“Palmer applies philosophy and religious scholarship to illuminate
what it means to hold a belief, show why beliefs often divide us, and
argue that divergent beliefs conflict less than we realize.”
— BlueInk
“It comes to the convincing, timely, and valuable conclusion that if a
person’s beliefs lead to living a happy, moral, and productive life, then
those beliefs are justified.”
— Foreword Reviews
“This book is well argued and broadly researched. It has challenged
me to think more carefully about the basis of my beliefs. That is the
best measure of its success.”
— William DiPuccio, Ph.D.
“I got a kick out of the chapter on Spinoza. It’s quite a feat how the
book bridges the gap between the ancients and the moderns. This one
book could easily absorb an entire year of teaching at college.”
— Lindy Hayes, Attorney-at-Law
“If enough of us read it, it might lead us to be more kind and understanding of our fellow human beings.”
— Jim Grey, software engineer
“Weaves together history, biology, philosophy, religion, and politics
... Using a dash of humor and an accessible style of writing, this book
will delight fans of books like Yuval Harari's Sapiens. Highly Recommended.”
— Amazon reviewer
WHY SANE
PEOPLE BELIEVE
CRAZY THINGS
How Belief Can Help
or Hurt Social Peace
www.WhySanePeopleBelieveCrazyThings.com
N.S. Palmer
Copyright © 2018 by Consilience Publishing, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed
or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright
law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention:
Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
Consilience Publishing, LLC
5868 E. 71st Street E226
Indianapolis, IN 46220
www.consilience-publishing.com
Cover design by Darlene Swanson / Van-Garde.com
Why Sane People Believe Crazy Things by N.S. Palmer —1st edition
ISBN 978-0-692-15155-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-692-17123-3 (eBook)
Dedicated to my father:
May the memory of the righteous be a blessing.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments .................................................................................................. v
Preface ..................................................................................................................... vii
Chapter 1: How to Explain Anything .................................................................. 1
Explanations solve mysteries............................................................................. 1
Explanations provide understanding................................................................ 3
Explanations are stories with purposes............................................................ 5
Telling a story about belief ................................................................................. 8
Definitions are a special kind of story .............................................................. 8
How to know if a story is true ......................................................................... 10
Chapter 2: What Belief Isn't................................................................................ 13
Two historical mistakes about belief .............................................................. 13
Theories of belief ............................................................................................... 19
Beliefs are not mental states ............................................................................ 20
Beliefs are not dispositions .............................................................................. 26
Beliefs are not brain events .............................................................................. 29
Chapter 3: What Belief Is .................................................................................... 33
Beliefs do many things ...................................................................................... 33
Examples of belief give us clues ...................................................................... 34
Belief isn’t what we thought ............................................................................ 41
Belief is behavior ............................................................................................... 42
We hold beliefs in three basic ways ............................................................... 47
Chapter 4: Why Saadia and Maimonides Couldn't Believe -- But Did....... 49
How Medieval Islam challenged Judaism and Christianity ........................ 50
i
Can you believe the unbelievable? ................................................................. 51
Would you believe Groucho Marx in Babylonia? ........................................ 54
Saadia defends belief against all comers ........................................................ 54
Maimonides insists on beliefs you can’t believe........................................... 60
Chapter 5: Why Spinoza Could Believe -- But Didn't.................................... 73
Spinoza’s religious motivation......................................................................... 74
Spinoza’s concept of belief............................................................................... 75
Spinoza’s concept of God ................................................................................. 76
God in idea and belief ....................................................................................... 78
What Spinoza believed ..................................................................................... 79
Chapter 6: Why Mendelssohn Changed the Subject ..................................... 81
The Socrates of Berlin ....................................................................................... 81
The Lavater affair .............................................................................................. 82
Mendelssohn’s concept of belief ..................................................................... 85
Mendelssohn’s “search for light and right” ................................................... 86
Mendelssohn’s key conflict.............................................................................. 88
Chapter 7: Belief and Biology ............................................................................. 89
Biblical Biology 101 ........................................................................................... 90
From creation to evolution .............................................................................. 92
The problem of altruism ................................................................................... 95
Emotion as instant calculation....................................................................... 103
The neuroscience of practice ........................................................................ 106
Chapter 8: What Beliefs Do .............................................................................. 109
Beliefs satisfy our psychological needs ........................................................ 114
Beliefs provide factual guidance ................................................................... 116
Beliefs provide moral guidance ..................................................................... 118
Beliefs indicate membership.......................................................................... 120
Beliefs express and encourage loyalty.......................................................... 124
Chapter 9: What Justifies Beliefs ..................................................................... 125
Conventional wisdom about justification .................................................... 126
Justification backward and forward.............................................................. 128
It’s complicated ................................................................................................ 131
Misapplying justification ................................................................................ 133
Is factual truth intrinsically good? ................................................................ 135
Chapter 10: Belief in the Braino Machine ...................................................... 137
Plato’s cave prisoners see shadows............................................................... 138
Descartes thwarts his evil demon ................................................................. 139
Reid’s common sense strikes back ................................................................ 141
Putnam puts brains in a vat ............................................................................ 142
Meaning and truth cast their shadows ......................................................... 145
Chapter 11: How Beliefs Have Meaning......................................................... 147
Meaning starts with connection .................................................................... 148
Defining meaning............................................................................................. 152
Meaning for groups of people ........................................................................ 159
How "unbelievable" beliefs have meaning .................................................. 162
How mixed-domain beliefs are meaningful ................................................ 166
Chapter 12: How the Ineffable Leads to Religion ........................................ 169
Our unavoidable leap of faith ........................................................................ 170
What makes associations true or false ......................................................... 173
How we leap into religion .............................................................................. 175
How Judaism made the leap........................................................................... 178
How Christianity made the leap.................................................................... 180
Chapter 13: How Description Shapes Truth.................................................. 183
How foundational descriptions shape truth ................................................ 185
iii
What is a foundational description? ............................................................. 189
The main theories of truth ............................................................................. 196
How we test for truth ..................................................................................... 199
What is truth? Let’s stay for an answer........................................................ 202
Chapter 14: Does It Make Any Difference What We Believe? ................. 207
Postmodernism substitutes power for truth ............................................... 209
Knowledge approaches absolute truth ......................................................... 222
Situations and purposes with “one truth” .................................................... 224
Four seductive fallacies of postmodernism ................................................. 225
When argument can make a difference ....................................................... 227
Chapter 15: Why Be Tolerant? ......................................................................... 229
What is tolerance? ........................................................................................... 231
Tolerance recognizes our own self-interest ................................................ 235
Tolerance recognizes the reasons for difference ....................................... 239
Tolerance recognizes our own limitations .................................................. 241
Tolerance recognizes inherent dignity of all people ................................. 246
Chapter 16: Building Tolerant Societies......................................................... 249
Choose the achievable imperfect .................................................................. 250
Make Tolerance Easier .................................................................................... 256
Mitigate kin selection hostilities ................................................................... 265
Use the power of beliefs ................................................................................. 271
It all begins with you ... ................................................................................... 280
Appendix A: Why “Modest Foundationalism” is Circular Reasoning..... 281
Bibliography ......................................................................................................... 285
Index ...................................................................................................................... 291
About the Author ................................................................................................ 295
Acknowledgments
PAUL DE ANGELIS, MY EDITOR, was the best coach and critic for whom
a writer could wish. He encouraged me generously when I did it right
and nagged me mercilessly when I did it wrong. He has my deepest
gratitude.
Dan Buckley at the Indiana University Department of Philosophy
reviewed an earlier version of the manuscript and made many helpful
suggestions.
Barry Mesch at Hebrew College reviewed some of the material
about belief. Melinda Nearhoof at Hebrew College also reviewed the
manuscript and made helpful suggestions from a religious-studies perspective. John Buisson provided very helpful criticisms of Chapters
15 and 16.
The late Brand Blanshard at Yale was my philosophical mentor
and, second only to my father, was my personal role model. His ideas
provide much of the foundation for this book, though he would disagree with some of what I've written.
My family patiently endured my incessant updates about the progress of "the book" and will be glad to see it in print. My friends and
colleagues likewise provided support and encouragement.
v
Preface
"It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair.
We had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short,
the period was so far like the present period ..."
-- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
YOU’VE GOT AN UNCLE FRANK. EVERYONE DOES. He watches Fox News
and reads Breitbart. He thinks that capitalism is great, taxes are terrible, and welfare is for freeloaders.
You’ve also got an Aunt Sally. Everyone does. She watches CNN
and reads The New York Times. She thinks that socialism is great, taxes
are too low, and police are thugs with badges.
Both Uncle Frank and Aunt Sally are basically good people.
They’re honest and considerate. They’re sincere. They’re intelligent
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Wh y S a n e P e o p l e B e l i e v e C r a z y T h i n g s
and educated. But God help you if they’re seated next to each other at
your wedding. You’ll have to recite your vows loudly enough to be
heard over the acrimonious argument that’s emanating from the pews.
Uncle Frank and Aunt Sally are sane, but they believe crazy things.
They believe those things with a fervor and fanaticism that make them
seem even crazier.
Multiply that situation by a few hundred million cases, and you’ve
got America in 2020. You’ve also got Great Britain, France, Germany,
and other countries that are tearing themselves apart.
Both Uncle Frank and Aunt Sally think that the world is going to
hell.
But what they don’t know is that they are the ones driving it there.
They’re not doing it on purpose, but they’re doing it. Why? And
how can they stop doing it? How can they -- and we -- return to some
version of sanity?
That’s why you have this book. It’s not magic. It can’t solve the
problem by itself. But it provides some of the answers. Solving the
problem depends on you.
People like Uncle Frank and Aunt Sally often have real, substantive disagreements that they could resolve. The problem isn't simply
that they disagree. They disagree about a lot of things without getting
angry.
But some issues make them feel that disagreement marks a line
between "us" and "them." Someone who belongs to them is an enemy,
enemies are evil people, and evil people must be defeated or destroyed -- before they destroy us.
Of course, Uncle Frank and Aunt Sally aren't actually crazy, so
they don't consciously believe those things about each other. Even so,
in the heat of an argument, it's how they feel. Those feelings can spill
over into their normal lives. They won’t shoot at each other, but they
might not speak to each other for 10 years. And when the feelings occur in people who really are crazy or in the grip of mob hysteria, they
cause hatred and violence. Lives are destroyed: sometimes figuratively, often literally. Peaceful societies disintegrate into warring
tribes.
viii
How to Explain Anything
What can we do about it?
We can’t fix the problem completely because it comes from human nature. We can only reduce the damage and minimize the risks.
That depends on seeing the big picture.
There’s a story about three blind men examining an elephant. The
first man grabs one of its legs and says that an elephant is like a tree.
The second grabs its tail and says that an elephant is like a rope. The
third grabs one of its ears and says that an elephant is like a leaf. Meanwhile, the elephant is not amused by all that inappropriate touching,
so it stomps the men into mush.
If the men had been able to see the entire elephant, they would
have proceeded with greater caution. Sadly, each of them could perceive only a small part of the situation. Result: mush.
Most books about social discord focus on a single topic in a single
way. Many of the books are excellent. However, they’re like the three
blind men examining an elephant. Their narrow focus prevents them
from seeing how different problems connect to each other. This book
shows the connections, including:
• How beliefs divide “us” from “them.”
•
How biology biases our judgment about us, them, and about
our beliefs.
•
How beliefs can unite societies instead of dividing them.
•
Why beliefs that seem to conflict often don't really conflict.
•
What history shows about the problems and their solutions.
•
What we can do about the problems -- and what we can’t do.
Nobody can "fix" the world completely or permanently. But you
can make it better. Don't worry about what you can't do. Just do what
you can: "even the angels can do no more."
ix
Chapter 1:
How to Explain
Anything
“Explaining metaphysics to the nation;
I wish he would explain his explanation.”
-- Lord Byron (18th-century English poet)
THIS
BOOK BEGINS WITH A MYSTERY:
“Why do sane people believe
crazy things?”
“Fair enough,” you might think. “But what does that have to do
with explaining things?”
The connection is this: the mystery arises from an unhelpful way
of explaining belief. This book tries to persuade you that a new way of
explaining belief can solve the mystery. And you need some reasonable way to decide if my new explanation works better than the old
one.
Explanations solve mysteries
Many people believe things that seem crazy to us. Their beliefs seem
crazy for one or more of three reasons:
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Wh y S a n e P e o p l e B e l i e v e C r a z y T h i n g s
•
There’s not much evidence for the beliefs.
•
There’s plenty of evidence against the beliefs.
• The beliefs themselves seem unclear.
If such beliefs were held only by the ignorant, the stupid, or the
insane, it wouldn’t worry us too much. Holding crazy beliefs is part of
their job description. But many “crazy” beliefs are held by people who
are educated, intelligent, and who seem as sane as any of us. How can
that be? It’s a mystery.
Of course, which beliefs are “crazy” depends on who you ask.
Some people think it’s crazy to believe that God exists:
“God? Seriously? A kindly old man in a white robe who lives in the
sky, protects you from harm, and gives you stuff when you pray for
it? Can you say ‘fantasy father figure’? Does the ghost of Elvis talk
to you, too? Science can explain everything. We don’t need God.”
To other people, the evidence of God’s existence seems so strong
that atheism is an incomprehensible choice:
“If you see a watch, you know there’s a watchmaker. The universe is
far more complex and beautiful than a watch. It couldn’t have happened by chance. It was designed and built by an intelligent Creator
who ordained the laws of physics. That’s why science works: God.”
Other beliefs seem less crazy but make it just as difficult to reach
agreement. Raise taxes? On whom? Why? How much? Will taking extra vitamins improve your health? Is country X a threat that requires
military action? Is President X a maniac or a hero? Did Movie X deserve to win an Academy Award for Best Picture?
Global warming is a prime example. Some people believe in it and
call anyone who doubts it a “global warming denier.” Others believe
that global warming talk is a socialist conspiracy. They argue incessantly but neither side can convince the other. Ironically, it’s usually
because neither side knows what it’s talking about.
Think about that for a second. Do most people know anything
about climate science? Do you? We all have beliefs about global warming, but we can’t back up our beliefs with any reasons worthy of the
name. The vast majority of people rely on magazines or websites that
2
How to Explain Anything
they trust. Most people who write for those magazines don’t know anything, either. They’re just regurgitating what they read, or what they
heard from someone with a Ph.D. and a lab coat.
I went to the trouble of reading a book about climate science. It
didn’t convince me one way or the other about global warming -though the author clearly believed in it -- so I fell back on expert opinion. A friend of mine was a climate scientist at NASA. He doubted
global warming in the 1990s, but since then he got religion about it.
Now he thinks we’d better fix the problem fast or we’ll be in terrible
trouble. So my opinion is based on what he said. The difference between me and most people is that I relied on a person instead of a
website. If our expert sources are wrong about global warming, then
so are we.
By the way, if a person holds belief X and calls non-believers “X
deniers,” it’s a sure sign that the person regards X as a sacred belief,
not to be doubted or questioned. You can think of your own examples:
there are lots of them in the news. A sacred belief might be true or it
might be false. What makes it sacred is the attitude of the believers,
not the belief itself.
But the mystery remains: You, I, and our acquaintances are not
crazy people, but we all hold beliefs that -- when not outright crazy -are at least vague and short on evidence. Sometimes, we hold the beliefs with religious fervor, and the less evidence there is, the more intensely and insistently we believe; the more inclined we are to scream
at our particular “deniers.”
Why?
The answer lies in how we explain belief. If we don’t explain it or
we explain it wrong, then the mystery stays mysterious. If we explain
it right, the mystery disappears.
Explanations provide understanding
Ever since the first stirrings of intelligence in our distant ancestors,
we have wondered and asked questions: Who are we? What are we?
Why are we here? What kind of world is this? Why do we suffer and
die? How can we live and be happy?
3
Wh y S a n e P e o p l e B e l i e v e C r a z y T h i n g s
To answer those questions, we’ve told stories that begin with mysteries and end with beliefs that solve the mysteries. Telling stories is
how we understand the world. Explanations are stories.
On its face, that seems like an odd suggestion. Should we look to
a book like The Cat in the Hat for scientific explanations? What does
telling stories have to do with understanding the world?
The answer becomes clear when you think about what it means to
understand things. You already have an intuitive grasp of what it
means, but you’ve probably never thought about it or tried to put it
into words. Let’s try something simple:
“Why are you reading this book?”
It might be because your spouse liked the book and wants to discuss it. You might be waiting on your flight at the airport and the book
seemed more interesting than watching people argue with the gate attendants. But you understand why you’re doing it. That means something simple:
If you understand something, then you can give an explanation of
why it’s true.1
Notice an important point:
How you explain it depends on your purpose.
Our minds did not evolve to explain things in the abstract. They
evolved to achieve specific purposes such as surviving, prospering,
and passing on our genes to the next generation. As a result, our purposes always affect the explanations we give. If you’re waiting on your
flight at the airport but you’re reading the book because your spouse
liked it, then you wouldn’t mention the airport in your explanation,
and vice versa.
Let’s consider the relation between understanding and explanation. Here are examples of things we can understand:
• The speed of light is 186,282 miles per second.
1
Note that when you understand or explain something, you connect it to something
else. The more you connect it, the better you understand it. This will be relevant in later
chapters about the nature of meaning and truth.
4
How to Explain Anything
•
You can get to the store by going north on Ditch Road.
•
The internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees.
•
It’s usually wrong to break promises.
You know many things like those. Understanding them is more
than just knowing them. It means you can also explain why you think
they’re true. Your explanation might be more or less detailed and include more or less evidence, but you can give one. You might say, for
example:
• My physics textbook said that the speed of light is 186,282
miles per second. If my physics textbook says something
about physics, it’s true. Therefore, the speed of light is
186,282 miles per second.
•
My uncle said that he got to the store by going north on Ditch
Road. I went north on Ditch Road and I arrived at the store.
Therefore, you can get to the store by going north on Ditch
Road.
•
My geometry textbook gave a proof that the internal angles of
a triangle add up to 180 degrees. I didn’t understand a word
of it, but my teacher will mark that answer right if I give it on
the test. Therefore, the internal angles of a triangle add up to
180 degrees.
•
The Bible says “Thou shalt not lie,” and it’s lying to make a
promise but then break it. When people break promises to
me, it makes me feel bad. Therefore, it’s usually wrong to
break promises.
Explanations are stories with purposes
Notice that almost all of these stories are about people: what they did,
saw, felt, or produced. The stories begin with a question, stated or implied, such as “What’s the speed of light?” or “How can I get to the
store?” They describe how someone answered the question, then they
give a belief as the answer.
The most abstract story is the first one, about the physics textbook. However, if you ask how the answer got into your textbook, you
5
Wh y S a n e P e o p l e B e l i e v e C r a z y T h i n g s
get stories -- all the way back to the story of the Danish astronomer
Olaus Roemer, who in 1676 first measured the speed of light by observing the moons of the planet Jupiter. That story produced a belief
about the speed of light.
But stories contain more than beliefs: feelings, memories, images,
customs, and behavior also form part of the stories’ meaning. They
provide context for our fundamental beliefs, sense of self, and ways
of dealing with life. Often, they also provide a guide for action.
Ancient people believed that earth, water, and sky were separate
because God divided them, or because the Mesopotamian god Marduk
defeated the sea goddess Tiamat and split her body; or, later, because
gravity made matter form into planets. Even the last explanation, impersonal as it seems, included stories about people doing things: Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, for instance. And though gods aren’t
people in the human sense, they have thoughts, goals, and motivations
like human people.
What about purpose? We tell different kinds of stories for different purposes. The stories both include and imply beliefs. Some have
practical impact and others don’t. For example:
• National-origin stories make us believe that our nations are
good and their government is legitimate. That motivates us to
cooperate for the common good, obey the law, and fight to
defend our nations in war. Stories of King David support Israel’s legitimacy, just as stories of the Founders and the American Revolution do the same for the United States.
•
Practical stories tell us how to do things. If Uncle Joe says he
found a grocery store by driving two miles north on Ditch
Road, we believe that if we follow the same steps as in the
story, we will get to the grocery store.
•
Moral stories tell us about certain kinds of situations, then try
to make us feel positively about one way of acting (the
“moral” choice) and negatively about others.
•
Philosophical stories tell us about different ways of looking
at the world, and ask if they make sense to us. They try to get
6
How to Explain Anything
us to adopt particular “big picture” views of the world. Sometimes the stories have practical implications, but often they
don’t. One such story denies the reality of space and time.
However, even people who tell that story plan to drive home
after work. They say they don’t believe in space and time, but
they sure act like they believe in them.
We verify the stories and their beliefs in different ways, depending on the type of story and the purpose for which it’s told.
To verify national-origin stories, we look at historical evidence:
critically for other countries, credulously for our own country because we want that story to be true. For practical stories, we either
follow the steps in the story or ask someone who’s done it. For moral
stories, we imagine the situation and how we’d feel if it happened to
us. For philosophical stories, we consult our common-sense view of
the world. We ask if the story makes sense to us and explains a lot.
Stories can serve more than one purpose. For example, nationalorigin stories can provide historical information even though it's not
their main purpose. The American Revolution was launched officially
by the Declaration of Independence, whose signers risked their "lives,
fortunes, and sacred honor" by signing it. American Founder John
Hancock signed first. The British had already issued a death warrant
for him, so he made his signature extra large in defiance of the edict.
Notice how the national-origin story of the United States combines
historical fact (the Declaration of Independence) with an inspiring
but less certain story about Hancock's signature.
7
Wh y S a n e P e o p l e B e l i e v e C r a z y T h i n g s
Likewise, even a simple practical story about how to get to the
store can serve other purposes. It might help someone evaluate a particular neighborhood as a place to live, since it tells how far residents
must travel to get their groceries.
Telling a story about belief
This book tells a story about belief: what it is, why it is that way, and
what it does for us and society. The story explains how beliefs can be
harmful by sparking hatred and conflict. It also explains how beliefs
can be helpful by promoting goodwill and cooperation.
It’s a philosophical story because it argues for a specific way to define belief. It argues that if you adopt the definition, it's easier to understand human society, morals, and politics: that’s the purpose of the
story. However, you can’t test it like you can test a story about how to
get to the store. There’s no physical procedure you can perform that
shows the definition is true or false. Nor are there historical records
to back it up. You’re unlikely to have strong moral feelings about the
correctness of a definition. And if you have a different purpose, such
as studying the relation between beliefs and brain events, then you
might tell a different story that’s more helpful for your particular purpose.
Definitions are a special kind of story
So how can you know if the definition is true?
The first step is to be careful about that word “true.” In the abstract, definitions are neither true nor false. You can define things any
way you want. For specific purposes, a definition might be more or
less useful. And if your purposes change, your definitions might
change as well. You might define belief in one way to understand society and politics, but define it in a different way to understand logic
or human religious experience. Each definition would focus on aspects of belief that were relevant to your purpose, but without denying the other aspects. The purpose determines the focus.
8
How to Explain Anything
Being useful is definitions’ practical role in our lives, but some
work better than others. In addition to being useful, they can fit well
or poorly with the rest of our definitions, beliefs, and practices. That
kind of “fit” is how definitions can be true or false.
For example, I could define the word “cow” as “four cars standing
side by side.” A single car would then be one-fourth of a cow.
However, the definition doesn’t fit our other definitions and our
normal beliefs, so nobody would understand what I was saying. It’s
also not useful, since “cow” would refer to what we’d usually consider
four things and “car” to one-fourth of a thing.
Defining a cow as four cars affects our description of the world.
Under that description, you can’t get milk from a cow. The connection
runs both ways: the definition implies a description, and the description implies the definition.
Our normal description of the world defines cows as female bovine animals. It includes beliefs that you can get milk from a cow.
Therefore, defining “cow” as four cars is fine in the abstract, but is
wrong relative to our normal description of the world. It’s also not
useful to us.
So there are two ways we can evaluate definitions:
• Truth: A word’s definition is “true” if it matches the ordinary
meaning of the word for our particular linguistic group. That’s
what truth means as applied to definitions.
•
Usefulness: A word’s definition is useful if it helps us achieve
a particular goal, such as explaining specific observations or
predicting future events. Note that the same definition might
not be useful for other goals.
Ideally, we’d like our definitions to satisfy both criteria. But even
if they don’t, it’s not a problem as long as we remember that we’re
using a special definition for a specific purpose. Happily, the definition of belief in this book does satisfy both criteria.
By the way, a common tactic in philosophy is to use special definitions in a kind of “bait and switch.” For example, some writers define “knowledge” in a way that makes it impossible to know anything.
