normality and functionality
that have characterized our traditional democratic processes. Civility and
propriety and respect are on life-support. It seems we have lost what T.V.
Smith and Eduard Lindeman called the “state of mind” that the effective
enactment of a democratic government and society requires: “Persons striving to
adapt themselves to the democratic way of life are required to discipline
themselves to one variety of unity, namely unity which is achieved through the
creative use of diversity. A society which is by affirmation democratic is
expected to provide and protect a wide range of diversities” (The Democratic Way of Life. Mentor,
1951, p. 91).
Moreover,
the omnipresence of what cognitive scientists and social psychologists call
“motivated reasoning” has effectively curtailed our capacity to listen to
argument and think objectively and critically about both our own beliefs and
the policy positions suggested by them. Motivated reasoning in politics is the
tendency to look only for evidence that supports or confirms our beliefs and
positions. Rooted in the pioneering research of Leon Festinger who developed
the theory of cognitive dissonance, the understanding of motivated reasoning or
confirmation bias as a corrupt method of inquiry and interpretation has helped
us recognize the affective and cognitive distortions and denials at work in our
intensified political partisanship. Occasionally it happens that, in our search
for information or arguments in support of a preexisting position, we may
discover that a conflict—cognitive dissonance—occurs within our thinking for
the simple reason that we discern the difference between a realistic, truthful,
and fact-based conclusion on the one hand, and the conclusion we would
otherwise prefer to buttress our position on the other. But as Andrew Newberg
and Mark Waldman note in their book, Born
to Believe: God, Science, and the Origin of Ordinary and Extraordinary Beliefs
(Free Press, 2006):
Our
expectations have a significant influence on what we eventually believe about
the world. We come to expect certain things to happen, and we expect people to
behave in specific ways. These beliefs are necessary for helping us to deal
with the world adaptively and productively….
However, neither children nor adults have a well-developed capacity to
distinguish the accuracy of their own beliefs. In fact, adults are particularly
vulnerable with regard to maintaining self-deceptive beliefs, especially when
comparing their own intelligence and attractiveness with other people’s (73).
Lest we believe this form of cognitive
disability is peculiarly modern phenomenon, we should note that it was observed
by the English philosopher and jurist Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who noted in
the first book of Novum Organum:
The
human understanding resembles not a dry light, but admits a tincture of the
will and passions, which generate their own system accordingly: for man always
believes more readily that which he prefers. He, therefore, rejects difficulties
for want of patience in investigation; sobriety, because it limits his hope;
the depths of nature, from superstition; the light of experiment, from
arrogance and pride, lest his mind should appear to be occupied with common and
varying objects; paradoxes, from a fear of the opinion of the vulgar; in short,
his feelings imbue and corrupt his understanding in innumerable and sometimes
imperceptible ways.
But by far the greatest impediment and aberration of the
human understanding proceeds from the dulness, incompetency, and errors of the
senses: since whatever strikes the senses preponderates over every thing,
however superior, which does not immediately strike them. Hence contemplation
mostly ceases with sight; and a very scanty, or perhaps no regard is paid to
invisible objects.
This
sentiment is echoed by the French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal
(1623-1662). In his work, Pensées,
he says:
The will is one of the chief
organs of belief, not because it creates belief, but because things are true or
false according to the aspect by which we judge them. When the will likes one
aspect more than another, it deflects the mind from considering the qualities
of the one it does not care to see. Thus the mind, keeping in step with the
will, remains looking at the aspect preferred by the will and so judges by what
it sees there (L539).
Clearly,
we are not well served by a cognitive default position or belief system that
revolves around the inclination to discredit information that is judged to be
contradictory to otherwise inviolable opinions. Either we are immune to
critical thinking or we capitulate to those whose presumptive role is to frame
and interpret the issues for us, namely the political elite and, increasingly, the
ideologically-driven media.
Release
from the bondage of this default position is a form of what George Orwell, in
another 1946 article,
called “intellectual liberty.” In a political context such as ours at present,
where dissembling frequently gives way to blatant lying and fabrication of
facts, we are increasingly prone simply to disbelieve in the very existence of
objective truth. If prevarication becomes the new normal in our political
discourse, we shall surely find no reason to seek for and hold to what is real
and true; if all our political systems are shrouded in duplicity, we will have
surrendered to what Orwell called “organized lying,” or the tyranny of such
memes as “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and “truth isn’t truth.”
Intellectual liberty entails the freedom to inquire, investigate, criticize,
and when necessary, oppose the arduous pull of falsehood.
In
politics, as in other areas of human living, we do not have the right to
believe anything we want. The reason is that there are consequences to our
believing, and sometimes, as now in our politics, our believing is followed by
actions that are injurious to others. We do not have the right in politics to
believe as true something that has no evidence or warrant; a belief that is unsubstantiated
by evidence and argument is both naïve and dangerous. As William K. Clifford
argued in his 1877 article,
“The Ethics of Belief,” though beliefs may be earnestly and conscientiously
held, if they are not the product of patient and deliberate inquiry, they are
merely “stolen by listening to the voice of prejudice and passion.” Moreover, it
is the action that flows from the belief that becomes the demonstration of the
belief’s legitimacy or degeneracy. “For it is not possible,” writes Clifford,
“so to sever the belief from the action it suggests as to condemn the one
without condemning the other. No man holding a strong belief on one side of a
question … can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were
really in doubt and unbiased; so that the existence of a belief not founded on
fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty.”
It
is wrong to believe on insufficient or falsified evidence, just as it is unethical
to suppress evidence by either skepticism or flawed or nonexistent inquiry. As the
5th century Gallic monk, Vincent of Lérins, proposed a rule in his Commonitorium for
distinguishing the true Catholic faith from the falsehood of heresy with the
aphorism, “that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all,” so
Clifford universalizes a precept for securing the warrant for a belief: “It is
wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient
evidence.”
We
are faced now with a surplus of political stresses over party ideology and policy
issues, many of which are quite localized in their expression while others are more
widespread. It is not easy to whack our way through the political jungle in
search of what is right and just and true. Some believe in justice for all, and
others hold to boundaries enclosing parochial and intolerant convictions. Some give
precious time over to critical inquiry in order to discern and declare the
truth, and others are content to prop up illusions and falsehoods claiming veracity
for a ruse that serves principally their self-interests. Still others are
simply tired of thinking and choose deliberately to be instructed by the political
cognoscenti who monopolize our political discourse and influence the formation
of public policy.
It
need not be this way. Enacting civic virtue could and should entail seeking
that which maximizes the conditions for all members of a society to thrive.
Integrity and civility, magnanimity and compassion, generosity and humility, impartiality
and mercy, prudence and restraint, tolerance and trust, are truer and more potent
sources for the animation of our political literacy and activity. We would do
well, whether we identify as religious or not, to follow the lead of the
Apostle Paul in determining the discipline and manner of our cogitation at the
base our political beliefs: “Whatever is true,
whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing,
whatever is commendable, if there is
any excellence and if there is
anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil. 4:8),
and, I might add, enact them in the
pursuit of political aims.
Now is not a time to be heavy-handed or overbearing in the articulation
and defense of our beliefs, for by doing so we run the risk of injuring
precisely that about which Paul exhorts us to reflect. As Pascal wrote in Pensées,
“Our own interest is another wonderful instrument for blinding us agreeably….
Justice and truths are two points so fine that our instruments are too blunt to
touch them exactly. If they do make contact, they blunt the point and press all
round on the false rather than the true” (L44).
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