Then they draw the startling conclusion that knowledge is impossible
9
Wh y S a n e P e o p l e B e l i e v e C r a z y T h i n g s
– forgetting that it’s only impossible if we accept their special definition.
How to know if a story is true
When we hear stories about the world, we start with four questions:
• What do they mean?
•
Are they true?
•
What’s the justification for believing them?
•
What actions and attitudes should we take?
As already noted, a definition of belief isn’t right or wrong in the
abstract. We can define it any way we like. This book offers a definition that it claims is “correct” in the sense of being more useful for
social and political analysis than alternative definitions. How can we
decide if it’s a good, useful definition?
Let’s apply the criteria from the previous section: truth and usefulness.
The first criterion is “truth” – that is, consistency with what we
mean by belief in everyday life. Does the definition identify the same
things as we do by “belief” -- i.e., does it have the same meaning? It
should satisfy:
• Requirement 1: Pick out all the cases we’d ordinarily call “belief.” If we would say that “Joe believes X,” then the definition
should apply to that case.
•
Requirement 2: Pick out only the cases we’d ordinarily call
“belief.” If we would not say that “Joe believes X,” then the
definition should not apply to that case.
Now this first criterion comes with a disclaimer. We might unreflectively think of belief in a certain way, but after careful consideration, we might amend our unreflective idea. So our ordinary sense of
belief is a starting point, not the final word on the subject.
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How to Explain Anything
It’s also important to realize that the first criterion is not just about
words.2 The reason we want our definition to correspond to the ordinary meaning of “belief” is that we want it to be about what we think
it’s about. If the definition picks out all and only the same things as
our ordinary idea of belief, then we have reasonable assurance that
we’re talking about the right thing.
The second criterion is usefulness for achieving our purpose.
Does our definition of belief help us to improve our lives, our social
relationships, and our world? That’s a high standard to meet. Most
philosophical stories don’t achieve it, nor does anyone expect them to
achieve it.
How could the story be useful? Here’s one way. Too often, beliefs
divide us from our fellow human beings. They provide an excuse for
hatred, persecution, and bloodshed. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
We can do better.
“Doing better” requires us to understand how and why beliefs can
unite us or divide us. If a new way of looking at belief can help us do
that, then it’s useful for that purpose. One more criterion is explanatory power. If our definition of belief only makes sense under certain
conditions, and doesn’t help us to understand anything else, then it
doesn’t satisfy our second criterion. But if it applies to widely different situations and if puzzling cases suddenly “make sense” in the light
of our definition, then it has explanatory power.
Our purpose in these early chapters is to find a definition of belief
that helps us understand human society, morals, and politics. In the
later chapters that deal with the nature of truth, meaning, and our experience of the transcendent, we'll assume a definition that's more
helpful for those purposes. The definitions don't conflict, but they
have different purposes and focus on different aspects of belief.
If our stories about belief are consistent with the way we identify
beliefs, are useful for our purpose, and explain a lot of things, then
they're good philosophical stories. We should accept them.
2
Confusion on this point was almost the entire inspiration for 20th-century “ordinarylanguage philosophy.”
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Our quest will take us on a surprising journey through religion,
philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, history,
and biology.
If everything “fits together” at the end, then we’ve got a winner.
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Chapter 2:
What Belief Isn't
“Belief is the affirmation that what has been represented is outside
the mind just as it has been represented in the mind.”
--Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, Chapter 50.
JUDAH HALEVI WAS A POET. Saadia Gaon and Moses Maimonides were
philosophers. On the surface, their approaches to belief seem completely different: Halevi celebrated experience while Saadia and Maimonides followed logic.
But at a higher level, they agreed almost completely on one point:
“Why believe?” And their agreement stemmed from two mistakes:
mistakes about what belief is.
Two historical mistakes about belief
Halevi (1086-1145 CE) is today best known for The Kuzari3, which
presents a fictional dialogue between a king and a Jewish sage. The
king dreams that an angel told him his actions were not pleasing to
God, so he asks a philosopher, a Christian, and a Muslim for advice.
3
Though usually referred to as The Kuzari, the book’s formal title is The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Religion.
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The philosopher responds with airy abstractions. He says that
God is beyond our understanding and cannot be pleased or displeased.
He gives logical arguments but dismisses the king’s main concern:
What should he do to please God?
The Christian and the Muslim are more sympathetic, but they fail
to offer adequate evidence for their religious claims. Both of them recognize the validity of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), so
the king finally turns to a Jewish sage -- a representative of “the despised religion.” What are his arguments?
The sage says simply that he believes in the God of Abraham, who
revealed Himself to the entire Jewish nation at Sinai and proved Himself by miracles that they also witnessed. He argues that because God
revealed himself publicly to a vast number of people, His existence
and revelation are undeniable, as is His choice of the Jewish people as
“the pick of mankind.” The sage says that by converting to Judaism,
the king could make his actions pleasing to God.
Halevi was deeply distrustful of our ability to find religious truth
by reason. He justified his conclusions by reference to the belief of
Jewish people in his time that their ancestors had encountered an anthropomorphic God at Sinai.
On the other hand, both Saadia (882-942 CE) and Maimonides
(1135-1204 CE) thought that reason could find any religious truth, at
least any we could understand. In the Prolegomena to his Book of Beliefs and Opinions (also known as Book of Doctrines and Beliefs), Saadia
wrote:
“There exist three sources of knowledge: The knowledge given by
sense perception; the knowledge given by reason; and inferential
knowledge.”
Saadia thought we could get most of our knowledge, including religious knowledge, from those sources. He considered prophecy to be
only a shortcut to knowledge that we could acquire more slowly by
reason. He later added “authentic tradition” as a fourth source, but
unlike Halevi, did not mainly rely on it.
In his “Letter on Astrology,” Maimonides wrote similarly about
the three grounds of knowledge:
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“The first is a thing for which there is a clear proof deriving from
man’s reasoning ... The second is a thing that a man perceives
through one of the five senses ... The third is a thing that a man receives from the prophets or from the righteous.”
Like Saadia, Maimonides recognized the validity of tradition because he believed in rabbinic Judaism, but he put tradition in last
place. Most of his ideas about God are highly abstract and based on
philosophical reasoning.
If Saadia and Maimonides both emphasized reason, but Halevi denied that reason was a reliable guide in religion, then how did they
agree “almost completely”?
They agreed in assuming that beliefs could only be justified by
looking backward.
For Halevi, Jews looked backward at their tradition about Sinai.
For Saadia and Maimonides, they looked backward at empirical evidence and logical arguments. We had to look backward at the reasons
for the beliefs, not forward at the results of the beliefs. We had to look
at what led to the beliefs, not where the beliefs themselves led.
They failed to consider the results of beliefs because all three of
them -- in common with most thinkers throughout history -- took the
idea of belief for granted. They didn’t seriously consider what belief
is, what it does, or what it means for beliefs to be true in different
contexts.
As a result, all three of them were only vaguely aware that beliefs
do a lot more than make assertions. They had made two crucial mistakes about belief:
• They assumed that beliefs were entirely mental.
•
They assumed that beliefs’ only job was to assert things about
the world.
The first mistake led to the second. If beliefs are entirely mental,
then the only person who knows for sure about them is the believer.
As a result, beliefs by themselves could have no other jobs besides asserting things. They had no social impact. Normal moral rules did not
apply to them. The only rules about beliefs that mattered were rules
of proof: backward-looking rules about logic and evidence.
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At least in some ways, the second assumption is obviously wrong.
Beliefs also perform moral, psychological, spiritual, and social functions. They help us to lead decent, happy lives in stable and harmonious societies. Saadia and Maimonides acted like they knew it, even
though it did not fit in their philosophies. The closest Maimonides
came to recognizing other functions of belief was in Book 3, Chapter
28 of his Guide for the Perplexed. He argued that certain beliefs are
“necessary” for successful social life. A later chapter here discusses
necessary beliefs.
Centuries later, the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn observed in his “Letter to Lavater” that even incorrect beliefs
could have good results we should consider:
“Whoever cares more for the welfare of mankind than for his own
renown will keep a rein on his opinions concerning [dubious beliefs]
… I am obliged to remain silent if these errors are accidentally connected to the promotion of the good.”
We’ll return to Mendelssohn’s view in Chapter 6, but the point is
clear: logic, evidence, and tradition are all valid justifications of belief
-- but results are also important.
To understand why, we must identify what belief actually is – and
what it isn’t. We will venture outside of religion and philosophy to
look at the question of why people have beliefs at all.
Why is “believing” something that human beings do? Evolutionary psychology will provide some context, as will sociology, mathematics, and the history of science. We will look at how these ideas
apply to some traditional religious beliefs. Finally, we will examine
how the ideas can help us increase religious and social tolerance in our
often bloody and hate-drenched world.
A historically influential example
To set the stage, let’s look at a belief that’s had enormous influence in
Western history. Unsurprisingly, it’s from the Bible: the belief that
“God gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai.” We could just as easily use
other religious or secular beliefs, for example, about Jesus, or about
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string theory in physics. However, the belief about Sinai illustrates all
of the important points.
In the beginning of the Jewish faith, just as for most theistic religions, people thought of God anthropomorphically. They thought He
had a physical body, was finite, powerful but not omnipotent, and
lived in the universe but hadn’t created it. Biblical scholar Yochanan
Muffs describes the situation in his book The Personhood of God:
“Both Christians and Jews, each in their own way, have even accepted God’s physical attributes without much care ... Pre-philosophical Jews and Christians accepted both psychic and somatic
anthropomorphism as a root principle of their faith.”
Now, I apologize for Professor Muffs if his statement is a little obscure. He’s a smart man but he’s writing for other academics who are
fluent in jargon. “Pre-philosophical” simply means that ancient Jews
and Christians didn’t think of religion in philosophical terms. Except
for ancient Athenians, hardly anyone did think that way.
Jews and Christians finally got started with philosophical reasoning in the 6th century CE4 when they first encountered the newlytranslated works of Plato and Aristotle. Before that, few people ever
thought to ask what kind of being God was. It was enough simply to
study the Bible and what it said about God.
If the Bible said that God got angry, walked around the Garden of
Eden, or talked to Moses, people took the statements at face value
without thinking about them too much. Getting angry suggested that
God had emotions like humans did, and walking around the garden
suggested He had a physical body. Hence, it seemed that God was like
humans, just bigger, more powerful, and immortal. That’s what Muffs
means by “psychic and somatic anthropomorphism.”
Given that understanding of God, the belief that God gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai is relatively unproblematic -- at least on the level
4
A few earlier Jewish and Christian writers dabbled with philosophical ideas, and even
the Bible includes them. However, the ideas weren't developed systematically until
later. Philo of Alexandia (25 BCE - 50 CE) came the closest to doing it but didn't go all
the way. As Hans Lewy writes in 3 Jewish Philosophers, Philo's "main work is an exegesis
of the Bible and not a working out of first principles. Consequently his philosophical
concepts lie scattered throughout his writings ..."
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of meaning if not on the level of historical and archaeological evidence. A finite, visible anthropomorphic being, who lives in the universe but did not create it and did not transcend it, gave (dictated) a
book to a man. You can visualize Moses sitting on a rock, taking notes
while a glorious, shining Being floats in the air above him.
However, as the centuries passed, the ancient Israelites changed
their idea of God. Instead of being an anthropomorphic mountain god
who was similar to other national gods of the Ancient Near East, He
became the Creator ex nihilo (Creator from nothing) of the universe:
infinite, transcendent, incomprehensible, and utterly “other.”
That coincided with the Israelites’ religious change from monolatry (worship of one God and belief that other gods exist) to monotheism (worship of one God and denial that any other gods exist).
The change from a human-like to a transcendent God had philosophical merit, but it made the traditional belief as incomprehensible
as the God to whom it referred, who Muffs writes had:
“... been reduced—or elevated, according to one’s own personal
taste—to an impersonal principle: Omniscient, Omnipotent, AllGood, Infinite, and so on ... Philosophy has lost its radical doubt
(God is still affirmed as a person), while myth has lost its fire (God
is not much of a person).”
Making God transcendent and incomprehensible makes the statement that “God gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai” into nonsense, because the subject is unknown and unknowable, while the verb is,
according to Maimonides (The Guide to the Perplexed, Part I, Chapter
56) equally unknowable:
“His essential attributes, may He be exalted, in the existence of
which they believe, must not be like the attributes of other beings ...
Similarly, the terms ‘knowledge,’ ‘power,’ ‘will,’ and ‘life,’ as applied
to Him, may He be exalted, and to all those possessing knowledge,
power, will, and life, are purely equivocal, so that their meaning
when they are predicated of Him is in no way like their meaning in
other applications.”
In spite of that, people say that the belief does have meaning and
they make it an important part of their lives. The people who say it
are sane, educated, and employed. They have families. They pay taxes.
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They obey the law. If you engage them in conversation, they’re perfectly lucid.
If they say the belief has meaning for them, we must presume that
they’re right, even if we don’t quite see what the meaning is. It must
be doing something for them. What can that be? If the belief is logically meaningless, then it’s not asserting anything, at least not anything we would ordinarily consider a fact.
Moreover, the belief is immune to empirical falsification. The
parts of the belief that have meaning (“... the Torah to Moses at Sinai”)
have historical and archaeological implications. Those are either not
fulfilled or actively contradicted by the evidence we have; and yet,
believers in the Biblical account continue to insist on it.
It’s a belief that, considered as a whole, seems logically meaningless. To the extent that it does have meaning, people believe it in the
face of absent or contrary empirical evidence. Whatever it is, it’s not a
straightforward belief like “Joe gave the book to Sarah.”
So there seem to be different kinds of beliefs. Some make factual
claims and are factually verifiable. Others also seem to make claims,
but they have no obvious connection to what we normally think of as
evidence. If we now consider that belief is expressed in various forms
of behavior, then a hypothesis begins to take shape: whatever they are,
beliefs do things.
What beliefs do depends on the context and the type of belief;
different types of justification are relevant to producing different
types of results. A good story about belief should explain all the different things that beliefs do.
Theories of belief
Most people hold a rather naive and unreflective view of belief. To
believe something, they think, is to consider and mentally affirm a
specific statement, such as “2 + 2 = 4,” “There is an elephant in the
living room,” “My spouse loves me,” or “God loves me.”
This is the traditional “mental act” view of belief, as stated by the
Jewish philosopher Maimonides in the quote that begins this chapter.
A more recent view is the “dispositional” theory of belief, which holds
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that beliefs are learned tendencies to act in certain ways. Another current view is the neuroscientific view, which in various ways reduces
beliefs to brain events.
Contemporary academic philosophers use lots of different terminology but address the same issues. Their most popular view is representationalism, which combines elements of all three views, as do
dispositionalism, interpretationism, functionalism, and various “eliminative” theories. Each of the theories has its merits and defects, but
all of them boil down in one way or another to the three basic views
we’ll discuss here. Let’s take a look at those ways of explaining belief,
to see if they satisfy the two basic requirements from Chapter 1:
• Requirement #1: Pick out all the cases we’d ordinarily call
“belief.” If we would say that “Joe believes X,” then the definition should apply to that case.
•
Requirement #2: Pick out only the cases we’d ordinarily call
“belief.” If we would not say that “Joe believes X,” then the
definition should not apply to that case.
Beliefs are not mental states
The oldest view is the mental-act theory. The theory combines two
things: a mental state of considering a statement and a mental state
(“mental act”) of affirming the same statement. Here, we’ll refer to it
more generally as the mental-state theory.
As you’d expect of a theory endorsed by Maimonides, it has a lot
of truth. On this view, when a person believes something, he or she:
• Thinks of the words forming the statement.
•
Thinks of associated images, memories, actions, or feelings:
ü An arithmetic problem: Writing out the steps on paper.
ü A loving spouse: The spouse behaving in loving ways.
ü A benevolent God: Whatever images the believer associates with the term “God,” as well as feelings of love, benevolence, and security.
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•
Mentally affirms (in a mental act) that the statement and its
associations correspond in some manner to a reality viewed
as separate from the affirming mental state.
Maimonides says “outside the mind” instead of “separate from the
affirming mental state.” However, that doesn’t quite work. Someone
might have a belief about his or her own mental states: e.g., “I believe
that I believe in the mental-state theory.” So we’ll say “separate from
the mental state” instead of “outside the mind.”
The believer does not need to vocalize the belief or act in ways
consistent with it. It’s all internal. Nobody else needs to know about
it, and that’s actually a problem for this theory of belief.
Under the mental-state view, belief occurs at a particular time and
place in the mind of a particular person. For example, if I recall and
affirm my belief that Hillsdale College is a fine educational institution,
my act of belief occurred at my desk on October 15.
There’s no doubt that sometimes, the mental-state view applies.
When we think of a proposition and mentally affirm it, we perform
what we can reasonably call a mental act of belief.
We perform mental acts of belief mainly to assert facts, though
we can have side-purposes as well. For example, we might mentally
believe that:
• Belief 1: Dogs are mammals.
•
Belief 2: Two plus two equals four.
•
Belief 3: There is an elephant in my living room.
•
Belief 4: I should set a good example for my children.
•
Belief 5: America is the greatest country in the world.
We can mentally believe all of those things because whether or
not they’re true, we can understand them. They refer to things we can
see, touch, or explain in terms of everyday experience.
Note, however, that the beliefs differ from each other in important ways. Beliefs 1, 2, and 3 are purely factual assertions about
dogs, numbers, and an elephant. Under normal circumstances, they
would not affect how you feel or how you see the world. Their impact
on your behavior is limited to a few specific situations. They differ in
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other ways: the first is based on definition, the second on calculation,
and the third on observation. However, those differences do not affect how we react to having the beliefs.
Beliefs 4 and 5 are not factual beliefs; instead, they evaluate things
and behaviors, implying the believer’s commitment to act in certain
ways.
Problems with the Mental-State Theory
In spite of its common-sense plausibility, the mental-state view of belief has three problems:
• It ignores the public functions of beliefs.
•
It implies that beliefs are dateable.
•
It implies that nobody can know what anyone else believes.
Problem #1: Beliefs Have Public Functions
It’s with belief 4 (“I should set a good example for my children”) that
we start to run into problems. It asserts a moral fact, and that’s a plausible subject of a mental state. However, it does a lot more than that.
It also entails:
• Making (or at least considering) a commitment to behavior
that the speaker considers morally good.
•
Visualizing instances of the behavior.
•
Strengthening the believer’s emotional readiness to engage in
the behavior.
•
Actually engaging in the behavior when possible and appropriate, at least a little.
Those are not unintended side-effects. They are an essential part
of having such a belief. There would be no point in considering such
a belief (or stating it out loud) unless one were interested in doing the
other things as well. If belief were just a mental state, it couldn’t do
those things. If someone claimed to have the belief but never acted on
it when he or she had the chance, we’d say that he or she didn’t really
believe it at all.
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Belief 5 (“America is the greatest country in the world”) is an evaluation that implies some factual statements: in particular, that America is better than other countries.
However, if you ask someone who holds belief 5 to tell you exactly how America is best, you’re likely to get a blank stare. Facts are
largely irrelevant to such beliefs. Moreover, such beliefs are seldom if
ever merely “thought.” Instead, believers proclaim them loudly and
enthusiastically in the presence of other people. They perform three
main functions:
• They encourage the believers and their hearers to defend
America (however they conceive it) against attacks.
•
They express (to self and others) the believers’ membership
in the group called “Americans.”
•
They express (to self and others) the believers’ loyalty to the
group called “Americans.”
Like belief 4 (“I should set a good example for my children”), belief 5 involves making a commitment, as well as trying to strengthen
certain kinds of feelings and behavior. However, belief 5 is mainly expressive, signifying believers’ membership in the group “Americans,”
their pride in the group, and their commitment to support the group
in conflicts with other groups. As with belief 4, the connected behavior is crucial. If a person failed to behave in ways consistent with the
belief, we’d say that he or she didn’t really believe it at all.
When an utterance expresses a belief rather than states it, the
words used might have little or no connection to the belief it expresses. In such a case, the words are less important than the behavior
itself. And any purely “mental” acts hardly matter at all.
If members of a group of people all say “God bless America” or
“Vive la France,” they do not assert any beliefs corresponding to the
words they use. Instead, they express beliefs and signify attitudes associated with the verbal formulas they uttered. They express belief
that the countries have good features, and usually that they are citizens of those countries. To themselves and others, they express their
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warm feelings about the countries, they indicate their membership in
the national groups, and they signify loyalty to those groups.
Problem #2: Beliefs Are Not Dateable
Another problem of viewing beliefs as mental states is that it makes
beliefs “dateable.” Because belief requires a mental act of affirmation,
beliefs occur at specific times and places.
That consequence is not entirely false. Suppose I consider the
proposition that “The sky is blue” and mentally affirm it. Then I believe it. At a specific time and place, I have engaged in a mental act of
belief (whatever experience that mental act is for me).
But what about when I’m not thinking of the belief? Do I stop believing “the sky is blue” as soon as I think about something else? If to
believe things is to affirm them in a mental act, then we believe them
only while we are doing it. All other times, we do not believe them.
Problem #3: We Can Know What Other People Believe
A third problem is that if belief is a mental state, we can never know
what other people believe. But we can know what other people believe. Therefore, belief is not a mental state, or at least not only that.
Is this just a trivial complaint about our lack of mind-reading ability? If we can’t read other people’s minds, then of course we can’t directly know what they believe in the privacy of their own minds. You
might argue that it’s a silly objection: We can’t read other people’s
minds, but on the basis of their statements and behavior, we can infer
what they believe.
However, that’s not the problem. The problem is this: We can
never know what another person’s mental states are. If belief is a mental state, private to the person who has it, then we can never know
what another person believes.
Suppose you and I agree that it’s healthful to follow a vegan diet.
I say it, and you voice your agreement. I observe that you follow a
vegan diet and that you urge other people to do the same. On that basis, can I infer what your mental state of belief is?
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This is a tough point to grasp. Suppose that when I believe “It’s
healthful to follow a vegan diet,” I mentally imagine hearing the words
corresponding to my belief. Suppose that when you have the same belief, you imagine hearing the chimes of Big Ben. However, both of us
say and act consistently in following a vegan diet and uttering statements in support of it.
Do I know how you act? Yes. Do you know how I act? Yes. Does
either of us know what private mental state the other has? Absolutely
not -- and it doesn’t even matter. Everyone could have different mental states of belief and we’d not only never know, but wouldn’t see it
as significant. If someone says X, never denies it, and acts consistently
with it, then the person believes X. We don’t need to know what his
or her private mental experiences are, whether they’re of words or of
a duck quacking.
If beliefs were mental states, then that wouldn’t be true. But we in
fact can know what other people believe. Therefore, beliefs are not
mental states.
The fact that our mental states are private is crucial. If any theory
depends on people knowing what other people privately experience,
then the theory is false. That will affect how we define belief, meaning, and communication in general.
Frankly, of the three problems, I see problem #3 as the clincher
argument. Beliefs are not mental states, or at least not only mental
states. Mental states are involved as necessary conditions for belief (as
is consciousness), but they’re not the same thing as the beliefs themselves.
Therefore, the view that beliefs are mental states fails both requirements: It fails to identify all the cases we’d call belief, and it fails
to identify only the cases we’d call belief. It’s definitely part of the
story, but It leaves out a lot of things that we need to understand belief.
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Beliefs are not dispositions
Problems with the mental-state theory led to a different theory: the
dispositional theory. On this view, to hold a belief is to have a disposition to behave in certain ways in certain situations.
If the idea of dispositions is unfamiliar, don’t worry: it’s quite simple. If you have a disposition to do something, it just means that in the
right situation, you’ll probably do it. For example, I have a disposition
to eat chocolate donuts. If you put chocolate donuts in front of me, I
will probably eat them. That’s why I stay out of donut shops. As the
fictional movie detective Dirty Harry said, “A man’s got to know his
limitations.”
If I believe that one plus one equals two, or that Albany is the capital of New York state, common sense asserts that I continue to believe
them even when I’m not thinking of them. What belief means in that
instance is one or more of three things:
• Mental state: If I were to consider the statements that “one
plus one equals two” and “Albany is the capital of New York,”
I would mentally affirm them.
•
Statement: In certain circumstances, I would say that “one
plus one equals two” and “Albany is the capital of New York.”
Psychologists call this “verbal behavior.” It makes no difference which language I use to say these things. I could just as
easily have said “eins und eins ist zwei” or “un plus un égale
deux.”
•
Behavior: In certain circumstances, I would act as if those
statements are true. If I want two lumps of sugar in my tea, I
will not take one lump and then three lumps as if that made
two lumps: instead, I’ll take one and then another one. If I
want to see the state legislature of New York, I will not drive
to Buffalo: instead, I’ll get out the map and look for the shortest route to Albany. This is non-verbal behavior.
Notice that all of those examples begin with some variation of an
“if” clause: if I considered some statements, if someone asked me a
question, or if I were doing certain things.
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The dispositional theory of belief includes the mental-state view
but puts the emphasis elsewhere, on what the believer would say or
do if certain things were true. It’s kind of a new, improved version of
the mental-state theory that fixes some of its problems. If beliefs are
dispositions to think or behave in certain ways, then:
• Beliefs can have public effects through public speech and behavior.
•
Beliefs don’t disappear when we’re not thinking of them.
•
Because beliefs can have public effects, we can know what
other people believe.
However, dispositions are if-then statements. They describe not
what is, but what probably would be if believers were in certain situations. They do not assert, for example:
Sam says that dogs are mammals.
What they do assert is that if certain things happened, then Sam
would do certain things:
If asked whether or not dogs are mammals, Sam replies “Yes, dogs
are mammals.”
As a result, dispositions have the same problem as mental states:
they’re invisible. All we can ever observe are the statements and behaviors. We base our reactions and our own behavior on those, not on
how people would behave in situations that don’t currently exist. We
can never observe dispositions.
Dispositions also can’t explain beliefs held in the past. Yesterday,
nobody asked Sam if dogs were mammals. Did he believe it anyway?
We might say that if someone had asked him, then he would have said
dogs are mammals, but notice what that is: it’s a prediction we are
making about something that didn’t happen. Especially in that kind of
case, the disposition has nothing to do with Sam: it’s a prediction that
we might or might not make. It’s all ours. Sam almost has nothing to
do with it.
Let’s give credit to the dispositional theory: it explains a lot. Just
like the mental-state theory, it accurately reflects how we sometimes
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think about belief. But its flaw as an overall view of belief is that it’s
about what might happen, not what does happen. It’s part of the story,
but only part of it.
To sum up, let’s look at a different kind of example. On earth’s
moon, in an area called the Sea of Tranquility, sits a rectangular piece
of metal that's the high-water mark of human civilization. It has squiggles on its surface that look like this:
HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY 1969, A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND
Sitting there undisturbed, in the silence of an airless moon, the
squiggles do nothing. Do they have a disposition to do anything?
The answer depends on what happens. If a human who understood English once again stood in front of the metal plate, then the
squiggles would say words corresponding to their shapes in English.
In that situation, they have a disposition to say something in English.
But consider another case. Suppose that an alien from another star
system stood in front of the plate. The alien doesn’t understand English. His sensory organs differ from those of humans, so he perceives
the squiggles in a way we can only guess. They remind the alien of his
favorite pasta dish at a restaurant on the other side of the galaxy. In
that situation, the squiggles have a disposition to remind someone of
a pasta dish that you can only get far, far out in space.
You can think of other cases, but the point is obvious. What the
squiggles have a disposition to do depends not on the squiggles themselves, but on other things that happen in their vicinity. The squiggles
“have” an infinite number of possible dispositions, but the dispositions aren’t properties of the piece of metal. The dispositions are possibilities that something will happen around it. If a particular thing
doesn’t happen, then the corresponding disposition doesn’t exist.
And that’s the other point. The disposition itself never happens.
What happens, or not, is that a human stands in front of the plate and
sees English text; an alien stands in front of the plate and thinks of his
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favorite pasta dish; or any of countless other possible if-then situations.
Something that never happens, can’t be seen, and can be almost
anything is not an adequate explanation of belief. The view that beliefs
are dispositions fails both requirements #1 and #2. We’ll have to look
elsewhere.
Beliefs are not brain events
The newest view of belief is the neuroscientific view. With variations
and many different names, it holds that beliefs are patterns of brain
activity or are reducible to them.
Though it’s stated in terms of recent scientific research, it’s not
really new. It is in fact an updated version of an ancient theory called
“materialism.” It’s now called “physicalism.”
Physicalists say that nothing exists but matter, energy, and patterns of matter and energy that they confusingly call “information.”
That’s how they explain rocks, stars, the human body, and -- less convincingly -- consciousness. As far as they’re concerned, the human
mind is just a brain with delusions of grandeur. It’s all physical in the
end.
That might seem kind of nuts, but physicalists have their reasons.
Most important is that they think science can answer all of our questions: not just about friction, atomic theory, or planetary orbits, but
about the human soul and its problems. Love, justice, beauty, meaning,
and belief: to physicalists, they can all be explained in terms of matter
and energy. If physical science can study something, then it’s real; otherwise, it’s imaginary, and imagination itself is also physical. But physicalists have a more substantive reason, too.
Physicalism is a response to the problems of another theory called
“dualism.” Dualism says that mind and body are radically different
kinds of things. Mind is a mental thing, not subject to physical laws,
more or less independent of our bodies, and having no particular
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location in time and space: “conceived as a peculiar, perhaps immaterial, substance distinct from the brain.”5
On the other hand, our bodies -- including our brains -- are physical things. They are subject to physical laws. They exist at particular
locations in time and space.
This raises two challenging problems. First, how can a non-physical thing (the mind) interact with physical things (the brain and the
body)? If I decide to hold up two fingers, then absent some disease or
disability, my hand goes up and extends two fingers: a mental event
caused a physical event. If someone is offended by my gesture and
kicks me in the shin, then I feel a pain in my leg: a physical event
caused a mental event.
We know, or at least think we know, what it means for an event
to cause another event of the same kind. If I think of my grandfather,
that’s a mental event. It causes me to recall his book-lined study and
the smell of his pipe: my act of remembering is another mental event.
I know the experience of having one thought lead to another. Likewise, if one billiard ball strikes another, that’s a physical event. Its impact exerts a force on the second ball that causes it to move: that’s
another physical event. No problem.
But as for how a mental event causes a physical event or vice
versa, we haven’t a clue. If you decide to put your hand in front of a
moving billiard ball, then your hand moves as you decided. How did
the mental experience of deciding to move your hand cause the physical hand to move? When the ball hits your hand, the physical impact
causes you to feel something that corresponds to the impact. How did
we get from the impact to the feeling? To say it’s because of sensory
nerves in your hand only moves the problem back a step: how does
the disturbance of physical nerves in your hand cause a mental experience? Dualism has no good answer for such questions.
The second problem is even more troubling. If the brain and body
are physical things and are subject to physical laws, then their operation will be consistent with those laws. In particular, that seems to rule
5
Bennett, M. and Hacker, P., “Selections from Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience,” in Bennett (2003), p. 6.
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out non-physical causes of physical events. The movements of my
hand must be entirely determined by antecedent physical causes. To
suggest that a mental event can cause my hand to move is tantamount
to saying that the law of cause and effect doesn’t always apply in the
physical universe. It’s like saying that even if the first ball doesn’t hit
it, the second ball can decide by itself to start moving.
Physicalists, including supporters of the neuroscientific view,
solve the problem by insisting that mental events are physical events.
In its essentials, their argument is the same as it was over 2,000 years
ago when the poet Lucretius wrote in De Rerum Natura:
All nature, as it is in itself,
Of two things: there are bodies and there is void
In which these bodies are and through which they move …
Impossible without body, must we not
Admit that mind and spirit are bodily?
Today, we have many more details to add. Lucretius didn’t know
about neurons, action potentials, Broca’s area, or any of the scientific
discoveries in which modern physicalists couch their accounts of
mind. But the argument still boils down to this:
1. Only physical things exist.
2. But consciousness exists.
3. What?! There goes our theory …
4. Therefore, consciousness must be physical.
The problem is that premise 1 (only physical things exist) is contradicted by a common-sense interpretation of premise 2 (consciousness exists). Both cannot be true. We can either abandon the belief
that only physical things exist or we reinterpret consciousness as a
physical thing. Physicalists choose the latter as a matter of faith,
though they are by their own admission not conscious of doing so.
The existence of consciousness is the paramount challenge to a
purely physical account of belief, but it’s not the only one. However
accurate in scientific details, a description of brain processes is plainly
not a description of belief as it has always been understood.
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Let’s look at muscular strength for an analogy. We now know that
muscles contain filaments of actin and myosin that contract. Our muscles break down fats and carbohydrates to get energy. That’s how this
happened in the Bible’s Book of Judges:
28 Then Samson called to the LORD, “O Lord GOD! Please remember me, and give me strength just this once, O God, to take revenge of the Philistines, if only for one of my two eyes.”
29 He embraced the two middle pillars the temple rested upon, one
with his right arm and one with his left, and leaned against them;
30 Samson cried, “Let me die with the Philistines!” and he pulled
with all his might. The temple came crashing down on the lords and
on all the people in it. Those who were slain by him as he died.
Was Samson’s strength the same thing as the muscle fibers and
chemical reactions that made it possible? Did the Biblical writers think
about fats, carbohydrates, and muscle fibers? To ask those questions
is to answer them. The same applies to statements about belief and,
more generally, to those about consciousness.
Supporters of the neuroscientific explanation are certainly talking
about something, perhaps even something important, but they are not
talking about belief or consciousness. They have changed the subject
to one with which they feel more comfortable.
If someone stated a belief in X, and behaved consistently with it,
we would say he believed X even if neuroscientists found no corresponding brain processes. The view of beliefs as brain processes fails
requirement #1: it does not identify all the things we’d call belief.
If neuroscientists found that a person had brain processes corresponding to belief X, but she neither stated belief in X nor behaved
consistently with it, we would say that she did not actually believe X.
The view of beliefs as brain processes fails requirement #2: it does not
identify only those things we would call belief.
Beliefs are not brain events, even if -- just like mental states -brain events are normally involved in having beliefs. We must look
elsewhere.
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Chapter 3:
What Belief Is
“No one really knows how beliefs are represented in our brains … it
seems reasonable to think of them as sentences -- constrained by
the language we use to construct sentences.”
-- Nils J. Nillson, Understanding Beliefs
BY NOW, WE KNOW WHAT BELIEF IS NOT. It’s not a mental state, it’s not
a disposition, and it’s not a brain process. Those things are part of the
story, but none of them is helpful for the purpose of analyzing human
society, morals, and politics. That purpose determines where we
should focus.
Beliefs do many things
So where should a definition focus for our current purpose? Let’s consider an example. Suppose that I stand up in the middle of a public
meeting and loudly proclaim:
“I believe that all people are equal!”
What did I just do? First, notice that it’s not a statement about
people being equal: it’s a statement about me. That’s actually quite important. It’s a clue.
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Second, notice that what I claim to believe is false: In most factual
ways, all people are not equal. They are taller or shorter, fatter or thinner, richer or poorer, law-abiding or criminal, with different interests,
personalities, and abilities.
Therefore, my statement is kind of a mess. It’s not about what it
pretends to be about, and what it pretends to be about is obviously
untrue. It seems to do this:
• It asserts that I believe “All people are equal.”
•
It suggests that all people are equal.
•
It signals that I am a virtuous person in ways with which people around me agree.
I’m communicating at least three things. Two of them are about
me, and one of them signals that I share moral beliefs with the other
people present. Unless I’m at a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan, everyone
else will nod in agreement and think I’m a nice person. They will also
think that they know what I believe. If they interact with me, they will
base their actions on that assumption. Will they be right? It depends
on what we think belief is.
Examples of belief give us clues
If you want to know what kangaroos are, it won’t suffice just to make
up a description at your desk. You’ve got to look at some real kangaroos. The same applies to beliefs. If you want to know what beliefs are,
you’ve got to look at some beliefs, not just make up a description and
insist that all beliefs must be like what you described.
Remember that one of our goals for a definition of belief is to
cover all the things we would normally call belief, and only the things
we would normally call belief. So let’s look at more examples.
Example #1: Words that require action
Suppose that you’re a newly-hired technician at a nuclear power plant.
At your workstation, I point to the computer screen and hand you a
piece of paper that says “Loss of coolant.”
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I say that if you ever see those words on the computer screen, you
must shut down the reactor and evacuate the power plant.
A couple things are interesting here. First, notice that a fact
(words on a screen) implies that you must do some actions (shutting
down the reactor and evacuating the power plant). That takes a lot of
logical steps for granted and leaves them unspoken:
1. Loss of coolant can cause a core meltdown.
2. A core meltdown will release large amounts of radioactive
material into the vicinity.
3. Exposure to large amounts of radioactive material harms humans.
4. Shutting down the reactor can prevent a core meltdown.
5. Evacuating the plant reduces the risk of human exposure to
large amounts of radioactive material.
6. If possible, prevent harm to humans.
7. Therefore, shut down the reactor and evacuate the plant.
Steps 1 through 5 are purely factual, but step 6 is different. It introduces a moral principle in the form of an imperative: if X, then do
Y. Step 7 follows by simple logic.
Suppose you’re a poorly trained technician and you don’t know
what “loss of coolant” means. You know the individual words, but not
the meaning of the phrase so that you could give an equivalent phrase
in English. Does that lack of understanding make any difference in
your behavior if the phrase appears on your screen? No. You can reach
the necessary conclusions and take the required action even if you
can't explain what it means. You hold this belief:
“If ‘loss of coolant’ appears on my screen, it means I must shut
down the reactor and evacuate the power plant.”
We often think that “what a phrase means” is an equivalent
phrase, either in English or in some other language. You cannot give
an equivalent phrase or explain the original phrase. However, you believe something without knowing, in that sense, what it means: You
know how to behave if a certain thing happens. In summary:
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•
You can’t give the linguistic meaning of your belief – i.e., you
can’t state it in different words – because you don’t know
what “loss of coolant” means.
•
You can’t form a coherent mental picture of your belief for
the same reason.
•
You can act correctly on the basis of your belief. To the extent
that your belief has meaning, its meaning is that it points to a
particular sequence of behavior.
Therefore, in a practical sense, you do know what “loss of coolant”
means: it means certain facts and actions. You can’t give an equivalent
phrase. You can’t picture it in your mind. But you understand what to
do. That’s enough. You believe it, and you do it. Lives are saved.
Example #2: Gibberish that requires action
You’re still a newly hired technician at a nuclear power plant. However, this time the plant is in Japan and you’re an American who understands no Japanese. You took the job because the salary was a
million yen per year, and that sounded like a lot of money (it’s about
$9,300).
I’m your Japanese supervisor and, considerate fellow that I am,
I’m explaining your job in English. I point to your computer screen
and hand you a piece of paper with this written on it:
冷却水の喪失.
I say that if you ever see 冷却水の喪失 on the computer screen,
you must shut down the reactor and evacuate the power plant.
In the previous example, you understood the individual words but
couldn’t give an equivalent phrase in different words. Now, you have
even less idea what the writing on the paper means. You not only
don’t know what the words mean, but you’re not even sure where one
word ends and the next word begins. All you know is that if you see
that string of characters on your screen, you’ve got to shut down the
reactor and evacuate the power plant. You hold this belief:
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“If 冷却水の喪失 appears on my screen, I must shut down the reactor and evacuate the power plant.”
As before, you believe something but you don’t understand what
it means in the sense that you cannot give an equivalent phrase. Your
belief points to required actions in case there’s a loss of coolant. If you
see that string of characters, your belief tells you how to behave. So
you know the meaning. It’s not an equivalent sequence of words: it’s
a required sequence of actions.
Example #3: Religious doctrine that requires action
You’re no longer a technician in a nuclear power plant. You got your
first paycheck and it was barely enough for a week’s worth of bentos,
Japanese lunch boxes that you can buy at the local convenience store.
You decided that religion might pay a little better. You considered becoming a Catholic priest, but there’s that whole celibacy thing, so you
decided to be a rabbi. Thanks to your non-religious but still stereotypically Jewish mother, you’ve got street cred for that.
At the yeshiva, your teacher is instructing you about basic Jewish
beliefs. He says you must believe that:
“God gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai.”
Can you believe it? Yes, you can, but there are some problems.
The first problem is one from our first example: you don’t understand some of the words in the belief, just as you didn’t understand
“loss of coolant.” Jewish and Christian thinkers agree that we can’t understand God, so we have no ordinary conception of what the word
“God” means. The same applies to other words when we apply them
to God. What we logically understand of the belief is essentially
“Blank blank the Torah to Moses at Sinai.”
As for the rest -- the Torah, Moses, and Sinai -- it’s all good. The
Torah consists of five books, Moses was a man, and Sinai is a mountain. We’ve seen books, men, and mountains. As long as we don’t insist on historical or archaeological evidence, we can believe that part.
The Torah says it happened, and that’s good enough for us.
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And just as before, you do know what the belief means. You can’t
give an equivalent statement in different words because you’d need to
understand all the words of the belief. However, you know what actions the belief requires. You always state the belief in appropriate
situations. You never deny it. And you act consistently with it. So you
believe it.
But in your own private thoughts, do you really believe what
you’re supposed to believe?
Do you really believe it, or are you just acting like you do? How
would anyone else know? For that matter, how would you know?
That is the real problem. If believing something requires a specific
thing to happen in your mind – the same thing that corresponds to the
belief in your teacher’s mind -- then how can you know if the thing in
your mind is the correct thing?
You can’t.
Your teacher told you to believe that “God gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai.” You think your belief is correct if it’s the same as what
the teacher believes. You’re right about that, but wrong about what it
means.
You can observe what your teacher says and how he acts, but not
what’s in his mind. It is impossible for you to know what you’re supposed to believe “mentally.” The teacher can’t communicate that to
you at all. He can only tell you the words and show you the behavior.
If you faithfully recite the words and consistently exhibit the behavior, then you believe. If your words and behavior match those of the
teacher, then so does your belief.
Every person who believes “God gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai”
might have a different mental experience of what it means, and none
of us would ever know.
When nobody can know even in principle if their mental experience of belief is correct, then the word “correct” loses its meaning.
Whatever your mental belief is, it’s correct as long as you consistently
say the right things and exhibit the right behavior. If your mental experience (A) is hearing “Stairway to Heaven,” and the teacher’s experience (B) is hearing the words of the belief, then each of you matches
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that experience (A or B) with your other experiences and behaviors
associated with the belief. As long as you both do it consistently, it
works fine. You can communicate.
Even if you examine your mental states and find that they are correct, you have no independent check on your judgment that they are
correct – which in this case, means that they match your memory of
what they were yesterday. And because your mental states are private, nobody else can help you. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said (Philosophical Investigations, section 258):
“Whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only
means that here, we can’t talk about ‘right’.”
Your mental state must exist, or else you’re not conscious. As we
normally think of belief, a corresponding mental state is a necessary
condition for having a belief: otherwise, you can’t believe anything.
But the specific content of your mental state drops out. If you say and
act, then you believe.
When we think about other people’s beliefs, we often imagine our
own internal experience and attribute it to them. We assume that for
them, believing “God gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai” (or anything
else) is associated with the same mental experience as we have when
we think about the belief. However, two points should by now be
clear:
• We cannot even in principle know the contents of other people’s private mental belief experiences.
•
And more significantly, it doesn’t matter at all for the meaningfulness of beliefs.
As long as we remain aware of those facts, it is harmless -- and
probably unavoidable without clumsy literary constructions -- to talk
about beliefs as if they were mental experiences. But it’s generally not
true. Beliefs are public acts with public meaning, even though they
must be connected with private experiences that serve to “anchor”
them in our consciousness.
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Notice one other thing. Even though we can’t know the contents
of other people’s private experiences of belief, we can infer how the
beliefs are related to each other.
If John says “This book is blue, therefore this book is colored,”
there’s no way for us to know how he privately experiences either of
those beliefs. However, based on his behavior, we can infer that he
connects the beliefs and that the first belief leads to the second.
What’s private is the content of the experience. The structure of the
experiences can be public. We also assume that other people are having some kinds of experiences that correspond to the structures
shown by their verbal and non-verbal behavior.
Example #4: A law-school wannabe that requires action
Sadly, you flunked out of the yeshiva because your teachers said that
you couldn’t even speak coherently, let alone engage in theological
discussion. For your own good, they sent you back to the first grade.
Since you’re 25, none of the other first-graders have tried to bully you.
They just wonder what you’re doing there.
Your teacher is talking about the names of different colors. It’s a
much simpler example than any we’ve discussed. No nuclear power,
no reading Japanese, no theology. Just a palette of colors on the wall
with their names written next to them.
Your teacher points to a blue-colored patch and says, “This is
BLUUUUE.” She enunciates the word very slowly and carefully because in her private mental states -- remember those? -- she thinks that
first-graders are idiots. She wishes that she could have gone to law
school instead. Unfortunately, she went out drinking the night before
the LSAT exam, with predictable results. So here she is, teaching a
bunch of rotten kids about the color BLUUUUE instead of earning a
six-figure salary on Wall Street.
“All together now, children: BLUUUUE.”
You and all the other first-graders say “BLUUUUE.”
Your teacher points at the word next to the color patch: “BLUE.”
She says, “This is how the word looks if you write it,” she says. “Write
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the word ‘BLUE’ in your workbooks.” You and all the other first-graders write “BLUE.”
It’s just the color blue, but you might as well be talking about a
beetle in a box. Do you know what the teacher sees when she looks at
something blue? Do you know what any of the other kids see? No, you
don’t. You can’t. But if they say that something is blue, you know what
they mean: it’s the same color as the patch on the wall, or similar
enough to count as the same. As long as you all identify the same
things as blue, say the correct words, and exhibit the correct behavior,
you know what “blue” means to everyone in your group.
Belief isn’t what we thought
Our examples highlighted surprising facts about belief. It’s not connected as intimately with mental experiences as we expected, though
there is a definite connection. It’s much more tied to speech, writing,
and behavior than we initially thought:
• Belief doesn’t depend only on words.
•
Belief does more than just make statements.
•
Belief is a social phenomenon learned from and taught to
other people in a social group by associating words with public behaviors.
•
Language has only public meaning, not private meaning. We
can describe mental states only in terms of people’s behavior
and its structure. That applies even to our own mental states,
including beliefs.
•
Still, if you’re not conscious, you can’t have beliefs. We assume that other people have some kinds of mental experiences corresponding to their beliefs.
So how should we define belief for our current purpose? It’s starting to look like belief is behavior. Unfortunately, that suggestion bothers anyone with common sense:
“Sure, belief is connected to behavior, but seriously: Isn’t belief still
really mental? We behave in certain ways because we have mental
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beliefs. If I believe something, it means I have a mental experience,
no matter how you describe it or argue about it.”
It’s a persuasive argument. Private mental experiences are necessary for having beliefs. However, so is being alive. If you’re not alive
and conscious, you can’t have beliefs. So where do we draw the line?
What do we count as part of belief and what not?
Philosophy distinguishes between first-person explanations (“I
believe”) and second- or third-person explanations (“You believe,”
“he/she believes”).
Our conviction that belief requires private mental states comes
exclusively from our own first-person viewpoint. Any time we talk
about our own beliefs, we think of our private experiences, whatever
they are. We don’t think about how we behave based on our beliefs.
Other people see our behavior more clearly than we see it. As a result,
we naturally think of belief in terms of how we experience it, not an
objective third-person viewpoint that sees only our behavior.
Conversely, when we talk about other people’s beliefs, all we really know is their behavior, but we unthinkingly assume that their private mental experience is just like ours. We have no way to know
anything about that. If we talk about their beliefs, their private experience drops out. If we talk about our beliefs, we use the same public
language, so our private experience drops out.
Belief is behavior
Let’s go back to the criteria that we discussed in Chapter 1. A good
definition:
• Should pick out all and only the things we would normally call
belief.
•
Should explain a lot of things.
•
Should be useful in promoting happiness, morality, and social
peace.
Therefore, I propose that for social, political, and moral analysis,
we should define belief as behavior.
Does that satisfy the criteria for a correct definition?
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It satisfies the first criterion. We learn to talk about belief by associating words with behavior, so our definition picks out all and only
the things we would call belief. When we talk about other people’s
beliefs, all we can observe is their behavior. Even when we talk about
our own beliefs, the only language we can use is public language that
refers to public behavior. We have private mental experiences but we
have no private language with which to talk about them.
As for the second and third criteria, the rest of this book argues
that defining belief as behavior explains many human problems and
can help us solve them. If that’s so, then the definition has explanatory
power and it is useful. Belief consists of:
• A set of verbal and non-verbal behaviors taking place over a
period of time,
•
which are given meaning by their relation to a network of
other beliefs (including behaviors, etc.),
•
defined conventionally by the believer’s social and linguistic
group.
A person believes X if he or she consistently behaves as if X were
true, never denies X, and never acts inconsistently with X being true.
The person might or might not verbally affirm X.
Let’s pause for a moment to contemplate what that means about
each individual belief.
In specific contexts, verbal and non-verbal behaviors express beliefs according to the rules and expectations of the believer’s social
and linguistic group. Each of the behaviors, such as saying “There’s
been a coolant loss” and taking actions to deal with the loss, express
the belief.
We often forget that beliefs develop, and almost invariably occur,
in the context of other beliefs and other people. If I believe that democracy is the best political system, then my belief cannot exist or be
meaningful without a context of other beliefs, such as beliefs about
other possible political systems. If you alter or remove the other beliefs, then you change the meaning of the first belief. Believers might:
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•
State their belief in words that match the belief they’re stating. If I say, “It’s later than 8 o’clock,” I’m typically stating a
belief that matches the words I use.
•
Express their belief in words that don’t match the belief
they’re stating. If I say, “It’s later than you think,” I’m typically
stating a belief that doesn’t match the words I use.
•
Express their belief in non-verbal behavior. If before an 8pm
party, I rush around the house straightening things up, I express non-verbally the belief that it is shortly before 8pm.
Conversely, if I then put on a bathrobe and sit down in front
of the television set, I contradict that belief without ever having to say a word.
Belief can be actions instead of words
Just as behavior can express belief, beliefs can imply or be associated
with behavior. When those behaviors are central to a person's life,
laden with emotion, or connected with important experiences, the
link is even stronger. As a result, people feel as if rejecting the belief
means rejecting the behavior and everything else associated with it.
If as a child you went to church or synagogue with your parents
every week, prayed with family, friends, and loved ones, those experiences were not only pleasant but were also an important formative
influence in your life. They’ve become part of who you are as a person.
When anyone suggests that you reject the beliefs associated with all
that behavior and life experience, it feels like you're being asked to
reject your family, your loved ones, all those wonderful moments, and
even important parts of yourself.
Is it any wonder that so many people can't do it and don't even
want to do it?
Belief is a social phenomenon
Could a person have beliefs if he or she was raised by wolves and had
never interacted with other human beings?
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We might think that the answer is “yes,” but think again. It’s true
that individual people have beliefs. However, it is not true that they
could acquire or express those beliefs except as part of a community
of intelligent beings who use language.
Consider our wolf-boy. Just like the wolves who raised him, he
would learn to associate things with each other. The call of a bird
means there’s food nearby. A growl from the wolf pack leader means
he’d better be careful. But he could not articulate any of those associations in speech or writing. That knowledge can only be developed in
a human community.
From childhood through adulthood, we learn most of our beliefs
from other people. As children, we learn arithmetic from our school
teachers and morals from our parents. As adults, we learn from other
people everything that we do not personally discover or verify, such
as the principal export of Norway, the plot of a currently popular
movie, or scientific results reported in a journal article we’ve read.
We test and refine our beliefs in conversation and debate with
others. We modify our beliefs in response to new evidence reported
by others, as well as to fit in with peer groups and social groups. Even
generating new beliefs is a skill we learn from participation in a community.
Without testimony, support, and challenge from other people,
any beliefs we had would be only inarticulate associations. The sophisticated intellectual infrastructure that we deploy even in the simplest
daily tasks would be beyond us. Even the language in which express
our beliefs is far beyond the ability of any human being to create on
his or her own.
There’s another side of that phenomenon. Not only do we learn
our own beliefs in cooperation with other people, we teach beliefs to
others by our verbal and non-verbal behavior. Just as what other people say and do affects us, what we say and do affects others, both for
good and for ill. If our behavioral expressions of belief help the community and its people, they are in that respect good. Conversely, if our
behaviors have a negative effect, they are in that respect bad.
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Belief is not an individual phenomenon, but a social one that has
some individual aspects. The private mental experiences we associate
with our own beliefs are important to us, but they play no role in interactions with others or our membership in society. Only our verbal
and non-verbal behaviors expressing beliefs are important in those areas.
The two-way effect of belief -- on us by others, and on others by
us -- means that beliefs have moral significance beyond their mere
truth and falsity.
Only behavior is socially relevant
Because mental experiences of belief are private to the person holding
them, they can only be known to other people through the holder’s
verbal and non-verbal behavior. Only that behavior has any effect on
other people or on the community. In addition, mental experiences of
belief are often confused, vague, inconsistently held, and inconsistent
with each other. Though they are a necessary condition for the existence of belief, they have no effect on its meaning.
For those reasons, communities cannot regulate mental experiences of belief. They can only regulate behavior. And since only that
behavior has an impact on the communities and on other people, it is
the only aspect of belief that is socially significant.
What the definition omits
Defining belief as behavior helps for analyzing the role of belief in human life and society. But it isn’t any help in analyzing our first-person
experience of the world. It doesn’t exclude the reality of mental experience, but it doesn’t say anything about it, either.
That’s an omission, but it’s harmless as long as we remember that
stories (including definitions) have purposes. For example, when Aristotle defined humans as rational animals, his purpose was to classify
humans as part of the animal kingdom. As a result, he omitted other
human traits such as having two hands and two feet because they did
not distinguish us from other animals. Even though his definition
omitted those traits, it did not deny their existence.
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Later in the book, our focus will shift to a more mentalistic view
when we examine meaning, truth, and religious experience. Behavior
will still be there, but in the background because it’s less relevant to
our purpose in those chapters.
We hold beliefs in three basic ways
If we look at real-life beliefs, we find that people hold them in three
basic ways:
• Hold and apply
•
Hold and do not apply
•
Hold if X
Hold and apply
These are normal beliefs. In appropriate situations, we affirm them
verbally or we base our non-verbal actions on them.
We weight such beliefs in terms of credibility, importance, and
other factors. Although the scale is arbitrary, such beliefs might be
weighted from 1 to 10. In case of conflicts between beliefs, we apply
the beliefs with higher individual or combined weights. If we don’t
reject the losing beliefs outright, we place them in the “Hold and do
not apply” category.
Hold and do not apply
These are beliefs that we put aside because they conflict with other
beliefs to which we give more weight. We do not deny them, and if
asked, we affirm them. But we do not apply them in inference or behavior.
For example, did you ever buy a lottery ticket? I buy one occasionally just to waste a dollar. For most, your chance of winning is less
than 1 in 100 million. People who buy tickets often know they have
almost no chance of winning. But they also believe they have a slight
chance of winning. They hold both beliefs, but apply only the hopeful
one.
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Hold if X
These are beliefs that we hold only if a certain condition or conditions
are true.
The most obvious case is when beliefs depend on matters of fact.
Will I get wet if I go outside? I hold the belief (“If I go outside, I will
get wet”) if I look out the window and see that it is raining. If it is not
raining, I do not hold the belief.
However, there are other cases of this type of belief-holding. In
his book Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, the late Harvard University philosopher Hilary Putnam told how he reconciled his religious
and secular beliefs:
"As a practicing Jew, I am someone for whom the religious dimension of life has become increasingly important ...Those who know
my writings from that period may wonder how I reconciled my religious streak and my general scientific materialist worldview. The
answer is that I didn’t reconcile them. I was a thoroughgoing atheist, and I was a believer. I simply kept these two parts of myself separate.”
Putnam weighted his religious and materialist beliefs differently
in different situations. When he was in religious situations, he assigned weight 10 to his religious beliefs and weight zero (do not hold)
to his materialist beliefs. When he was in his office at Harvard, he assigned weight zero to his religious beliefs and some non-zero weight
to his materialist beliefs.
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Chapter 4:
Why Saadia and
Maimonides Couldn't
Believe -- But Did
"Belief is a notion that arises in the soul in regard to the actual
character of anything that is apprehended."
-- Saadia Gaon
PREVIOUSLY, WE ARGUED THAT COMMON DEFINITIONS of belief are incorrect. They conflict both with how we behave in response to beliefs,
but also with how we talk about beliefs when we’re not trying to be
philosophers.
In this and the next two chapters, we’ll see how this conflict
played out historically in the lives of several great thinkers. They all
defined belief as mental and as only for making factual statements, but
circumstances forced them to act against that definition.
Saadia Gaon (882-942 CE) and Moses Maimonides (1138-1204
CE) are textbook examples of that conflict. Both were Jewish intellectual leaders in societies dominated by Islam.
Direct challenges to their beliefs came from Islam and Christianity
as well as from breakaway Jewish sects. Indirect challenges came from
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being second-class citizens in Islamic countries, as well as from political quarrels within the Jewish community.
How Medieval Islam challenged
Judaism and Christianity
Islam has a bad reputation today among many Western people, mainly
from terrorism and its treatment of women. But in the Middle Ages,
Islamic civilization was – for its time -- tolerant and intellectually dynamic. Saadia and Maimonides lived in Islamic countries and wrote in
Arabic.
Life as “dhimmi” in Islamic society
Even though they lived in Islamic societies, Saadia and Maimonides
publicly defended their religious beliefs against arguments from Islamic writers. They could do so because whatever its shortcomings,
Islam regarded Jews and Christians as kindred “people of the Book.”
Most non-Muslims had to convert to Islam or be killed. However,
Muslims saw the Jewish and Christian scriptures as part of their own
religious tradition. Therefore, Jews and Christians had the status of
“dhimmi,” second-class citizens who enjoyed at least some legal protection. They could practice their religions without persecution as
long as they paid a special tax.
Islamic scholars rediscovered Greek philosophy
In the 8th century CE, Baghdad became an important intellectual center as Islamic scholars translated ancient Greek works of philosophy,
science, and mathematics into Arabic. They wanted to learn “falsafa”
(philosophy) so they could argue more effectively for Islamic beliefs.
They translated and studied the works of Aristotle and Plato, as well
as Euclid (mathematics), Archimedes (mathematics and science), Galen (medicine), and Ptolemy (astronomy).
Based on what they learned from the Greeks – mainly from Aristotle -- Islamic sages wrote religious apologetics called “Kalam”
(speech). They assumed that Divine revelation must be entirely
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compatible with reason and science. Jewish and Christian thinkers
had to respond. Saadia and Maimonides gave part of that response.
Just like Islamic writers, they accepted Aristotle’s basic ideas and assumptions. So did Christian and Islamic thinkers. Each wanted to
show that Aristotelian reasoning supported their own religion.
Even though Islam tolerated Judaism and Christianity, it was still
the dominant religion of the societies. Conversion to Islam offered social, economic, and political advantages. Some Jews and Christians decided to convert for that reason, which alarmed both Saadia and
Maimonides.
Rivalry between Palestine and Babylonia
Arguments with other religions weren’t the only ball that Saadia and
Maimonides had to juggle.
Palestine and Babylonia were rival centers of Jewish religious authority, and most communities followed one or the other. Saadia
ended up on both sides of that dispute.
Saadia also had to deal with the Karaites, a breakaway Jewish sect
that denied the validity of tradition and claimed only the Torah (the
first five books of the Old Testament) had religious authority. Three
centuries later, Maimonides confronted sects and various religious
skeptics. And they both faced disputes that were partly about belief
but mainly about political power.
Can you believe the unbelievable?
That was the context in which Saadia and Maimonides worked. The
biggest intellectual problem they never solved is still with us today:
Can you believe something that’s literally unbelievable?
We're not talking about things that are merely difficult to believe,
like a 45-year-old, overweight accountant winning an Olympic gold
medal in gymnastics. That would be crazy -- and certainly worth seeing -- but it’s not impossible. We can imagine that, so even by the mental-state theory of belief, we can believe it.
Instead, we’re talking about things that are unimaginable, like
something that has a color but occupies no space. Try to think of what
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that would be like. Try to think of a number that is both even and odd.
You can’t. And if you can’t even imagine it, can you have beliefs about
it?
Beliefs about God are like that. If you define God as transcendent
and incomprehensible, then you can’t even imagine Him. How can
you have beliefs about what you can’t even imagine?
That’s a problem for any religion with a transcendent God and a
naïve idea of belief. Alvin Plantinga, a contemporary Christian philosopher, summarizes it in his book Knowledge and Christian Belief:
“We human beings can’t have any beliefs about God; God is beyond
all of our concepts; our minds are too limited to have any grasp at
all of him and his being.”
Plantinga rejects the problem mainly on the ground that it’s a useless thing to believe, but he also offers kind of a neat logical argument
against it:
“If we can’t think about God, then (as Ramsey said) we can’t think
about him; and therefore can’t make statements about him, including statements to the effect that we can’t think about him. The
statement that we can’t think about God — the statement that God
is such that we can’t think about him — is obviously a statement
about God; if we can’t think about God, then we can’t say about
him that we can’t think about him.”
Here’s the instant replay, in case Plantinga lost you: He says that
the statement “we can’t think about God” is a statement about God. If
we can make a statement about God, then we can think about Him.
Therefore, the statement “we can’t think about God” disproves itself.
A contemporary logician would reply that statements about what
we can say or think are “in the meta-language” and aren’t about God
at all. But that’s really bewildering stuff and it won’t be on the test. So
we’ll skip it.
Notice that all of these arguments are philosophical stories. You
can’t test them experimentally. There’s no historical or documentary
evidence that would prove who’s right in this debate. You just read
the arguments and decide which story makes more sense to you.
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The bottom line is that it was a problem for Saadia and Maimonides because they defined belief incorrectly. They never solved the
problem, but they acted as if they had solved it. At some level they
knew there was more to belief than their theories allowed.
Plantinga versus the Logicians
The meta-language debate really is interesting, but you can skip this
little section if you want. Plantinga argues that if we can’t understand
God, we can’t assign any meaning to the word “God” in the statement
“We can’t think about God.” The statement turns into “We can’t think
about [blank],” which fails to tell us what we can’t think about. Therefore, Plantinga argues, we have only two possible interpretations:
Interpretation #1: If the statement is meaningful, then “God” is
meaningful. In that case, we are thinking about God when we make
the statement. So the statement contradicts itself.
Interpretation #2: If the statement isn’t meaningful because
“God” isn’t meaningful, then the verb “think about” has no object. So
the statement isn’t even a statement, and it tells us nothing.
Logicians would reply that “We can’t think about God” isn’t about
God at all. Instead, it’s a misleading way to say “We can’t assign any
meaning to the word ‘God’.” If that’s right, then we’re not talking
about God. We’re talking about a word, and we can think about the
word. So there’s no contradiction.
British atheist Antony Flew made that argument in his book God
and Philosophy. Interestingly, he later changed his mind and started to
believe in God, though in a way that didn’t contradict his earlier argument. He didn’t take God’s existence as an article of faith, and he
didn’t think we could understand God. However, based on the evidence, he eventually decided it was probable that God existed in some
sense, even it if was beyond our comprehension.
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Would you believe Groucho Marx in Babylonia?
Groucho Marx, a famous 20th-century American comedian, poked fun
at people who seemed gullible. After making some absurd statement
about a situation, he often asked: “Who are you going to believe, me
or your own eyes?”
Both Saadia and Maimonides would have understood that joke. By
the standards of their time, they were world travelers. They spoke
multiple languages. They had lived in different cultures, learned different customs, and seen different belief systems. Unlike most people
even today, their background was “diverse.” The contrast between
different belief systems showed them examples of how beliefs worked
– not just in logic, but in life. Their lived experience told them that
belief had functions beyond making assertions and wasn’t limited to
private mental states.
But Aristotle, the ancient philosopher whose ideas they accepted,
told them something else. They knew Aristotle only through Islamic
translations and commentaries, but he clearly saw belief from a firstperson (mental experience) viewpoint and thought it was only for asserting things about the world.
Neither Saadia nor Maimonides ever resolved the conflict between what Aristotle said and what they saw with their own eyes. In
their theories about belief, they followed Aristotle. In their lives, they
followed what experience had taught them was true. Let’s explore
how that conflict played out for them.
Saadia defends belief against all comers
Saadia is almost always called “Saadia Gaon,” but that wasn’t his name.
Most people don’t know his actual name, much as people think that
the Mahatma Gandhi’s name was Mahatma, which means “great soul”
in Sanskrit. Gandhi’s real first name was Mohandas.
Similarly, “Gaon” was Saadia’s title as headmaster of a Babylonian
Jewish academy. His full name was Saadia ben Joseph: “ben Joseph”
means “son of Joseph.”
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Saadia was born in 882 CE in a small village of Egypt. His parents
might have been Christians who converted to Judaism. Even if they
weren’t, he got plenty of exposure to Christianity. Since Egypt was
dominated by Islam, he also got that. Finally, Egypt’s Jewish community followed the teachings of Palestine rather than Babylonia. As a
child, he grew up with the Palestinian side of the rivalry, then argued
for the Babylonian side as an adult.
By the time he left Egypt at age 23, he had already written a Hebrew dictionary and polemics against the Karaite sect. Until 921, he
traveled between Palestine, Aleppo, and Baghdad, and was often away
from his family.
In 921, however, the Jewish officials of Palestine and Babylonia
had a bitter dispute over which of them had the authority to define
the Jewish calendar. Celebrating holy days was a religious obligation,
so the side that defined the calendar controlled Jewish religious life.
Saadia argued effectively on behalf of the Babylonian side, which won
the dispute.
In 928, the leader (Exilarch) of the Babylonian Jewish community, David ben Zakkai, appointed Saadia as headmaster (Gaon) of the
Babylonian Academy at Sura. He did so because Saadia was widely
known from the calendar dispute and he was the best available
scholar. Academy members had more parochial interests, and wanted
Zakkai to appoint one of them instead.
Up to that time, the academy had focused mainly on study of the
Babylonian Talmud. As a result, their rulings about Talmudic law were
considered authoritative over those of rabbis in the academies of Palestine. However, that narrow focus also blocked them from wider
knowledge, even of Jewish documents such as the Palestinian Talmud,
which Saadia often used in his own writing. It seems strange, but academy members did not study the Bible, write commentaries on the
books of the Bible, or write single-issue monographs, as Saadia did.
That narrow focus had put the Sura Academy in danger of closing.
Even so, members feared that the cosmopolitan Saadia would import
unwelcome new ideas. They warned Zakkai that he was too independent. On both points – fortunately -- it turned out that they were right.
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Saadia’s unwelcome new ideas broadened the focus of the academy and restored its reputation. That, at least, pleased Zakkai. Everything went smoothly until 930, when Saadia confirmed the academy
members’ warnings about his independence. As leader of the Jewish
community, Zakkai issued a ruling in a real estate dispute. Despite his
relationship with Zakkai, Saadia refused to endorse the ruling because
he believed it was illegal.
Angered by Saadia’s seeming disloyalty, Zakkai appointed a new
Gaon. In retaliation, Saadia appointed a replacement for Zakkai as
community leader. Zakkai eventually won the dispute and removed
Saadia from his position, though the two men finally reconciled years
later.
Saadia was thus well aware that belief, even when well-founded
and sincerely held, could have serious practical and social consequences. At some level, that awareness undoubtedly affected his willingness to support or oppose certain beliefs.
How Saadia defined belief
His magnum opus, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions (known in another
English translation as The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs), clearly supports the mental-state definition of belief. In the Prolegomena, he
writes that belief is:
“a notion that arises in the soul in regard to the actual character of
anything that is apprehended … He deposits it in his soul for a future occasion or future occasions.”6
In other words, he thinks that belief is a kind of mental state. Its
purpose is to help us direct our behavior successfully on a future occasion or future occasions.
His definition of truth sheds further light on the nature of this
mental act:
“A true belief consists of believing a thing to be as it really is;
namely, that much is much, and little is little, and black is black,
6
The two English translations use different wording but convey the same meaning.
Quotes here are from Samuel Rosenblatt’s 1947 translation, published under the title
The Book of Beliefs and Opinions.
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and white is white, and that what exists exists, and what is non-existent is non-existent.”
Thus, Saadia thought a belief was an accurate representation, in
the mind of the believer, of a fact outside the mind of the believer.
Saadia also wrote that because human minds are finite, they can
only form representations of things that are themselves finite. To
make the point clear, Saadia adds in Book II (“Concerning the Belief
that the Creator of All Things is One”) that:
"Science is capable of being grasped by man only because it is finite,
for if it were thought to be infinite, it could not be grasped in its totality, and once that becomes impossible, it is no longer subject to
the cognition of anyone.”
If science can be grasped by human beings “only because it is finite,” then it clearly follows that what is not finite cannot be grasped
by human beings – according to Saadia.
How Saadia justified belief
The accuracy of the mental representation was determined in different ways depending on the type of belief involved. Saadia accepted
four ways to validate beliefs:
•
By direct observation: for example, that this apple is red.
•
By intuition of the intellect: for example, that 1+1 = 2.
•
By logical inference: for example, that people have souls because we see their effects.
•
By authentic tradition: for example, that Moses confronted
the Egyptian Pharaoh because it’s what rabbis have taught for
centuries. Note that this last test of truth amounts to reliance
on the testimony of other people. Saadia’s reference to “authentic” tradition makes his test circular: a belief is true because it relies on authentic tradition, and the tradition is
authentic because it endorses true beliefs.
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Saadia thought that perceptual beliefs were validated empirically,
simply by inspecting the world around us. Other beliefs were validated by consulting rabbis or sacred writings. But as for logical and
metaphysical beliefs -- including belief in God -- he advocated a different test: That the beliefs be clear and distinct. In the Prolegomena,
he wrote:
“Now as for the intuitions of the intellect, anything that is conceived in our mind in complete freedom from accidents of any sort
is to be regarded as true knowledge about which no doubt is to be
entertained.”
Here, “accidents” refers to non-essential features of a thing. In the
dominant view at the time, everything had a certain nature that made
it what it was.
An apple had a certain “appleness” that made it an apple instead
of a peach or a dog, and it shared this essential nature with all other
apples. However, each apple also had “accidental” properties that its
nature did not require. The apple that I hold in my hand might weigh
eight ounces, but could just as easily have weighed six ounces or 10
ounces and still be an apple. An apple’s weight, then, is an accidental
rather than an essential feature.
For Saadia, to conceive something “in complete freedom from accidents” is to conceive it clearly and distinctly as it is by nature. If we
conceive a belief clearly and distinctly, we know it is true.
It’s worth observing that on this point, Saadia was far ahead of his
time. Seven centuries later, the French polymath René Descartes
(who indirectly got Spinoza in trouble) would make the same kind of
“clear and distinct ideas” his test of truth:
“So I now seem to be able to lay it down as a general rule that whatever I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true.”
Saadia’s epistemic agnosticism
But for Saadia, this “clear and distinct” test of truth causes a problem
when it comes to belief in God: It leads straight to agnosticism, though
it rules out atheism for the same reason as it rules out theism.
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Later in The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, Saadia devotes a chapter
to the nature of God. He writes that:
“The idea of the Creator, exalted and magnified be He, must of necessity be subtler than the subtlest and more recondite than the
most recondite and more abstract than the most abstract and profounder than the most profound ...”
So far, it’s the same kind of florid praise that people routinely and
without embarrassment apply to God. But then Saadia gets to the
punch line:
“... so that it would be impossible to fathom its character at all …
what is infinite and endless cannot be embraced by the human
mind.”
In other words, the human mind cannot form a representation of
God. The human mind can only grasp what is finite, and God is not
finite.
But on Saadia’s view, a belief is a mental representation of a fact
outside the mind of the believer. If we cannot mentally represent God,
we cannot have beliefs about Him. We cannot believe that He is One.
We cannot believe that he is good. We cannot believe that He gave
the Torah to Moses at Sinai. We cannot even believe that He exists or
doesn’t exist.
As an observant and faithful Jew, of course, Saadia would have recoiled in horror from such suggestions. Most of The Book of Beliefs and
Opinions is devoted to arguing for various beliefs about God.
Why the disconnect? Why did Saadia hold an explicit definition
of belief, but then argue and act as if his own definition was false? Why
argue for beliefs that on his view were impossible? Even if they came
from “authentic tradition,” they still referred to a Being whose nature
could not “be embraced by the human mind.”
The answer is that even though his definition of belief did not permit it, he knew from experience that beliefs were about more than just
asserting things. They held society together, maintained personal relationships, and guided individual lives.
The evidence will become even clearer as we look at the other
thinkers: Maimonides, Spinoza, and Mendelssohn. All of them, at least
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implicitly and sometimes explicitly, recognized that behavior was an
essential component of belief. Mental affirmation might have been important, and spiritual commitment was definitely helpful, but only behavior was subject to morality and only behavior could affect society.
Maimonides insists on beliefs you can’t believe
Like Saadia, Maimonides’s famous name isn’t his actual name. His
name was Moshe ben Maimon, but he’s usually called “Rambam”
(short for for Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon) or simply “Maimonides.”
He was born in 1138 CE in the relatively tolerant Islamic society
of Andalusia (now southern Spain). A few years later, the region was
taken over by the Almohads, a radical Islamic sect that allowed no dissent from its beliefs. Maimonides and his family had to run for their
lives. As a young man, he moved around North Africa until he finally
settled in Egypt in 1166.
When he arrived in Egypt, Maimonides had no status, no wealth,
and no connections. Nevertheless, his hard work and brilliant mind
soon made him a leader of the Egyptian Jewish community. He became a famous scientist and was the Egyptian Pharaoh’s personal physician. He wrote the first systematic exposition of Jewish law in his
Mishneh Torah, discussed the philosophical basis of Judaism in The
Guide of the Perplexed, and wrote other treatises on logic, astronomy
and medicine.
Of course, to do all that required more than just intellectual brilliance. He had to be a diplomat and a strategist. From childhood experience, he knew that beliefs could have deadly results and could tear
society apart. From the contrast between tolerant Andalusia, various
North African countries, and Egypt, he could see the ways in which
belief either united or divided people.
Could he reconcile his lived experience with what Aristotle told
him about belief?
Not very well, it turns out, but somewhat better than Saadia.
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How Maimonides defined belief
In Chapter 50 of The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides clearly supports the mental-state view of belief:
“Belief is the affirmation that what has been represented is outside
the mind just as it has been represented in the mind.”
In other words, to have a belief is to represent in the mind a fact
outside the mind: to affirm it in a mental act. If the representation corresponds to the fact, the belief is true; otherwise, the belief is false.
That implies two crucial points:
•
We can only have beliefs about things we understand or have
experienced. If we cannot understand or have not experienced something, then we can’t form a mental representation
of it and can’t have beliefs about it.
•
A true belief must have an object outside the mind that is “just
as it has been represented in the mind.”
Beliefs required by Judaism
Apart from The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides is best known in
Jewish circles for his list of 13 principles that he says are essential to
the Jewish faith. In Chapter 10 of Helek: Sanhedrin, he wrote that Jews
must believe:
•
First principle: “In the existence of the Creator.”
•
Second principle: “That God is one, the cause of all oneness.”
•
Third principle: “That He is incorporeal.”
•
Fourth principle: “That the One (i.e., God) is absolutely eternal.”
•
Fifth principle: “[That only God] is rightfully worshipped,
magnified, and obeyed.”
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•
Sixth principle: That there are “certain people so gifted and
perfected that they can receive pure intellectual form … These
men are the prophets; this is what prophecy is.”
•
Seventh principle: “[That Moses] was the chief of all other
prophets before and after him, all of whom were his inferiors.”
•
Eighth principle: That “the whole Torah was given [to] us
through Moses entirely from God ... it came to us through Moses who acted like a secretary taking dictation. ... The authoritative commentary on the Torah [by the rabbis] is also the
Word of God.”
•
Ninth principle: “That this Torah was precisely transcribed
from God and no one else.”
•
Tenth principle: “That God knows all that men do and never
turns His eyes away from them.”
•
Eleventh principle: “That God rewards those who perform
the commandments of the Torah and punishes those who
transgress its admonitions.”
•
Twelfth principle: “That the Messiah will come.”
•
Thirteenth principle: “That the dead will be resurrected.”
Impossible beliefs and other problems
However, according to Maimonides’s definition of belief, some beliefs
on his list are impossible to hold. As for the beliefs that aren’t impossible, he either asserted them without believing them himself, or he
reinterpreted them in ways that most people wouldn’t recognize. The
beliefs on his list fall into three groups:
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•
Impossible beliefs: Principles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, and 11.
All those beliefs refer to God, of whom we cannot form a
mental representation.
•
Reinterpreted beliefs: Principles 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, and 11
Maimonides reinterpreted those beliefs to make them philosophically acceptable. However, he kept the traditional wording because he thought that most people were better off with
simple beliefs even if incorrect. He agreed with the Islamic
philosopher Averroes, who wrote in On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy that for such beliefs, “the duty of the elite
is to interpret them allegorically, while the duty of the masses
is to take them in their apparent meaning.”
•
Unproblematic beliefs: Principles 7, 12, and 13.
We can hold these beliefs without reinterpretation.
Maimonides thought that most people couldn’t understand the
impossible beliefs at all. Even the most gifted people could only understand them by reinterpreting them philosophically or stating them
in negative terms: they couldn’t know what God is, but they could
know what He isn’t.
Likewise, he thought that prophecy was completely different
from how most people understood it. He knew perfectly well that the
text of the Torah had changed over the centuries, contrary to the belief required by his eighth principle.
He thought that Divine reward and punishment operated by natural law. God didn’t intervene in the world to reward the virtuous and
punish the wicked. Instead, He set up natural law so that good actions
usually succeed (rewards) and evil actions usually fail (punishments).
Just as in the case of prophecy, his view was completely different from
what most people believed.
Maimonides deliberately obscured his views on these issues because he knew that stating them clearly would upset the community
and confuse most people. In The Guide, he wrote that:
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“My purpose is that the truths be glimpsed and then again be concealed, so as not to oppose that divine purpose which one cannot
possibly oppose and which has concealed from the vulgar among
the people those truths especially requisite for His apprehension.”
Let’s look at each of these points.
God is incomprehensible
According to Maimonides, God is mostly incomprehensible even to
the most intelligent and educated individuals. God is entirely incomprehensible to most people, whom he characterized in The Guide (Part
II, Ch. 36) as “like domestic animals or like beasts of prey.”
In the Introduction to The Guide, Maimonides writes that:
“You should not think that these great secrets are fully and completely known to anyone among us. They are not.”
Among those secrets is the nature of God, about whom we can
know nothing positive. In Book I, Ch. 56, he writes:
“Those who believe there are essential attributes that may be predicated of the Creator — namely, that He is existent, living, possessing power, knowing, and willing —to understand that these
notions are not ascribed to Him and to us in the same sense.”
In what sense, then, are they ascribed to God? Not in any sense we
know about:
"His essential attributes, may He be exalted, in the existence of
which they believe, must not be like the attributes of other beings ...
Similarly the terms 'knowledge,' 'power,' 'will,' and 'life,' as applied
to Him, may He be exalted, and to all those possessing knowledge,
power, will, and life, are purely equivocal, so that their meaning
when they are predicated of Him is in no way like their meaning in
other applications.”
By Maimonides’s definition of belief as “the affirmation that what
has been represented is outside the mind just as it has been represented in the mind,” belief requires that we create a mental representation of our belief’s object, which we can’t do much in the case of
God. For a belief to be true, its object must be “just as it is represented”
in our minds, which he thinks we can’t do at all in the case of God.
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Those problems put him squarely into the same difficulties as Saadia
and, in our time, Alvin Plantinga.
Maimonides managed to avoid the trap that later ensnared the
great Christian theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas wrote (in
his Summa Theologica under “The Names of God”) that our knowledge
of God’s attributes was analogical: for example, our mind is to human
nature as God’s mind is to God’s nature.
It might make a good SAT question to spot the error in that argument. We can use analogical reasoning to infer what a donkey’s mind
is like because we know what a donkey’s nature is like: The human
mind is to humans as the donkey mind is to donkeys. But we don’t
know God’s nature, so the analogy is uninformative in His case.
Having avoided analogical fallacy, Maimonides fell into what psychiatrists call “word salad:”
“He exists, but not through an existence other than His essence;
and similarly He lives, but not through life; He is powerful, but not
through power; He knows, but not through knowledge.”
Centuries later, Spinoza (discussed in the next chapter) used similar language about God, but defined it differently. For the most part,
Spinoza would have dismissed Maimonides’s text here as nonsense. A
more generous interpretation would say that it is mysticism. There’s
some basis for the latter view, because Maimonides said outright that
the words don’t mean anything with which we are familiar:
[The attributes of God] "cannot be considered through the instrumentality of the customary words, which are the greatest among
the causes leading unto error. For the bounds of expression in all
languages are very narrow indeed ...”
One might as well say that God is the Saturday ice cream cone of the
amusement park; it would be just as literally meaningful as “He lives
but not through life.”
But why say it, then? Why talk about God if we can’t mentally understand what we are talking about? I would argue that Maimonides
knew at a gut level that the words themselves were part of what made
the belief important. The words and the behavior that goes with them
are part of what holds the community together and gives people
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strength to survive. In addition, the words can -- unverifiably, but still
can -- point to truths beyond our understanding. We’ll look at that
issue in Chapter 12.
Prophecy isn’t what you think it is
Maimonides said at the outset of The Guide that he intended to conceal
and obscure some of his ideas, and his discussion of prophecy keeps
that promise. Like Aristotle, Maimonides saw the world as governed
by natural law that left little room for Divine interventions, whether
they were miracles like the parting of the Red Sea or less cinematic
events like individual prophecy.
In his introduction to Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), he says
that God’s will applies to nature in general, not to specific things:
"The rabbis avoided referring to the Divine Will as determining a
particular event at a particular time. When they said that man rises
and sits down in accordance with the will of God, their meaning
was that, when man was first created, his nature was so determined
that rising up and sitting clown were to be optional to him; but they
did not mean that God wills at any special moment that man should
or should not get up, as He determines at any given time that a certain stone should or should not fall to the ground.”
In other words, God’s will equals natural law.
For Maimonides, prophecy neither included nor required any supernatural component. It required study, reflection, and focus on the
relevant issues. It also required imagination, which he called a faculty
for “retaining things perceived by the senses, combining these things,
and imitating them.” It requires not only physical health, but intellectual preparation. In Part II, Chapter 36 of The Guide, he writes:
“That individual would obtain knowledge and wisdom … [and] all
his desires will be directed to acquiring the science of the secrets of
what exists and knowledge of its causes.”
It’s interesting to compare Maimonides’s description of prophecy
with a similar account from Bertrand Russell, the 20th-century British
philosopher, two-time Nobel laureate, and religious skeptic. In describing how he analyzed philosophical problems, Russell wrote:
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"After first contemplating a book on some subject, and after giving
serious preliminary attention to it, I needed a period of subconscious incubation ... Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my subconsciousness, it would
germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with
blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what had
appeared as if in a revelation.” (“How I Write”)
As a lifelong atheist, Russell would have been astonished to learn
that he was a prophet, at least according to Maimonides’s definition.
The point here is not that Maimonides was ahead of his time, even
though -- just like Saadia -- he was. The point is that he said the same
words about prophecy as other Jews, but defined those words in much
different ways. He could honestly say that he believed in prophecy,
but what he believed about it was wildly unusual and unorthodox. He
found the ordinary meaning of the belief unacceptable, so he kept the
words of the belief but redefined it as meaning something else. That
strategy has been used countless times over the centuries as scientific
beliefs, morals, and society have changed.
One question remains: In what sense can he have thought that he
and other Jews believed in the same principle about prophecy?
He knew that they all used the same words and behaviors in public statements about prophecy. Their mental beliefs might have been
completely different, but their words and behaviors were the same.
To borrow a phrase he used in a different way, the public “external
meaning” of the principle was the same, even if everyone had a different private interpretation. The latter had no effect on the community.
It was the public meaning that promoted cooperation and social peace.
The Torah’s text has changed
Modern archaeology, historical research, and textual analysis has convinced most academic Biblical scholars of three things:
• The text of the Torah was assembled by ancient editors (redactors) from various source documents, the most important
of which are called J, P, D, and E. Most of the work was completed by the 6th century BCE. Scholars disagree about
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details, but agree about the broad outlines of the theory, called
"the documentary hypothesis."
•
Many stories in the Torah are similar to earlier stories from
other cultures of the Ancient Near East, suggesting common
human origins of the text. For example, the story of the flood
in Genesis 6-8 corresponds point-by-point to the flood story
in the Sumerian “Gilgamesh” epic, and even uses some phrasing from Gilgamesh that appears nowhere else in the Bible.
•
In the 10th century CE, Jewish scholars called the Masoretes
produced a standardized text of the Torah from different versions that had been in circulation.
Maimonides knew about the Masoretes’ work to standardize the
Torah’s text. He probably also knew about the similarities between
the Torah and other ancient writings. Even so, he argued that a belief
in the Torah’s Divine origin and unchanged text were essential for
faithful Jews.
Why? For the same reason he was willing to say the same words
about prophecy as other members of the community. No matter how
people interpreted the beliefs as individuals, their shared verbal affirmation of the beliefs promoted cooperation and social peace.
Providence is natural law in action
Maimonides analyzed providence in much the same way as he analyzed prophecy. It's described in his faith principle 11:
“God rewards those who perform the commandments of the Torah
and punishes those who transgress its admonitions. The greatest
reward is the world to come; the worst punishment is extinction.”
Divine providence distributes the rewards and punishments, but
it does so through the operation of natural law. If you understand natural law and live consistently with it, you’ll be more likely to succeed
and be rewarded. If you don’t understand it, or try to ignore it, then
you’ll be more likely to fail and be punished. In Part III, Chapter 17 of
The Guide, he writes:
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“Providence is consequent upon the intellect and attached to it …
[each person] will be reached by providence to the extent to which
he is reached by the intellect.”
Maimonides saw providence as a kind of wisdom that we can acquire by studying natural law. It enables us to see life and the world
clearly, and to plan our actions rationally. It doesn’t exempt us from
the hazards of chance or the infirmities of age, but it helps us live
wisely, justly, and serenely. Maimonides almost sounds like the Stoic
philosopher Marcus Aurelius: Act rationally, accept what you can't control, and don't get upset about it.
Once again, we see Maimonides saying the right words: “God rewards those who keep the commandments and punishes those who
don’t.” He was also an observant Jew, so he acted according to those
words. But his own interpretation of faith principle 11 was far from
anything believed or even comprehended by the vast majority of people, then or now. Recall how he stated faith principle 11:
“That God rewards those who perform the commandments of the
Torah and punishes those who transgress its admonitions.”
Maimonides was no egalitarian. He thought that most people were
at least ignorant (a realistic assumption in his era) and probably also
unintelligent: “like domestic animals or beasts of prey.” He expected
them to interpret the belief anthropomorphically, as referring to “a
man in the sky”7 who would punish them if they disobeyed Him. But
his own interpretation of the belief was far different: That understanding natural law enabled people to live more successfully, and ignoring
it caused them hardship.
For him, the beliefs that mattered were those embodied in words
and behavior -- even though that attitude was inconsistent with his
own theory of belief.
7
That’s how God is described in the 2009 comedy movie, “The Invention of Lying.” I
disagree with the movie’s assumptions, but it’s thoughtful and entertaining.
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Metaphor in the Torah
Maimonides followed the same strategy in dealing with problematic
passages in the Torah. For example, in Chapter 1 of his Mishneh Torah,
he writes in 1:8 that God does not have a physical body. Therefore, in
1:9, he argues that the Bible is engaging in metaphor when it refers to
God’s physical body:
“What is the meaning of the following expressions found in the Torah: "Beneath His Feet" (Ex. 24:10); "Written with the finger of
God (ibid. 31:18); "The hand of God" (ibid. 9:3); "The eyes of God"
(Gen. 38:7) "The ears of God" (Num. 11:1); and similar phrases?
All these expressions are adapted to the mental capacity of the majority of mankind who have a clear perception of physical bodies
only. The Torah speaks in the language of men. All these phrases
arc metaphorical, like the sentence "If I whet my glittering sword"
(Deut. 32:41). Has God then a sword and does He slay with a
sword? The term is used allegorically and all these phrases are to be
understood in a similar sense.”
Maimonides wants to keep the words of the Torah but change
their meaning to something that is more philosophically defensible.
Once again, we see his operating principle: it’s not what we believe
mentally that matters, but what we say and do: our behavior.
Beliefs can be necessary even if they’re not true
Maimonides’s actual practice showed the emphasis he placed on verbal and behavioral beliefs, even if his theory had no place for that kind
of belief. A clue is that when he talked about beliefs, he usually referred to what people “say” rather than to what they believe mentally.
Only what they say and how they behave affect the community. What
they believe privately has no impact as long as they don’t act on it or
talk about it.
In Part III, Ch. 28 of The Guide, he distinguished between necessary beliefs and true beliefs. He still thought of necessary beliefs as
mental beliefs, but they might not be true and they might not be justified by logic and evidence. Their justification was mainly practical:
"The Law also makes a call to adopt certain beliefs, belief in which
is necessary for the sake of political welfare. Such, for instance, is
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our belief that He, may He be exalted, is violently angry with those
who disobey Him and that it is therefore necessary to fear Him and
to dread Him and to take care not to disobey.”
Maimonides’s attitude is an example of what I call “this is our
story and we’re sticking to it.” When radio comedian Jack Benny insisted against all evidence that he was 39 years old, his audience went
along with the joke. Interviewed on the radio in 1951, Benny said that
he had been born in 1912, making him 39 years old. He then admitted
that he had been drafted into the U.S. military in 1917. When the interviewer asked how he could have been drafted when he was five
years old, he replied “I had a tough draft board, and shut up!” Everyone laughed.
For Maimonides, insisting on the truth of the Jewish tradition was
no laughing matter because the welfare and survival of his own people
were at stake. He wanted to give an account of Jewish beliefs that intelligent, educated people could accept in good faith, but that simpler
people could follow without crippling doubts. That’s what he tried to
do. If moral health and social survival depended on a few logically dubious but “necessary” beliefs, he wasn’t going to quibble about their
logic. In life, he’d seen both the good and the harm that beliefs could
do. He wanted to promote beliefs that supported the good, regardless
of the evidence or lack of it.
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Chapter 5:
Why Spinoza Could
Believe -- But Didn't
“A true idea must agree with that of which it is the idea.”
-- Spinoza
IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, we saw how both Saadia and Maimonides
behaved inconsistently with their own definitions of belief. From
their life experience, they knew that beliefs did other jobs besides just
making assertions. However, they both wanted to say the right words,
regardless of how they privately re-interpreted those words. They
were both members in good standing of the community and wanted
to keep it that way.
Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) didn’t care about saying the right
words. On the contrary, he often seemed to go out of his way to say
the wrong words. His Biblical interpretations feigned sincerity but
dripped with obvious sarcasm at what he considered harmful superstition. Some of his unorthodox beliefs are like those of Maimonides.
But unlike Maimonides, he didn’t try to conceal his beliefs.
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Spinoza’s religious motivation
Even the most scrupulous thinkers have non-intellectual motives that
affect their beliefs, and Spinoza was no exception.
Born in Amsterdam to a middle-class Jewish family in 1632, he
grew up in a tolerant Dutch society that unofficially appreciated its
Jewish residents. He went to synagogue and at least outwardly observed Jewish law. His intellectual curiosity, however, led him outside
the Jewish community to study the ideas of French polymath Rene
Descartes and other philosophers. He became widely known as an expert on Descartes.
Then, for reasons that even now remain uncertain, the leaders of
his synagogue condemned and excommunicated Spinoza from the
Jewish community:
“… having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de
Spinoza, they have endeavored by various means and promises, to
turn him from his evil ways. But having failed to make him mend
his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and
more serious information about the abominable heresies which he
practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds … they have
decided … that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and
expelled from the people of Israel. By decree of the angels and by
the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse, and
damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He
...”
That’s pretty intense stuff. What could have prompted it, since Spinoza was at that time still observing the law and participating in the
community?
It appears that Spinoza fell into a trap that later ensnared the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, though the results for
Mendelssohn were only embarrassing instead of catastrophic.
In a private conversation, two students begged Spinoza to tell
them his real beliefs. They swore to keep his remarks private, so he
told them what he really thought: that he found nothing in the Bible
about God being incorporeal (having no physical body) or about the
human soul being immortal. The students then broke their promise
and told the Jewish leadership what Spinoza had said. Apart from
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being condemned for believing what he considered the truth, he must
have felt very bitter about the students’ betrayal of his trust.
That incident pushed him away from the Jewish community. But
he was also finding his way toward something that he highly valued.
Spinoza’s rationalism was based in a kind of religious fervor. He
sounds at times like a person who had a religious conversion experience and "got saved.” However, he found salvation not in the worship
of God, but in the worship of reason.
In his semi-autobiographical Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, he wrote of his disillusionment and redemption:
"After experience had taught me that all the things which regularly
occur in ordinary life are empty and futile ... I resolved at last to try
to find out if there was anything which would be the true good ... if
there was something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy for eternity ... I would be giving up
certain evils for a certain good.”
Can I get a “hallelujah”?
Spinoza’s worship of reason, and the fact that he saw it as something that “would give him the greatest joy for eternity,” accounts for
some of the aggressiveness with which he attacked the Jewish tradition. He was a true believer, just as much as the most dogmatic of his
critics – even though his faith was in reason and philosophy instead
of traditional religion.
Spinoza’s concept of belief
Spinoza never tells us explicitly how he defines belief. We have to
construct a definition from his comments on other things. With Saadia
and Maimonides, we could quote their definitions of belief and then
compare them to their statements about God. We can’t do that with
Spinoza.
The short version is that for Spinoza, to believe something about
X is to have an idea of X. But it was as clear to him as it had been to
Maimonides that we could not form an idea of a God who was both
transcendent and incomprehensible. If Spinoza was going to have
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beliefs about God, he thought that it had to be a God he could understand.
A little background information will help. Any philosophy about
the world has to explain how:
• There are physical things with certain kinds of properties:
place, weight, shape, color, spatial relationships, and so on.
•
There are mental things with properties different from those
of physical objects: feeling, intensity, reference, logical relationships, and so on.
•
The two kinds of things interact somehow, or at least they
seem to interact.
Spinoza’s concept of God
Spinoza argued that thought (mental reality) and extension (physical
reality) were the same thing, simply looked at in different ways. In his
Ethics, Part II, Proposition 7, he wrote:
“Thinking substance [consciousness] and extended substance
[matter] are one and the same substance, comprehended now under this attribute, now under that. So, too, a mode of Extension and
the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, expressed in two
ways.”
The 20th-century name for Spinoza’s doctrine is “neutral monism.” On Spinoza’s account, the idea of a thing is just a different way
of looking at the thing, while the thing itself is just a different way of
looking at the idea. Therefore, ideas and their relationships exactly
parallel things and their relationships. Ideas are part of the conscious
order, while things are part of the extended (in space) physical order.
The orders are the same thing, but viewed from different perspectives, as shown in the figure on the next page.
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By the way, you might recall that as an example of something unimaginable, the previous chapter listed “something that had color but
took up no space.” If you ever hear the same example in a philosophy
class, the professor will say that the thing is “colored but not extended.” That comes from Spinoza’s distinction between the conscious order (ideas) and the extended order (space).
Through a complicated series of arguments in his Ethics, Part I,
Spinoza decides that only one “substance” exists:
"By substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived
through itself; that is, that the conception of which does not require
the conception of another thing from which it has to be formed.”
The one substance exists necessarily, so it’s impossible for it not
to exist. It’s infinite. And it causes itself. Everything else – stars, planets, buildings, horses, you, me, bad music, etc. – is part of that one
infinite, self-causing substance.
Think about that: It exists necessarily, is infinite, causes itself, and
causes everything else. You don’t need Google Maps to see where he’s
going with this:
“God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which
expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists,”
On Spinoza’s account, the only thing that qualifies as a substance
is God. Everything else might or might not exist, is caused by something else, and is finite in space and time.
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“Wait … God is what?!”
Spinoza thinks that God is the universe. If you are a conventionally-minded rabbi in 17th-century Amsterdam, you just had what used
to be called “a conniption fit.”
God in idea and belief
Now, we finally get to how Spinoza applies that concept to belief in
God.
For Spinoza, as noted earlier, to believe something about a thing
is to have an idea of the thing. To have an idea of it is to know its
principal attribute and its cause.
Its principal attribute is either thought (mental) or extension
(physical). He believed that there were an infinite number of other
attributes, but that we only knew about thought and extension. The
ultimate cause of any finite thing is God, but it can also have more
immediate and down-to-earth causes. In his usual turgid prose, Spinoza explains (Ethics, Part II, Proposition 9):
“The idea of an individual thing existing in actuality has God for its
cause not in so far as he is infinite but in so far as he is considered
as affected by another idea of a thing existing in actuality, of which
God is the cause in so far as he is affected by a third idea, and so ad
infinitum.”
In other words, if a horse exists, the ultimate cause is God. But the
more immediate cause is that the horse was born to a mother horse,
whose ultimate cause is also God. Complete and perfect knowledge of
the horse would require complete and perfect knowledge of its ultimate cause.
For Spinoza, an idea is not just an image: it always asserts something. If you have an idea of a horse, then at the very least, it includes
the implied assertion that “this is a horse.”
To get a more complete idea of the horse, you might know part of
its cause: that it was born to a female horse that’s its mother. The more
you learn about its cause (actually, the many things that jointly cause
it) the better you understand the horse. The more you understand
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about the horse, the more “adequate” your belief is (Ethics, Part I, Axiom 4):
“The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the
knowledge of the cause.”
This means that having a belief is not an either/or situation. It’s
not a situation where you either have a belief or you don’t. For Spinoza, there are degrees of belief and knowledge, based on the adequacy of your ideas. Only God, which is infinite, has perfect ideas and
completely true knowledge. Of course, in Spinoza’s view, we
shouldn’t say that God “has” ideas. God includes ideas, with each idea
corresponding to a parallel extended fact in the natural universe.
And here’s the most important point: Everything that exists is included in God, so the more you learn about the natural universe, the
more adequately you can form an idea of God (Ethics, Part I, Proposition 15):
“Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without
God.”
And when you form an idea of God, even an inadequate idea, then
you believe in God as Spinoza defines God.
That’s a God Spinoza could believe in: what he called deus sive
natura, the physical universe with its parallel system of ideas. We can
understand it only very imperfectly, but we can understand it.
What Spinoza believed
So Spinoza did believe in God after all, but it was his own version of
God as a rationally comprehensible being. What he didn’t believe in
was:
•
A transcendent and incomprehensible God: “Whether
therefore we say that all things happen according to the laws
of nature, or are ordained by the edict and direction of God,
we are saying the same thing.”
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•
A God that chose the Jewish people: “On this issue then we
can accept no difference between Jews and Gentiles; and
therefore there is no election which is unique to the Jews ...”
•
A God who dictated the Torah to Moses: “To interpret Scripture, we need to assemble a genuine history of it and deduce
the thinking of the Bible’s authors by valid inferences from
this history.”
Notice one final point: Spinoza did the same thing as Maimonides.
For philosophical reasons, he could not accept the plain and simple
interpretations of the beliefs. He redefined the beliefs in ways that
made them rationally acceptable to him.
The big difference between Maimonides and Spinoza was that
Maimonides still gave vigorous public support to the beliefs, concealing the fact that they meant something different to him. Spinoza didn’t
care about that. His people had already judged, maligned, and rejected
him. He felt no need to conceal anything.
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Chapter 6:
Why Mendelssohn
Changed the Subject
“Well done is better than well said.”
-- Benjamin Franklin
IF SPINOZA WAS ONE OF THE FATHERS of the 17th-century enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) was one of its most influential
children. He was a famous political philosopher as well as father of the
18th-century Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah) that reconciled Judaism with secular philosophy and non-Jewish society. As a bonus, he
was the grandfather of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), who -- in a
life that was brief even by 19th-century standards -- composed some
of the most beautiful classical music of that period.
The Socrates of Berlin
After he became famous, Mendelssohn was known as “the Socrates of
Berlin” -- a nickname that put him on a pedestal with the ancient
Greek philosopher who taught Plato. Growing up, however, he had
never heard of Socrates, didn’t live in Berlin, and didn’t even speak
German.
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Born in the small town of Dessau, Mendelssohn started studying
Torah and Talmud at the age of six. By 11, he had memorized the Torah and taught himself Hebrew grammar. That won him a place studying with Rabbi David Fränkel, an eminent scholar whom he followed
to Berlin at age 14 in 1743.
Berlin was a turning point. There, he studied Jewish philosophers
including Maimonides and Judah Halevi. He taught himself German,
Latin, Greek, French, and English, thereby gaining access to non-Jewish literature and the wider non-Jewish world. In 1753, he formed a
lifelong friendship with Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781), a Christian
who shared his intellectual interests. Together, they studied Spinoza
and jointly published a book about him.
In 1763, Mendelssohn’s essay on reason in religion won first prize
from the Berlin Academy, beating the second-place essay by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who was one of the most influential philosophers of all time. Mendelssohn’s other work and his superb German
writing style established him in non-Jewish society as a popular and
respected thinker. At the same time, he remained religiously observant, making the Jewish tradition and the Jewish people the touchstones of his life.
He was both “the Socrates of Berlin” to the Christian intellectual
world and a revered leader to the religious world of the Jews.
The Lavater affair
Sooner or later, those two identities had to come into conflict.
The first such conflict was “the Lavater Affair.” Johann Lavater, a
Swiss deacon, visited Mendelssohn in 1768 to discuss his ideas about
reason and religion. Promising to keep the remarks confidential, he
pressed Mendelssohn to reveal his opinion of Jesus. Eventually, Mendelssohn gave in to Lavater’s entreaties and said that he respected Jesus as a moral teacher -- adding the reservation that his respect
depended on Jesus not believing he was God.
Lavater, on the other hand, believed that Christianity was the only
rational and true religion. He also believed that Mendelssohn was a
brilliant thinker of high integrity. However, Lavater knew nothing
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about the intellectual foundations of Judaism. He could not understand why a smart man like Mendelssohn was not a Christian.
In 1769, he translated a book of Christian apologetics into German
and dedicated it to Mendelssohn. The book argued that Jesus’ miracles
proved the truth of Christianity. In the dedication, he challenged Mendelssohn either to refute the book’s arguments or convert to Christianity.
That put Mendelssohn in a terrible spot.
He agreed with Maimonides that many Bible passages were metaphorical. He shared Spinoza’s skepticism about traditional beliefs.
But he was also a leader of the Jewish community. He knew that
stating his doubts plainly and publicly would at best alienate most
Jews, and might cause far worse results. Some Jews might lose their
faith. It might damage the community and hurt the bonds of loyalty
that had enabled Jews to survive disasters and challenges over the millennia. And he knew he might end up like Spinoza, excommunicated
and cast out by his own people.
At the same time, his doubts about Jewish belief applied equally
to Christianity. He had no desire to antagonize the Christian majority
by arguing against their religion. Jews were tolerated and increasingly
accepted, of which Mendelssohn himself was an example. He didn’t
want to ruin that. He thought that he had to respond, lest his silence
be interpreted as agreement with Lavater’s point. But he had to be
very careful.
Mendelssohn replied to Lavater with an open letter he published
in 1769. The letter shows Mendelssohn at his most tactful, answering
Lavater’s challenge by changing the subject. It was a maneuver that he
would use later, and more ambitiously, in his book Jerusalem.
He opened by undermining Lavater’s moral standing to make a
public challenge, pointing out -- ever so politely -- that Lavater had
both betrayed Mendelssohn’s confidence:
“You cannot have possibly forgotten … how much you and your
friends had to press me before I dared to express my convictions on
a subject that is so important to the heart. If I am not mistaken, assurances were offered in advance that no public mention should
ever be made of the words that would emerge on this occasion. I
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prefer to be mistaken, however, than to blame you for breaking this
promise.”
and that Lavater had misrepresented his position:
“And my great respect for the moral character of its founder [Jesus]? Had you not been silent about the condition that I explicitly
added, I would have been able to concede it now.”
Mendelssohn added that he hadn’t just recently started thinking
about religion, but had thought about it for many years. He had thoroughly investigated his own faith and satisfied himself of its truth. At
this point, he deployed his two most characteristic tactics for avoiding
arguments:
•
He changed the subject, subtly misdirecting the readers to a
peripheral issue so that he could avoid arguing against ideas
that he thought it would be impolitic to dispute.
•
He used literary style and flowery rhetoric to obscure the
change of subject.
After explaining at some length (using verbosity to distract his
readers) that Judaism does not seek to convert people from other religions, he got to the real bottom line:
“My religion, my philosophy, and my rank in civil life furnish me
with the most important reasons for avoiding all religious disputes
and for speaking in my public writings only of those truths that
must be equally important to all religions.”
Most interesting, however, was Mendelssohn’s justification for his
reticence.
As a Jew, he believed that key tenets of Christianity were incorrect. But he also believed that incorrect beliefs could have good consequences for moral behavior and social tolerance. In such cases, he
argued, it is wrong to attack such beliefs unless people will accept alternatives that are both true and equally beneficial:
“Whoever cares more for the welfare of mankind than for his own
renown will keep a rein on his opinions concerning prejudices of
this sort … in order not to overturn what he deems a suspicious ethical principle before his fellow men have accepted the true one that
he wants to put in its place.”
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And even in the face of what he thinks is religious error:
“I am obliged to remain silent if these errors ... are accidentally connected to the promotion of the good.”
In other words, Mendelssohn believed that:
• Erroneous beliefs can have good consequences.
•
If they do, then we should not argue against them unless we
offer replacement beliefs that (a) are true, (b) are at least
equally helpful, and (c) the believers will accept.
Mendelssohn’s concept of belief
Mendelssohn does not give us an explicit definition of belief, but his
other comments make it clear that he thinks of beliefs as mental acts,
and that behavior -- though important -- is not a form of belief.
Menasseh ben Israel’s 1656 book Vindication of the Jews had been
published in England to argue that Jews should have full civil rights in
British society. In 1782, Marcus Herz translated it from English into
German. Mendelssohn wrote a preface for it. In that preface, he both
alluded to his concept of belief and gave a preview of his main argument in his later and more famous work, Jerusalem.
In the preface, he distinguished between belief and behavior:
“Through contracts, we can obligate ourselves not to allow certain
voluntary actions to depend on our own judgment or opinion, but
rather to subject them to another’s opinion and thus to renounce
our own judgment to the extent that it carries over into our actions
… But our judgment itself is an inseparable, immovable, and therefore inalienable possession. Everything depends on this distinction.”
And:
“Renouncing opinion as it concerns action is one thing. Renouncing
opinion itself is another. Action is immediately situated within our
power of choice. Opinion is not.”
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Mendelssohn’s “search for light and right”
Distinguishing between belief and behavior was fine. However, his
preface to Vindication of the Jews made another statement that got him
into deep trouble even if it seemed harmless.
Mendelssohn had said that we control only our actions, not our
opinions. But then he argued that while secular governments could
banish people from the country, religious organizations had no such
authority:
“It seems to me that every society possesses the right of expulsion
except for an ecclesiastical society, for it is diametrically opposed to
the ecclesiastical society’s ultimate goal, which is collective edification and participation in the outpouring of the heart through which
we show our thanks for God’s beneficence."
His statement denied that religious organizations had the authority to excommunicate members of the faith -- the punishment imposed so unfairly on Spinoza.
That statement caught the attention of journalist August Cranz
(1737-1801), who anonymously wrote “The Search for Light and
Right.” Like Lavater, he challenged Mendelssohn to renounce Judaism
– but for different reasons this time.
Cranz sympathized with Mendelssohn’s earlier treatment by Lavater, who had betrayed his confidence:
“People were satisfied with your response [to Lavater] because they
were dissatisfied with Lavater and felt that he had treated you unfairly by publicly embarrassing you. This time the case is different.
You have now publicly provided a major reason for people to rightly
expect and even demand fuller explanations from you.”
And what must Mendelssohn explain? How he can remain a Jew
while denying a central belief of Judaism:
“In your remarkable preface, you … rob the synagogue of its foremost power, by denying it the right of excommunicating from the
congregation of the holy those who deviate from the faith of your
fathers … Perhaps you have now come closer to the Christian faith
by throwing off the servitude of the iron bonds of the [Jewish]
church and henceforth teaching the system of freedom of rational
divine service.”
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Like Lavater, Cranz saw enlightened Christianity as rational and
Judaism as blind faith. But he also had a good point: Judaism had traditionally believed certain things, including the right of excommunication. Mendelssohn had publicly denied that belief. How could he
possibly extricate himself this time and remain a Jew?
Mendelssohn took a bold and unexpected step. He responded to
Cranz in Part II of his book Jerusalem, where Mendelssohn denied that
Judaism required any beliefs at all:
“Judaism knows of no revealed religion in the sense in which Christians understand this term. The Israelites possess a divine legislation—laws, commandments, ordinances, rules of life, instruction in
the will of God as to how they should conduct themselves in order
to attain temporal and eternal felicity. Moses revealed to them
propositions and prescriptions of this kind in a miraculous and supernatural manner, but no doctrinal opinions, no saving truths, no
universal propositions of reason.”
As for doctrines and universal truths, those are revealed to Jews
in the same way as they are revealed to everyone else: by experience
and by the natural light of reason:
“These the Eternal reveals to us and to all other men, at all times,
through nature and thing, but never through word and script.”
In other words, he says that Judaism doesn’t care what you believe,
as long as you behave in obedience to the commandments.
Mendelssohn’s reply is, of course, nonsense. Obeying the commandments makes no sense unless one believes that they were ordained by God -- and indeed, that God communicated them to Moses,
as Mendelssohn said. And since the commandments are mostly defined in rabbinic commentaries on the Torah -- the so-called “Oral Torah” -- it makes no sense to obey them unless one also believes that
God communicated the Oral Torah to Moses, who in turn gave it to
the rabbis who wrote the commentaries.
But the point is that Mendelssohn came back to what we have previously argued is a form of belief: verbal and non-verbal behavior. The
behaviors he prescribes make no sense except as expressions or embodiments of traditional Jewish beliefs. Whether one mentally
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believes them or not, acting in accordance with those beliefs is what
Mendelssohn says constitutes the Jewish religion.
Notice something astonishing about Mendelssohn’s position: It
entirely ignores the assertive function of beliefs, and focuses on the
value from the behavioral and social functions of belief. He had a mental-act view of belief, so he couldn’t explain it, but he certainly knew
about the other functions.
Mendelssohn’s key conflict
Mendelssohn’s life and work were shaped by two conflicts, one intellectual and the other social:
• Intellectually, he knew and cherished the Jewish tradition as
his cultural and religious heritage. But he also knew science
and Enlightenment rationalism, including Spinoza and Leibniz, and he was convinced of their truth.
•
Socially, he was loyal to his people and to his community. He
wanted to protect their rights and promote their welfare. He
was accepted and even celebrated by non-Jewish society. He
wanted all Jews to enjoy the same acceptance as he did.
Mendelssohn resolved the conflict by focusing on verbal and nonverbal behaviors. It was those behaviors that united the Jewish community, inspired it, and strengthened it to survive and flourish
through one challenge after another. Mental beliefs were private, had
no social impact, and were -- he thought -- beyond our control. They
existed but were not religiously important.
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Chapter 7:
Belief and Biology
"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."
-- Bertrand Russell
BIOLOGY? WHAT DOES BELIEF have to do with biology?
Look in the mirror. What do you see? You are many things: interesting and important things. You might be a lawyer, a student, or one
of three sisters. You might be an American, a Russian, or an Israeli. Or
you might not be any of those things.
But there’s one thing you definitely are: you’re a living being. Biology applies to you. It doesn’t make decisions for you, but it influences the decisions you make. It doesn’t choose your beliefs, but it
influences which beliefs seem natural or repulsive, which beliefs are
helpful or harmful. It also lets you use beliefs to achieve your individual or social goals.
How? Why? That’s the subject of this chapter. In the next chapter,
we'll see how it applies to the social functions of belief.
If your biology biases you in favor of some beliefs and against others, then you might adopt untrue beliefs just because they appeal to
you. Likewise, you might reject true beliefs simply because you instinctively don’t like them. Understanding your biology helps you
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compensate for instinctive biases so you have a better chance of believing true things. Just as important, it helps you understand how religious beliefs and practices can support you in living a good life.
Biblical Biology 101
As soon as people started to think, they started to wonder.
Where does the sun go at night? How did we get here? Why are
some plants and animals good to eat, but others make us feel sick?
For a couple thousand years, people in Europe and thereabouts
thought that life originated as described in the Bible:
“God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures,
and birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky …
And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.’”
-- Genesis 1:20 and 1:27
Of course, the Bible wasn’t the first to tell a story like that. Parts
of the Genesis story are similar to the Babylonian Enuma Elish, as well
as to the stories of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis. Far away from the ancient
Israelites, the Greek writer Hesiod told creation stories in his Theogony. In Southern Africa, the Bushmen told legends of Cagn, who made
the sun, moon, stars, plants, and animals. In India, the Hindus taught
that a being named Parusha was sacrificed to create the world, with
different parts of his body transforming into different parts of the
world and into different groups of people. In China, Huang-lao
brought order out of chaos.
Scholars of religion call all those legends “etiological tales,” because they explain the causes (the etiology) of how the world and human society came to be as they are.
But biology, like history, is written by the victors. Judaism outlasted the older religions in the West, and Christianity adopted Judaism’s account of creation. From ancient times to the 1800s, the Bible
was Western civilization's premier biology textbook. God had created
the world in six days -- or one, depending on which chapter of Genesis
you believed. However long it took, that was when God created the
earth, the plants, and the animals just as they are now. A horse is a
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horse is a horse. It’s never a bird or a tree. It doesn’t change into anything else.
Likewise, the earth itself was only about six thousand years old
and hadn't changed since God created it. The Anglican Bishop James
Ussher (1581-1656) calculated that God had created the universe on
October 23 in 4,004 BCE. Not to be outdone, Dr. Charles Lightfoot at
Cambridge University added that God had created the world
promptly at 9:00am on that date.
Old Certainties Disappear
But as centuries passed, the old certainties seemed increasingly uncertain. The Copernican revolution had knocked the earth off its privileged perch at the center of the universe. Biologists noticed that many
plants and animals looked like each other and had corresponding
parts. For example, the internal anatomy of a human arm is like that
of a dog's legs, a bird's wing, and a whale's fin.
Of course, the Deity might have used the same basic layout to
make a lot of different creatures. It would have been efficient, and
since He had already created the world by 9:00am on October 23, we
know that He was big on efficiency.
But there was another obvious possibility. If Jim and Joe look a lot
alike, we naturally wonder if they're related. What if different species
of plants and animals were related somehow?
Even more puzzling was that embryos of animals had features
found in the embryos of other animals. Human embryos, for example,
have rudimentary gill arches like those in fish embryos. They also
share features with embryos of amphibians and reptiles, as well as
other mammals.
Geologists noticed that the earth seemed a lot older than 6,000
years. In sedimentary rock, layers upon layers had been deposited
over the eons. The lower layers, which were older, had the fossilized
skeletons of animals that no one had ever seen. The higher layers,
which were newer, had fossils that looked more like living creatures.
The closer the layer was to the present, the closer the fossils looked
to the animals around us. By that time, a lot of people doubted the
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accuracy of the Genesis stories, but they weren't sure what the truth
was. So they started thinking about how it all might have happened.
From creation to evolution
Most people today identify the theory of evolution with Charles Darwin (1809-1882). And that’s essentially true, since he was the first to
identify its basic mechanism and collect vast amounts of evidence that
it had happened.
Scientists regard Darwin as something of a patron saint because
he laid the groundwork for much of modern biology. Orthodox religious believers are split about the issue. Some still insist on a literal
reading of the Book of Genesis, though that has its own problems because Genesis has two separate creation stories (1:1-2:3 and 2:4-2:24).
Read literally, they contradict each other.
Orthodox believers who are scientists, such as Francis S. Collins
(geneticist), Owen Gingerich (astronomer), and Gerald Schroeder
(physicist) usually agree with their peers about evolution but add
their own religious gloss on how it occurred. Essentially, they all argue
for the theory of “intelligent design.” On that view, life developed naturally under physical laws, but the physical laws themselves were
“tuned” by a Divine intelligence to facilitate the development of life.
Even though he didn’t know about evolution, Maimonides had a very
similar view of natural law.
Intelligent design is a philosophical story rather than a scientific
story. It accepts the results of physical science, but then offers an explanation of why the results are the way they are. Note that intelligent
design competes not against the scientific story of evolution, which it
accepts, but against a rival philosophical story that says life developed
through random, unguided physical processes. Both stories are about
the explanations of scientific results instead of being about the results
themselves, so they cannot be proven or disproven by looking at scientific results. Like most philosophical stories, they either “make
sense” to you or they don’t. Which story you prefer depends on your
own psychology, assumptions, and experience.
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What Darwin brought that was new
Darwin wasn't the first person to suggest that modern plants and animals developed by evolving from different species.
The best-known of his predecessors was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
(1744-1829) who thought evolution took place by inheritance of acquired characteristics. For example, giraffes evolved long necks because their ancestors kept stretching their necks to eat leaves high in
trees. Over many generations, the stretching caused their necks to
lengthen. Other advocates included Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus,
who was a little vague about how evolution occurred.
Darwin, however, did bring something new to the discussion. He
both assembled vast amounts of evidence that evolution had occurred, and he proposed a verifiable mechanism for how it had happened. It wasn't just armchair theorizing.
Even as a boy, he was an avid naturalist, studying all the animals
and plants around the small English town where he lived. At his father’s insistence, he tried studying medicine but couldn’t stand the
sight of blood. As a second choice, he enrolled in Cambridge University to study for the ministry. That made sense because most famous
British naturalists were ministers. They preached a few sermons,
heard confessions, and had the rest of their time free to peruse the
various forms of plant and animal life in the countryside.
Darwin’s big break came in 1831, when he signed on as a scientific
observer for a British Navy ship that was mapping the coast of South
America. For four years, he studied plants and wildlife of South America, but that was only a warmup for the main event. In the fifth and
last year of the mission, the ship surveyed the Galapagos Islands just
off the South American coast.
The Galapagos Islands had been created by undersea volcanic activity and had never been connected to the mainland. In spite of that,
they were teeming with plants and animals. Some were the same species as Darwin had seen in South America. Others were similar to
those on the mainland but were clearly different species. Some species
were found only on individual islands and on none of the others.
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Selection, natural and otherwise
Obviously, there was something odd going on. If God had created all
plant and animal life at one time, why were there different types of
plants and animals in the fossil record, with newer fossils being more
similar to current species? And why would God create slight variations of the same species of plants and animals on different islands?
Darwin didn't know much about genetics, but he did know how
farmers bred animals. In any population of animals, some have desirable traits and others don't. If you mate animals that have desirable
traits, their offspring are likely to have the traits of their parents. Humans have used that technique for millennia to breed useful varieties
of plants and animals.
The same kind of variation exists in nature. Some animals are bigger, stronger, more resistant to heat or cold, or harder for predators
to see. When those traits increase an animal's chances of surviving to
produce offspring, it has more offspring and they inherit the helpful
traits.
At the same time, if an animal lacks helpful traits or has harmful
traits, it is more likely to die off before producing offspring, or to produce fewer offspring. Its offspring are likely to have the same traits,
so they, too, have fewer offspring.
Therefore, with each new generation, the animal population has a
larger percentage with the helpful traits and a smaller percentage
without them. Over many generations, that two-sided process alters
the population so that animals and plants with helpful traits are most
common, and the ones with unhelpful traits disappear.
That's natural selection, as opposed to the artificial selection used
by animal breeders. Instead of breeders deliberately mating animals
with desired traits and not mating others, nature kills off animals with
undesirable traits because they can't compete with the more advantaged members of the species.
Notice that the emergence of new species is a special case of evolution by natural selection. Most evolution takes place within species,
such as all the wildly different breeds of dogs -- some big, some small,
with different features, personalities, and intelligence. New species
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only come into being when enough small changes accumulate that two
groups descended from a common ancestor can no longer interbreed.
That happens if the groups are geographically isolated from each other
and exposed to different environments that make different traits helpful or unhelpful.
So according to Darwin, that's how evolution occurs: them what's
able, survive; the others die off, either mostly or completely.
The problem of altruism
But there was a problem with Darwin's theory. Many animals -- not
just humans -- exhibit altruistic behavior, where they risk or sacrifice
their own welfare for the benefit of others. The others can be individuals such as family members or all the members of a group. For example:
• A duck that sees a wolf emits a warning cry to the other ducks
in its flock, enabling them to take flight before the wolf can
kill and eat them. But by making a noise, the duck attracts attention to itself, risking its own death for the sake of the flock.
•
Bees protect their hives by stinging predators, but they die
from losing their stingers.
•
Vampire bats (yes, they really exist) regurgitate blood to feed
other hungry bats.
•
Dolphins help injured dolphins and carry them to safety.
•
Whirligig beetles form large groups to skim across the surface
of ponds. Each beetle has a greater risk of dying from a predator's attack, but a greater number of beetles survive.
•
Men routinely fight and die to defend their families, their
faiths, or their countries.
In all of those cases and many others, animals risk or sacrifice
their own welfare for the good of others. As laudable as that sounds,
it doesn't fit Darwin's theory of evolution.
If a tendency to altruistic behavior is genetic, then on Darwin's
theory, it should quickly vanish. Altruistic animals tend to die earlier
and more often than others, so they have fewer offspring. Non95
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altruists live longer and have more offspring. In a few generations, animals inclined to altruism should die off, and the population should be
dominated by "selfish" animals.
If only humans acted altruistically, we could say it was because of
intelligence, conscience, or moral training. But since other animals do
it, that explanation doesn't work. Lower animals don't think about
their actions: they behave as they do because their genes program
them to do it. A duck doesn't think about the welfare of the flock being
more important than his own welfare. He just warns the flock, and the
wolf eats him as a result. No more offspring for the do-gooder duck.
How is it that altruists are still around? And for another example
from today's society, how is it that gays and lesbians are still around?
They have fewer children than heterosexuals, if indeed they have any
at all. If homosexuality is mostly biological, as scientists now believe,
shouldn't evolution have made us all heterosexual by now?
On Darwin's theory, we should all be selfish heterosexuals. But
we're not. Darwin's theory is at least incomplete. There is something
about altruism, and other offspring-reducing traits such as homosexuality, that has survival value in the evolutionary struggle.
When it was finally discovered, the mystery's solution was surprisingly simple. Darwin couldn't see it because he was limited by the
science of his time. He thought of evolution in terms of individual animals producing their own offspring. Some of his successors, trying to
explain altruism, would go to the opposite extreme and focus on
whole species. But the real answer was too small to see: It was a sequence of molecules called a "gene."
All of animals' visible traits -- speed, strength, intelligence, and so
forth -- are largely determined by their genes. Environment (“nurture”) has a definite influence that can help or hurt, but an animal’s
genes set the range within which its traits are most likely to vary. Beagles never give birth to pit bulls; families of short people rarely include
professional basketball players. Here's a summary of the important
points:
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•
Genes are sequences of molecules called nucleotides: Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine. A fifth nucleotide,
Uracil, occurs only in the genes of viruses.
•
The genes of all living things except viruses are in molecules
of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in their body cells. Viruses
use RNA (ribonucleic acid) to encode their genes.
•
Each living thing’s DNA (or RNA, for viruses) is the blueprint
for its physical body.
•
A living thing's blueprint is called its genotype. The physical
body created from the blueprint is called its phenotype.
Those genes do not control human behavior, but they influence
it. They can predispose us to help others and to care about their welfare, to be indifferent to them, or to be hostile. In various contexts,
they do all three.
But for the theory of evolution, our inclination to help others
posed a particular problem. How could helping others -- especially at
risk or expense to ourselves -- help us pass on our genes to the next
generation? In other words, how can we reconcile the theory of evolution with the fact of altruism? Darwin lacked a good answer for that.
Four kinds of altruism
What most people don't realize, even today, is that altruism isn't just
one kind of thing. It comes in four varieties, depending on how the
altruist selects the beneficiaries. All of them are relevant to human
behavior, though they vary in their impact on evolution.
Need selection
The need altruist selects beneficiaries based on perceived need. This
is pure altruism: helping others with no expectation of selfish benefit.
It's Mother Teresa territory.
You might think only human beings can be need altruists, but
they're not the only ones. Other mammals, from chimps all the way
down to rats, sometimes help others even when they get no benefit
for themselves.
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Therefore, need altruism isn't just a result of human moral training: It reflects something genetic. Altruism by lower animals suggests
that the morals are based on the genetics, not the other way around.
The biological basis of need altruism is empathy, which enables
animals -- mammals, mainly, and primates, particularly -- to feel the
suffering or happiness of others. Thus even "pure altruism" has a selfish aspect: one animal might get no material gain from helping another, but it might get a good feeling from doing it. Need selection has
only a small effect on evolution, but enough for Darwin to mention it
in The Descent of Man (Part I, Chapter 4):
“The social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society
of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of [empathy] with them, and
to provide various services for them.”
Game selection
Game selection makes a little more sense in evolutionary terms. The
game altruist selects beneficiaries based on its own long-term self-interest: in other words, as a way of "winning a game." It's helping others
based on the expectation of getting their help in return. The goal is
not to benefit anyone else, but to benefit yourself: helping others is
just a way to do it.
Just like need selection, game selection occurs in lower animals as
well as in humans. Harvard biologist Robert Trivers argued in “The
Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism” (Quarterly Review of Biology, March
1971) that evolution tended to punish “cheaters” who received help
but later failed to return the favor to the altruist:
[Evolution] “will discriminate against the cheater if cheating has
later adverse effect on his life that outweigh the benefit of not reciprocating.”
That’s just the conclusion of Trivers’s article, the full text of which
is available on the web. Game selection has some effect on evolution,
though not as much as kin selection.
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Kin selection
Kin selection is the most important type of selection. It's the most
common basis of altruistic behavior and it's one of the basic mechanisms of evolution. It's similar to need selection, but with a twist.
The altruistic animal helps others based on their need, but only if
it perceives that they're its close genetic relatives.
Though better known today as a militant atheist, biologist Richard
Dawkins became famous as one of the popularizers of kin selection
theory. In his book The Selfish Gene, he argued that the basic unit of
evolution was not the individual, population, or species, but the gene.
If we focus on genes, kin-selection altruism makes sense. We
share more of our genes with our families and close relatives than we
do with others. If we risk our lives to protect our relatives, we are
protecting their -- and our --- genes' opportunity to continue in the
next generation. Whether we have offspring ourselves or simply help
our relatives do it, the result is the same.
That fits biologists' field studies which show that animals are most
likely to commit altruistic acts to benefit their genetic relatives, that
is, their kin. In the 1960s, biologist William Hamilton came up with a
formula for determining when it is most likely to happen:
c<r*b
where c is the survival cost to the altruistic animal (in risk, food, etc.),
r is the percent of genes shared because of a family relationship, and
b is the benefit to the object of the animal's altruistic act.
Thus, kin selection explained how evolution worked together
with altruism:
• It explained why animals committed altruistic acts.
•
It explained scientists' observation that when animals in the
wild commit altruistic acts, it's usually to benefit their relatives (children, siblings, etc.).
The converse of kin selection is non-kin non-selection, which inclines animals to fight with other members of their species who are
genetic competitors.
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Because they are members of the same species, the non-kin animals occupy the same biological niche and compete with animals' genetic kin for food, resources, and mates. Therefore, animals react with
extra hostility and aggression to non-kin members of the same species, even more than they do to animals of other species that are physical threats.
For example, male hawk wasps will attack other male hawk wasps
that invade their territories but will ignore birds and genetically unrelated animals. They attack the other male hawk wasps because they
are genetic competitors who might mate with female hawk wasps in
the territory, but their aggression against female hawk wasps is limited
to attempted copulation.
The implications for humanity are obvious. All members of the
human race occupy the same biological niche. As a result, they need
the same kinds of things to survive and reproduce. When such resources are limited, people compete in order to get them. If they perceive others as their kin, they are more likely to cooperate peacefully
for mutual benefit. If not, the results are often irrational and destructive. But as we will see in the final chapter of this book, there are ways
to promote cooperation even without kinship.
Group selection
Sometimes, however, animals commit altruistic acts to benefit their
group as a whole: a hive of bees, a flock of ducks, or -- among humans
-- a group of people defined by ethnicity, nation, or religion. That
doesn't quite fit the kin selection theory, but it's not too different, either.
First, if an animal is a member of a particular group, it probably
shares a larger number of genes with other group members than it
does with non-members. Second, animals use specific cues to determine who is and isn't related to them. Because it’s loosely connected
to relatedness, group membership is one of the cues. It’s not an infallible cue, but it works well enough for evolution. That’s especially true
for lower animals. Unlike humans, who see cues in clothing, belief,
and other factors, animals use only biological cues. Therefore, an
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animal that engages in altruism for its group has a better than even
chance of benefiting its own genetic relatives, and thereby helping its
own genes make it into the next generation.
How Animals Know Who's Who
All the types of selection promote altruism, but studying animal behavior in the wild, biologists have observed that it usually benefits animals’ genetic relatives. Kin selection is by far the most powerful cause
of altruistic acts. That raises two other problems:
• How do animals know which other animals are their genetic
relatives?
•
How do they know how closely the other animals are related
to them?
These two questions go back to Hamilton's formula: The amount
that an animal will "spend" for the benefit of another animal is less
than the percentage of shared (by kin relationship) genes multiplied
by the benefit to the other animal. If the two animals aren't related,
the percentage of shared genes is zero, so the animal is unlikely to help
the other at all. If the animals are related, then some relationships are
genetically closer than others. A parent shares half its genes with its
offspring, but less with cousins or more distant relatives.
It turns out that animals use four methods to identify their kin, as
well as to determine how closely related they are. The methods aren’t
foolproof, but as people say in Washington, DC, they’re “good enough
for government work.” Sometimes, animals act altruistically to benefit
non-relatives, but usually, it’s for their relatives. As P.J.B. Slater explains in Behaviour and Evolution (“Kinship and Altruism”), the methods are:
• Context: This includes the location of the other animal. Birds
and rodents, for example, often care for any young in their
nests even if they are not related. It's a fairly crude way to
identify relatives, but it works more often than not. If an animal is in the right place at the right time, another animal might
assume it's a relative.
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•
Familiarity: If unrelated animals are raised together, they
treat each other with more care than they treat strangers, often even if the "strangers" are their genetic relatives.
•
Phenotype: An animal's phenotype is its physical body, and
biologists also include its behavior in this category. If animals
look alike and act alike, they assume that they are related and
are inclined to help each other altruistically.
•
Genotype: An animal's genotype is the genetic blueprint encoded in its DNA. That is obviously not visible to other animals. However, sometimes genes create clues that other
animals can perceive. For example, some genes affect the way
animals smell, and that can indicate kin relationship.
Need selection, game selection, and group selection amount to imperfect “back doors” leading to kin selection. Need selection implies
context and familiarity, since the beneficiary must be in the same location as the altruistic animal. Game selection and group selection also
imply those factors. Those types of selection will sometimes lead animals to help unrelated beneficiaries but the same thing can happen
with kin selection based on appearance and behavior.
The bottom line here is that animals are more inclined to help
other animals if the other animals:
• Are in a certain location,
•
Are already familiar,
•
Look like them, or
•
Act like them.
Below the level of consciousness, on a purely instinctive level,
those four cues prepare an animal to help and cooperate with another
animal who satisfies one or more of the cues.
You can probably guess how that's relevant to religious belief and
behavior. Human beings might be created in the image of God, but
their physical bodies share the same nature as other animals. On that
level, they react in the same way as other animals.
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Emotion as instant calculation
For most of Western history, we've regarded thought and emotion as
opposing forces. To keep our thinking free of emotional influence was
the ideal. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato said that strong emotion was like being chained to a raging madman, and he found few
people in the ensuing millennia to disagree with his viewpoint.
However, we now know that Plato's view was wrong. Emotional
reactions are not the enemy of reason, but instead, they are an integral
part of it.
Emotions give us instantaneous calculations based on eons of evolution, faster and with more knowledge than we could do by "thinking" about situations. Sometimes, our emotional reactions are wrong,
but just as often, they're right. If you think about emotion in the context of evolution by natural selection, that makes sense.
Emotion is more than just a mental "feeling:" it involves specific
biological reactions that prepare us to act. In the face of a threat, it
increases our heart rate, sends more blood and oxygen to our muscles,
and prepares us to fight or run away. In other situations, it prepares us
to cooperate with allies or get lovey-dovey with potential mates. If our
evolutionary ancestors had reacted that way in the wrong contexts,
they would have died without producing offspring. The ancestors who
survived are the ones who reacted correctly. Their emotional reactions are coded into us.
In order for kin selection to work in evolution, animals must be
able to identify their probable genetic relatives. As we saw in the previous section, they rely on cues such as appearance and behavior to
help them make such identifications. Their emotional machinery, including its purely biological aspects, supports that. When they see another animal that they identify as a relative, their emotional biology
prepares them to cooperate. When they see another animal that is not
a relative and might be a threat, their emotional biology prepares them
to fight or run away.
Humans have the same emotional and biological responses to
fight, flee, or cooperate. As a result, they unconsciously look for signs
that other humans fall into one of four groups:
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•
Genetic relatives: These humans share genes with us by common descent. We are emotionally inclined to cooperate with
them.
•
Genetic competitors: These are humans, and have the same
basic needs as us, but they share few genes with us by common descent. As a result, they compete with us and our genetic kin for resources. In order to protect our genes, we are
emotionally inclined to be hostile to them, to fight them, to
keep them away from potential mates, and even to kill them
if needed. This is the biological source of racism and other
forms of hostility between human groups.
•
Physical threats: These are other species that could harm us
physically, such as wolves and snakes.
•
Non-competing non-threats: These are other species that
pose little risk to us.
Just like other animals, we automatically consider appearance, behavior, familiarity, and location when we decide whom to fight and
with whom to cooperate. All that proceeds independently of any conscious thought they might have about the situation.
However, human beings are both biological and thinking creatures. When we react emotionally, it's a biological response based on
our unconscious assessment of the person or situation. The response
occurs instantly and without our conscious awareness of it. Those responses evolved in pre-human contexts, so they are often wildly inaccurate about some situations we face in modern society.
By itself, that wouldn't be a problem if our intelligence then subjected emotional reactions to rational scrutiny. But that's often not
what happens. Instead, our minds take the reactions as a starting point,
then they start fabricating "reasons" why the reactions are correct. As
political scientist Howard Margolis observed in his book Patterns,
Thinking, and Cognition:
"Given the judgments (themselves produced by the non-conscious
cognitive machinery in the brain, sometimes correctly, sometimes
not so), humans produce rationales they believe account for their
judgments. But the rationales ... are only ex post rationalizations."
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Our minds go to work generating justifications for the conclusions
our emotions have already reached. That's why smart people often
hold stupid opinions. They don't get their opinions by thinking: they
get them by reacting emotionally. They only start thinking when challenged to justify the opinions they've already chosen. Smart people
are simply more adept at coming up with reasons for beliefs they
adopted emotionally.
As a result, people's animal-level emotional reactions tend to bias
all the thinking they do afterward. If they encounter another person
and feel at a gut level that he is bad and a threat, their intelligence will
go to work justifying the feeling. It will adduce reasons: He follows an
alien religion. He's of a different race. He's disloyal to our group. And
because their minds are primed to believe bad things about the person, they will discount any good reports and be inclined to believe
terrible slanders based on no evidence:
“The bottom line is that human minds, like animal minds, are constantly reacting intuitively to everything they perceive, and basing
their responses on those reactions. Within the first second of seeing, hearing, or meeting another person, the elephant has already
begun to lean toward or away, and that lean influences what you
think and do next.”8
Let’s not be overly pessimistic. If rational moral judgment were
impossible, then we would not have achieved even as much civilization as we have. It's not impossible, but it's difficult, and it's not the
norm. We react first, and think second.
Remember how animals identify their kin: appearance, behavior,
location, and context.
For us, those kin-identification factors operate at the subconscious level. They generate emotional reactions that prepare us to cooperate, help, fight, or flee:
"What matters is not actual genetic relatedness, but the perception
of relatedness ... the experience of having grown up together, having
seen one’s mother care for the other person, commensal meals,
myths of common ancestry, essentialist intuitions of common flesh
8
Haidt, J. (2012), p. 69.
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and blood, the sharing of rituals and ordeals, physical resemblance,
and metaphors ... Military leaders use every trick in the book to
make their soldiers feel like genetic relatives and take on the biologically predictable risks."9
Unless we make a conscious and determined effort to override
those reactions, our intelligence simply makes up justifications for
why the reactions are correct. Most people do not make that effort
most of the time, nor is it practical for anyone to do it all of the time.
As a result, signals that hook our "cooperate" reaction support social harmony. They tell us that people are our genetic relatives whom
we should help and who are inclined to help us. Signals that hook our
"fight or flee" reaction cause strife, hatred, violence, and social dissolution. They tell us that people are threats – predators or genetic competitors – whom we must either escape or destroy.
The neuroscience of practice
One more thing is relevant: how the brain responds to practice.
Did you ever learn to ride a bicycle? And how about learning to
read? You don't need to think about the words you're seeing on this
page. You just look at them and their meaning pops into your mind.
When you were first learning to read, it was laborious. Now, it's automatic.
Likewise, what's your favorite song or melody? When you think
of it, you don't have to think about what the next musical note should
be. It just pops into your mind automatically.
That's because of long-term potentiation (LTP) in your brain. If
you repeat an action over and over, your brain learns how to do it
without requiring you to think about it anymore.
Animal brains have billions of cells called neurons. The neurons
communicate with each other across little gaps called synapses.
When you practice an action, you make the same pattern of neurons activate repeatedly. And it does what you'd expect based on
9
Pinker, S. (2011), loc. 7932.
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common experience: It changes the structure of the synapses so that
the practiced pattern of neurons activates more easily.
The next time you want to do that action, you barely need to think
about it before the neurons are ready to activate and do it for you.
That's what learning is.
And there's a bonus. You don't actually need to do the action to
practice it. Just thinking about it tends to activate the same pattern of
neurons as doing it.
The effect isn't as strong as actually doing it, but if you think of an
action repeatedly, you get some of the same effect. That's why Olympic athletes, for example, engage in "mental practice" of visualizing
their athletic events. If thinking about an action is associated with
strong emotion or "sensory pageantry" such as bright color, music, or
movements such as standing up or raising your hands, that strengthens your brain's learning of the neuron activation patterns.
In the Bible, Proverbs 23:7 was way ahead of its time:
“As a man thinketh, so is he.”
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Chapter 8:
What Beliefs Do
“The professor destroyed my core beliefs without replacing [them]
with anything. He tore down my foundation and left me staring at
the rubble.”10
-- A Yeshiva University student
THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER COVERED THE BIOLOGY OF BELIEF, so you might
think that we're done with biology. To start off this chapter, however,
there's one more biological mystery to solve:
Why do you have such a big brain?
That's not meant to flatter you, though congratulations are in order since you've read this far in what is unavoidably a challenging
book.
It's meant seriously. As a human being, you have a much bigger
brain than a comparison with unrelated animal species would predict.
Why?
Not only is your brain big, it's an energy hog. At three pounds, it
accounts for about two percent of your body's weight but uses about
20 percent of your body's energy.
10
Moment Magazine March/April 2014, “James Kugel: Professor of Disbelief.”
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Of course, some animals have bigger brains than you do. The brain
of a sperm whale weighs about 18 pounds, but its average body weight
is around 90,000 pounds. Relative to the size of your body, your brain
is much bigger.
And your brain is also better. Most of a whale’s brain is devoted to
operating its massive body. But your brain has a neocortex that handles thinking, belief, and social relationships. A whale's brain doesn't
have a neocortex at all. The brains of our primate relatives such as
chimps have a neocortex, but it's smaller than ours relative to their
total brain size.
Biologists have offered various explanations for human brain size.
An early view was that as our evolutionary ancestors foraged for food,
they needed big brains to remember where it was. On the other hand,
bees have tiny brains but are better than humans at remembering
where food is. And the truly distinctive feature of human brains is not
their size, but the size of their neocortex, compared not only to the
rest of the brain but compared to other primates.
Most biologists now accept the social brain hypothesis:11 that we
evolved larger brains with a larger neocortex in order to reason about
social relationships in social groups larger than those formed by lower
primates such as chimps. That ability means that we can think about
who did what to whom, what it means, and how we should act as a
result: in other words, it enables us to form reliable beliefs. A side benefit of social brains is that we can reason about non-social facts such
as how nature works and how to make tools. As a result, we can deal
with the world more effectively. We can form beliefs to guide us in
many different ways in different situations.
Let's put that in a more general context. If we can form beliefs,
what good does it do us? Why do we have beliefs?
I'm not talking about this belief or that belief. The question is
more general: Why do we have any beliefs at all? Why is forming beliefs something that human beings do?
11
"Large human brain evolved as a result of 'sizing each other up'," Science Daily, March
18, 2018.
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Biological evolution favors traits and behaviors that help living
things to survive and pass on their genes to the next generation. Does
that principle also apply to beliefs?
Yes, it does. Recall that evolution favors traits and behaviors that:
• Directly help living things to pass on their genes by enabling
individuals to get food, resist disease, use energy more efficiently, avoid predators, and so forth.
•
Indirectly help living things to pass on their genes by enabling
their group (including their genetic relatives) to survive in
the same ways.
We have beliefs because they helped our ancestors pass on their
genes to the next generation and ultimately to us. Having beliefs enabled them to live more successfully than other versions of our species
that did not have beliefs, or didn't apply them in the ways our ancestors did. As a result, we inherited our ancestors' particular ways of
having and applying beliefs.
And notice that for biological evolution, what matters are traits
and behavior. Whatever beliefs are or are not "mentally," the reason
we have them in the way we do is that they're embodied in our traits,
biological responses, and actions. The main point of this chapter follows directly:
Beliefs do things for us.
That's “things,” plural. Beliefs do a variety of things for us. Different beliefs do different things.
The fact that beliefs do different things suggests there are different kinds of beliefs. For example, consider three beliefs:
•
The cat is under the bed.
•
Joe lied to Sally and stole money from Bill.
•
God rewards the good and punishes the wicked.
The first is an ordinary empirical belief. It can be verified or falsified by specific physical steps and specific observations. If you look
under the bed and see the cat, your belief is verified. If you reach
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under the bed to retrieve the cat and get clawed, that's more verification. But if you look under the bed and do not see the cat, then reach
under the bed and feel around but don't feel the cat, your belief is falsified.
Normally, that kind of belief also has specific empirical and physical payoffs: You find the cat. With some difficulty, you get it out from
under the bed. With even more difficulty, you put it in the bathtub
and give it a bath. Those are goals you value. The cat does not value
them: hence your disagreement with the cat and your subsequent
need for bandages.
The second belief is a more direct example of the social brain. It
lists two social events: Joe lied and Joe stole. From those observations,
we use our neocortex to deduce a further belief that we should neither
believe Joe nor trust him with our possessions. If Joe then lied to us,
we would not rely on his statement but would independently verify
the facts: as a result, we would have a greater chance of acting successfully. If we had food or money, we would not leave them where Joe
might steal them. As a result, the resources would benefit us instead
of Joe. Once again, it enables us to act successfully, just it enabled our
ancestors to survive and procreate.
Now, consider the third belief: “God rewards the good and punishes the wicked.” It can be held in the face of almost any evidence. It
is a sweeping general statement that covers a wide range of situations.
Those situations differ in ways that the believer can invoke to maintain the belief, come what may. It gives people a framework to understand reality and to plan their actions.
“God rewards the good and punishes the wicked” is believed by
many Jews and Christians despite millennia of evidence to the contrary. Maimonides considered it a “necessary belief,” that is, a belief
justified by its moral and social benefits even if its meaning or truth
were dubious.
The Bible's Book of Job testifies to the difficulty of maintaining
the belief, since terrible things often happen to good people and good
things often happen to bad people. But there's always a way to save
the belief. Job's friends speculate that he must have committed some
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sin, or else God wouldn't be punishing him. In the wake of the Holocaust, when millions of innocents were horribly murdered, modern
writers such as Dennis Prager speculate that Divine reward and punishment must be after death, because it's obviously not happening on
earth:
“To state this case as starkly as possible, if there is nothing after
this life, then the Nazis and the children they threw alive into furnaces have identical fates. If I believed such a thing, I would either
become an atheist or hate the God who had created such a cruel
and absurd universe.”12
Prager's belief strategy is typical in a couple of ways:
•
He kept the words of the belief but changed its meaning.
“God rewards the good and punishes the wicked” looks like a
factual statement about what happens in this life on earth, and
that's how most people have always interpreted it. It's why in
the Bible, Job's friends thought he must have done something
wrong to deserve all the misfortune that God inflicted on him.
But Prager thinks that meaning is obviously false, so he reinterprets the belief to make it true. He makes it true by making
it invulnerable to any possible earthly evidence. No matter
what happens in life on earth, Prager can continue to hold his
belief.
•
His reinterpreted version of the belief does something for
him. Belief in a moral order under a just God enables Prager
to avoid what he sees as the three common responses to moral
nihilism: hedonism, utopianism, and despair.
Prager's attitude demonstrates what cognitive scientist Jason
Slone calls "theological incorrectness." When they think carefully
about their beliefs, religious people often give sophisticated explanations that match the tenets of their faiths. In casual reasoning, however, they use shortcuts such as simplistic, literal interpretations that
actually conflict with their more sophisticated "official" beliefs.
12
Prager, D. (1995), p. 236.
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That kind of thinking is found in most religious traditions. American founding father Benjamin Franklin gave an almost identical argument in The Pennsylvania Gazette (1734):
“Many arguments to prove a future state have been drawn from the
unequal lot of good and bad men ... to see virtue languish and repine, to see vice prosperous and triumphant: such a view, I confess,
raises in us a violent presumption that there is another state of retribution, where the just and the unjust will be equally punished or
rewarded by an impartial judge.”
General beliefs about complex situations tend to be like that,
whether they're about morality, theology, or purely factual subjects.
We understand the world by progressively reinterpreting such general statements to make them fit new evidence.
So what are some of the things that beliefs do for us?
Beliefs satisfy our psychological needs
We're not merely biological creatures. Thanks to our social brains,
we're also thinking creatures. We think about our lives, what they
mean, what we want, and how we fit in the universe. Such thinking
makes us feel good, bad, fearful, or needy: that is, we have psychological needs. We crave security, belonging, family, love, certainty, structure, and self-expression. What differs are not the needs, but their
intensity and importance for each individual.
The results of many beliefs are intangible, such as making us feel
that we are more in control of our lives and our destinies. Beliefs in
gods – whether or not they are factually true – have results that are
mainly moral and psychological. Believing in God – or for those of a
secular bent, believing in the natural order – helps us feel as if we can
avoid many bad experiences and increase the likelihood of good experiences. Often, it's even true.
When the Bible's character of Job suffered misfortune, his friends
believed that it had to be punishment for his sins. The belief made
them feel safer because it implied that if they avoided sin, they could
avoid the kind of misfortune that afflicted Job. Likewise, when modern people die young, we want to believe that we know why: because
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they smoked cigarettes, ate fried food, or did not exercise. We want
to believe that if we avoid those “sins,” we can avoid the punishment
of premature death. We might even half-pretend that we can avoid
death altogether. Belief gives us a result that, even though incorrect
and intangible, comforts us and helps us get through life with more
happiness and less anxiety.
It should be mentioned that simply because a belief satisfies a
need, that doesn't mean it's false -- or true. It just means that it satisfies
a need. The article "Therapeutic Superstition" by David Bentley Hart,
First Things, November 2012, describes the case of a man who since
childhood often saw angels. He lived an otherwise normal, productive
life and was happy. After mentioning his visions during a routine
physical exam, he was subjected to treatment for his visions, and medicine “cured” him. He no longer saw angels, and he was unhappy.
Cured? It’s debatable.
Some people need to be given “the answers” by an authority,
whether the authority is a religious leader, a sacred document, or a
famous scientist. It doesn't matter if they are completely convinced
by the answers: what matters is that someone else has done the thinking for them. They don't have to worry about it. You don't drive on
Shabbat. You fast on Yom Kippur. You don't mix meat and dairy. It's
all settled, and you don't have to think about it.
By the same token, other people find the same situation to be stifling and intolerable, which is why they leave Orthodox Judaism,
Evangelical Christianity, or Islam. They want to make up their own
minds in ways that Orthodoxy's more structured faith and observance
do not allow.
There is nothing shameful about wanting to let someone else decide the main issues of life for us. It's analogous to my own attitude
about apple pie. I don't want a recipe. I don't want to make it myself.
I want someone else to make it, give it to me, and let me eat it. In economics, it is called “division of labor.” And it's fine.
Because people's psychological needs differ, there's no “one size
fits all” belief system or way of life, any more than there's a “one size
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fits all” pair of shoes. The beliefs we adopt are one of the ways that we
satisfy our own psychological needs.
Beliefs provide factual guidance
The most obvious function of belief is to tell us accurate things about
the world. Having such accurate beliefs helps us succeed in life, both
in our daily activities and in long-term plans. As a result, we are more
likely to survive, prosper, and pass on our genes. Beliefs help us do
things such as:
• Getting to the store.
•
Treating a disease.
•
Determining whom to trust or ask for help.
•
Determining whom to help and how much.
The value of the belief is not in its factual accuracy per se, but in
its ability to help us achieve our goals. If I want to buy some milk and
I believe that the grocery is at a location on College Avenue, my belief
is valuable to me if it helps me get the milk. The value of its factual
accuracy depends on the result. If it helps me get to the grocery to buy
some milk, it's valuable; if it doesn't, it's not valuable.
If I'm not interested in the result, then the belief might still be
accurate but it has no value for me. The value comes from the result,
not the accuracy. The accuracy is only a tool to get the result.
Sometimes the results are tangible and obvious, such as getting to
the store or curing a disease. At other times, the results are intangible
and less obvious.
It's also worth noting that beliefs can be helpful even if they are
factually incorrect. For example, until the 20th century, doctors believed that the disease of malaria was caused by exposure to damp
night air. People exposed to damp night air were more likely to get
malaria than people who weren't exposed. The cause seemed obvious,
but malaria is more specifically caused by mosquito bites that infect
the sufferer with a microorganism called Plasmodium. Such bites are
more likely to occur in damp night air, where mosquitoes are common.
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Therefore, when people took their doctors' advice and stayed
away from damp night air, they were less likely to get malaria. Their
belief had value.
Beliefs provide "handles"
We use words and concepts as “handles” that allow us to think about
complex ideas, or vast quantities of information, without getting
bogged down in the details. That enables us quickly to assess situations
and handle them successfully.
Consider the concept of a “dog.” No actual dog corresponds exactly to the concept, so in a sense, the concept is inaccurate. But using
the concept of a dog and its associated word allows us to think about
issues related to dogs without getting bogged down in the details of
individual dogs.
Similarly, concepts such as “electron” and “the quadratic formula”
include details that might or might not be relevant to a problem about
which we're thinking. If the details are relevant, we can use the concept and associated word to recall them. If the details are irrelevant,
we can ignore them and simply use the concept without thinking
about its full meaning.
Thus, a concept and its associated word are like a handle for the
related information. When we hold the handle, we can use all the related information without having all of it in mind: we recall only the
details that are relevant to solving our current problem.
Beliefs sometimes provide the same kind of efficient shortcut.
“God gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai” appears to have a literal, empirical meaning (though in a later chapter, we will see that it doesn't);
it has a metaphorical meaning about spirituality; and it also works as a
handle for a vast number of associated beliefs in Judaism and Christianity.
When we assert that “God gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai,” we
seem to be making a literal statement, but we're not. We're using the
belief as a handle to assert, and to express commitment to, a vast array
of beliefs, practices, and attitudes to which the handle connects.
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A contemporary example is that of political beliefs. Consider a belief such as “America is a nation of immigrants.” If someone asserts
that belief, we can deduce his or her probable beliefs about a wide
range of other issues, as well as the political “tribe” to which he or she
belongs. The belief itself says nothing about those things, but it serves
as a handle to help us identify and interact with the person until we
know more.
Of course, the proviso "until we know more" is crucial. Handles
can be misleading if we ignore further information as it emerges. To
use handles as the only way of understanding a person or group of
people is to engage in harmful stereotyping.
Beliefs provide moral guidance
This function of belief is similar to factual guidance, but with a different goal. In this case, our goal is not to achieve specific factual situations -- though factual situations are involved -- but to act morally and
to achieve factual situations that are good.
Thinkers have argued for millennia about what goodness is. What
is it that makes some things good and other things bad? How is that
related to our judgments that some actions are right or wrong? From
an evolutionary perspective, what's right is what helps us survive and
prosper to pass along our genes. That's not the only perspective, of
course, but it's a reasonable one.
Regardless of our theories about what makes actions right or
wrong, ordinary moral beliefs can help us guide our actions. “Stealing
is wrong because it causes unhappiness.” Whether or not a person can
defend that belief logically, it’s a useful guide for life. “I should be loyal
to my friends and family” is likewise helpful even if a person never
asks why loyalty is supposed to be good.
In morals just like in medicine (recall the example of malaria earlier in the chapter), beliefs don’t need to be true in order to be helpful.
During the Middle Ages, European Christians believed that prayers by
the poor were particularly effective in helping them gain entry to
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Heaven.13 As a result, the rich often provided material help to poor
people, as a way to gain their support in prayer. Their belief now
seems risible, but it led to good results. Moral and religious beliefs, just
like factual beliefs, can be helpful even if they are incorrect.
Let's take another look at the belief with which we started this
chapter: “God rewards the good and punishes the wicked.” We can't
define “God,” but we want to be rewarded and we certainly don't want
to be punished. As very often happens, this belief looks like a factual
assertion, but it has several functions. Most importantly, it's a moral
command:
“Be good and don't be wicked.”
This view recognizes that religious beliefs in particular are different from ordinary empirical beliefs and serve different functions in
our lives:
“Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, would have regarded the idea of
proving the truth of the Jewish or the Christian or the Muslim religion by historical evidence as a profound confusion of realms, a
confusion of the inner transformation in one’s life that he saw as
the true function of religion, with the goals and activities of scientific explanation and prediction.”14
Beliefs encourage good behavior
As noted in the previous chapter, whenever we repeat an action, we
strengthen the neural connections that implement it. Each time we
repeat it, we “learn” it more thoroughly.
The first time we perform an action, we have to think about each
step in the action – for example, driving a car. But after doing it a thousand times, we no longer have to think about each step. We just decide
to do the action, and the practiced connections in our brains do the
steps for us automatically. We just follow along with them.
Repeating beliefs works the same way. Each time we think of a
belief, we strengthen the belief and its associated actions. If we
13
See my article “Catholic Church” in The Encyclopedia of World Poverty (Sage Publications, 2006).
14
Putnam, H. (2008), p. 13.
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vocalize the belief, we strengthen it even more. If we vocalize the belief in unison with other believers, while surrounded with vivid “sensory pageantry” and emotionally-laden symbols (as in religious
services or public events), we strengthen it further.
Most people hold the belief that they are honest, but the belief is
more likely to work if they are reminded of their belief. In one study,
people were supposed to get a certain amount of money but the cashier “accidentally” gave them too much. Only 20 percent corrected the
mistake. But if the cashier specifically asked them whether or not the
amount was correct, 60 percent corrected the mistake. They needed
to be reminded of their own belief that they were honest.15
Beliefs indicate membership
As previously noted, emotions give us instantaneous calculations
based on eons of evolution, faster and with more knowledge than we
could do by “thinking” about situations. They evolved to help us distinguish between those who are friendly and those who might be a
threat.
Because emotion occurs at a biological level, it uses the same criteria as lower animals use to distinguish between their genetic kin and
non-kin.
Remember that among other things, animals use phenotype to
identify their genetic relatives. The phenotype includes both appearance and behavior. In humans, it includes:
• Physical appearance: facial features, skin color, height, body
shape, and so on.
15
•
Dress: For example, a Star of David identifies the wearer as
Jewish, while a cross identifies the wearer as Christian.
•
Language: A speaker’s language identifies him or her as a
member of a particular national or linguistic group.
•
Beliefs: Expressed through verbal or non-verbal behavior.
Haidt, J. (2012), p. 96.
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Animals also use location and context as a way of identifying their
kin. In humans, those factors include:
• Presence at religious events
•
Presence at community events
At the level of kin selection, our automatic reactions are a positive
trait because they help us identify other people who share our genes,
at least reliably enough for evolution to work. Those are the people
we tend to help, trust, and with whom we tend to cooperate.
But humans are moral beings as well as animals. Preference for
people we see as our kin has some morally negative effects. When we
see people as non-kin, our biological response ranges from wariness
to aggression because they are our evolutionary competitors.
At best, they might use resources that we and our kin need to survive and reproduce. At worst, they might attack us because we are
their competitors. That's the root of racism. The Broadway musical
“South Pacific” (1949) assures us that such beliefs aren’t natural, but
must be learned:
"You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught."
Contrary to the song’s reassuring message, racism doesn't need
“to be carefully taught.” It's biologically hard-wired, with increased
activity in the amygdala, part of the brain that regulates fear. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) showed that:
“... children as young as six years old have the same kind of racebased biases as adults. And, rather amazingly, an IAT developed
for monkeys shows that they, too, exhibit implicit preferences for
in-group members.”16
Read that again: Not just adults. Not just human children. Monkeys
have the same kind of response. Monkeys distinguish between ingroup and out-group members. It's biological. When we react with
16
Greene, J. (2013), p. 51.
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wariness or hostility toward those who look different from us, act different, speak a different language, or profess different beliefs, we are
expressing a deep biological impulse. We “need to be carefully taught”
that such impulses are not necessarily reliable, and even then, we will
still have the same impulses. We simply have learned to ignore them.
Most people never do, and to assume the contrary is to invite social
conflict. The impulses will bias our judgments, but we won't realize it
because we've assumed we don't have them. We can't cope with a
problem if we pretend it doesn't exist. Only by confronting it can we
find a solution.
Shared beliefs foster social harmony because, expressed in speech
and behavior, they hook into our biological kin-identification mechanisms. When other people look like us, dress like us, speak the same
language, and profess the same beliefs, our biological impulses tell us
that they are “kin” and not a threat; their impulses tell them the same
thing about us. From the military to schools and workplaces, dress
codes help people feel solidarity with each other. Languages and dialects do the same thing.
Shared beliefs also help at the level of game selection -- that is,
choosing to cooperate with people who are likely to cooperate with
us. When other people cooperate with us, it increases our chance of
surviving, prospering, and producing offspring. Thus, shared beliefs
operate via kin selection to make us help genetic relatives have offspring; and via game selection to help us have offspring ourselves.
Naturally, each works in the other direction as well. Harvard biologist
Edward O. Wilson observes that such group cohesion can make the
difference between survival and extinction:
“The outcome of between-group competition is determined largely
by the details of social behavior within each group in turn. These
traits are the size and tightness of the group, and the quality of
communication and division of labor among its members.”17
17
Wilson, E.O. (2012), p 53.
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Hostility toward perceived genetic competitors
Animals have a special hostility toward other members of their species who are non-kin and therefore genetic competitors. A lot of human behavior simply puts a thin intellectual varnish on top of these
biological reactions to “explain” why they are the way they are.
Just as we perceive as kin those who look, talk, and act like us, and
who profess the same beliefs, we perceive as competitors those who
are similar to us but different in minor respects. Genetically unrelated
animals of the same species are likely to share the same biological
niche, requiring the same food, resources, and competing for the same
mates. That causes hostility.
In our case, such differences activate our deep biological reaction
to perceive them as genetic competitors, not as unrelated threats. That
means, for example, that our most hysterical wrath is reserved for heretics, not members of completely different faiths. The greater the difference, the less we are biologically inclined to see other people as
genetic competitors on that account.
A classic example appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which describe
the beliefs and practices of the Essenes, an ancient Jewish religious
sect at Qumran. According to the Community Rule (also known as the
Manual of Discipline), members of the sect:
“[Must] love all the sons of light, each according to his lot in God’s
design, and hate all the sons of darkness, each according to his guilt
in God’s vengeance.”
The “sons of light” were members of the sect. The “sons of darkness” were other Jews who were not members of the sect. Other Jews
who were not members of the sect were perceived as “the other” and
singled out for special hostility. Just as hawk wasps don't care about
birds, the Essenes didn’t care much about Romans, Egyptians, Babylonians, or other non-Jews. But Jews who denied the sect's beliefs were
unconsciously perceived as same-species members in the same biological niche who might compete for resources or mates. As a result,
sect members were commanded to “hate” them.
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Therefore, we use beliefs, expressed in behavior and appearance,
to announce membership in our group, and to identify other members
of our group. In the intra-group case at least, our animal impulses are
on the side of the angels, and tend to reduce conflict. When we encounter members of other groups, well, not so much.
Beliefs express and encourage loyalty
Expressing loyalty is a variation on signaling membership. To hold the
right beliefs, especially when they are implausible, shows that you
committed to the group and therefore loyal. Many groups have such
beliefs.
An example is “American exceptionalism,” which people often
take to mean that the United States is a uniquely wise and virtuous
nation. To hail the United States as “the exceptional nation” or “the
indispensable nation” is to declare one's loyalty to the country, its
people, and its system of government.
Other examples are more personal. If asked to identify “the best
wife in the world,” a sensible man replies without hesitation that his
own wife holds that honor. And she might indeed be a remarkable
person. The absurdity comes from the notion that there is any reasonable basis to choose one woman as “the best wife” (or one man as “the
best husband”). Likewise, some people might claim that their college,
club, or city is uniquely important and interesting, and they will find
no one among their friends and neighbors to disagree. But they aren’t
stating any facts. They’re expressing loyalty to their group, which
might – but need not, by itself – also imply hostility toward other
groups.
Human beings are more than just animals: We are thinking beings.
However, our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors have been fine-tuned
by millennia of evolution to help us survive, act successfully based on
accurate factual analysis, and work together in social groups. Beliefs
do a variety of things for us. But which of those things can justify our
holding beliefs, and when?
It is to those questions that we turn in the next chapter.
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Chapter 9:
What Justifies Beliefs
“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything
upon insufficient evidence.”
-- W.K. Clifford
WHEN MOST PEOPLE THINK ABOUT what justifies beliefs, they come up
with the same answer: A belief is justified if there is adequate logical
support or empirical evidence for its truth.
But that’s a special case of a more general principle. Two factors
determine the kind of justification a belief requires: what kind of a
belief it is, and what functions it performs.
When people have difficulty, it’s often because they tried to apply
one kind of belief to a different kind of problem, or tried to apply one
standard of justification to a different kind of belief.
Almost everyone makes two crucial errors when thinking about
belief. Those errors mislead them about how beliefs are justified.
First, people assume that beliefs are purely mental. We discussed
this error in Chapter 2. Mental states are private to the person who
has them. Nobody else can know what they are. If beliefs are mental
and private, then they have no public functions, don’t involve behavior, and don’t affect other people. Ordinary moral considerations
don’t apply to them.
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Second, people assume that beliefs only assert things about the
world. Even people who know that beliefs have other functions tend
to fall back to “assertions only” when they think about how beliefs are
justified. If belief’s only function is to assert things, then the only kind
of justification is the kind appropriate for making assertions.
However, as we saw in the previous chapter, belief has many
other functions. The standard of justification appropriate for making
assertions doesn’t apply to beliefs whose main purpose is non-factual,
such as beliefs signifying loyalty or providing psychological support.
It does apply to factual beliefs that also perform non-factual functions.
However, in that case, other standards apply as well, so we’re back to
our balancing act.
Conventional wisdom about justification
The idea that beliefs can only be justified by logic and empirical evidence has a long pedigree, both as common sense and as part of the
Western intellectual tradition. Saadia Gaon, who we discussed in an
earlier chapter, said that belief could be justified by four kinds of evidence: observation, intuition that some things are self-evident, reasoning, and tradition. Other thinkers, both religious and secular, have
given similar lists.
In his book Jerusalem, Moses Mendelssohn alluded to the view:
“[Beliefs,] by their very nature, permit no coercion or bribery. They
belong in the realm of man’s cognitive faculty and must be decided
by the criterion of truth or untruth.”
Because Mendelssohn held a naïve theory of truth, his criterion
means that beliefs can be justified only by appeal to logic and empirical evidence. He ruled out any role of good or bad consequences in
justifying belief (“no coercion or bribery”) – even though he elsewhere specifically endorsed considering such consequences.
In passing, note that even when we justify beliefs by looking backward at logic and evidence, we verify or disprove the same beliefs by
looking forward at their results. If we have good evidence that the
grocery store is two miles north on Ditch Road, we justify the belief
by looking backward at the evidence. But if we then drive two miles
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north on Ditch Road and find a forest, the result of acting on our belief
invalidates the previous justification, so we reject both it and the belief.
For modern skeptics, the gold standard of logical purity is the
preachment of mathematician W.K. Clifford (1845-1879) in his essay
“The Ethics of Belief.” And it really was a preachment: his text sizzles
with fire-and-brimstone religious fervor. After giving examples of
tragedy or injustice resulting from factual beliefs that were based on
inadequate evidence, Clifford concluded that:
“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything
upon insufficient evidence.”
Then he channeled the intensity of 18th-century American
preacher Jonathan Edwards’s sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God:”
“If someone believes without adequate evidence, ‘the life of that
man is one long sin against mankind.”
Or as Edwards (1703-1758) put it:
“The Wrath of God burns against them, their Damnation don’t
slumber, the Pit is prepared, the Fire is made ready, the Furnace is
now hot, ready to receive them, the Flames do now rage and glow.”
Clifford thought that belief is sacred and must not be defiled by the
logically wicked:
[Belief] “is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned
statements, for the solace and private pleasure of the believer; to
add a tinsel splendour to the plain straight road of our life and display a bright mirage beyond it; or even to drown the common sorrows of our kind by a self-deception ...”
To be fair to Clifford, he makes real arguments when he’s not hyperventilating or foaming at the mouth. He argues correctly that factual beliefs are justified by factual evidence. I agree on that point, but
I would add that the amount of evidence we need, and the care with
which we are obliged to collect and evaluate it, depend on the consequences of our being wrong.
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One of Clifford’s examples tells of a man who owned a sailing ship
and wasn’t sure if it was seaworthy. Instead of investigating the ship’s
condition and repairing it, he hoped it would be good for at least one
more voyage. The ship sank, and people died. Certainly, in the case of
such a factual belief, factual evidence is required to justify it. If the
consequences of error are serious, as in the example, then I would argue it’s not the sin of unwarranted belief at issue, but that of ignoring
risks to life. In any case, more evidence and investigation are required.
Clifford simply doesn’t address non-factual beliefs or non-factual
functions of belief. The idea seems not to have occurred to him. He
does write about religious belief, but he doesn’t talk about justification
of religious belief per se. He does little more than recite familiar denunciations of “barbaric” doctrines about vengeful gods, sacrifices,
and so on. Therefore, his writings about religious belief are not relevant here.
Justification backward and forward
As previously noted, conventional views of belief justification have in
common that they see belief (1) as mental, (2) only for asserting
things, and (3) only backward-justified. Justification of beliefs comes
before the beliefs, both logically and in time.
But we’ve argued that belief consists mainly of verbal and nonverbal behavior. In other words, to hold a belief is normally to do
something. Belief is not a special kind of thing, off in a corner, governed only by its own rules. To believe something is to do something.
And what we do is governed, among other things, by moral concerns.
If belief is mainly behavior, then let’s ask: What justifies any human behavior?
For thousands of years, people have given two basic answers:
•
The behavior is justified because it fulfills a duty that we intuitively know is required. This answer is called deontological.
•
The behavior is justified because it produces good results. This
answer is called utilitarian.
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Both are good answers, but they apply in different situations. And
for biological, psychological, or cultural reasons, some people prefer
one over the other.
So what about belief that's mainly behavior? In that case, the answers are the same as for any other kind of behavior:
• Deontological: The belief is justified because of the kind of
belief it is: supported by logic and empirical evidence. This is
backward-looking, toward the evidence.
•
Utilitarian: The belief is justified because it generally (not
necessarily in every case) produces good results. This is forward-looking, toward the results.
The arbitrary distinction between deontology and utilitarianism
It’s worth noting that the division between deontological and utilitarian justifications is arbitrary. Both are ultimately based on moral intuitions that people take as axiomatic and as not requiring proof:
• On deontological grounds, actions are considered right (or
wrong) because the actions or the rules they follow intuitively
seem right.
Hardly anyone feels a need to argue that it’s right to help the
needy and wrong to lie. It just seems obvious – that is, our
intuition tells us it’s true without requiring any proof.
•
Utilitarian results are considered good (or bad) because the
results intuitively seem that way.
Hardly anyone feels a need to argue that pleasure is good and
pain is bad. It just seems obvious – that is, our intuition tells
us it’s true without requiring any proof.
In Chapter 4 of his book Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill (18061873) did give a loose argument that happiness was good. He said that
because all people desire their own happiness, two conclusions follow.
First, he argued that because happiness is desired, it is desirable. But
he confused the fact that we are able to desire happiness with the belief that we ought to desire it. “Desirable” meaning “able to be desired”
is quite different from “desirable” as “ought to be desired.” Second, he
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argues that since we all desire our own happiness, we also desire the
general happiness of everyone. But this is sleight of hand (and a fallacy
of composition) since everyone experiences only his or her own happiness and has no direct stake in the happiness of others.
No matter how many arguments are made for it, even the most
sophisticated ethical theory is based at least partly on subjective moral
intuitions of the people who believe in it.
Maimonides on backward and forward justification
No less a thinker than Maimonides knew there was more than one way
to justify beliefs, though he could never explain it because of his
flawed definition of belief. In Part III of The Guide for the Perplexed,
he distinguished between beliefs that are true and beliefs that are necessary. True beliefs are backward-justified by logic and evidence. Necessary beliefs (even if also backward-justified) are forward-justified
by their good results:
“In some cases a commandment communicates a correct belief,
which is the one and only thing aimed at-as, for instance, the belief
in the unity and eternity of the Deity and in His not being a body. In
other cases the belief is necessary for the abolition of reciprocal
wrongdoing or for the acquisition of a noble moral quality-as, for
instance, stance, the belief that He, may He be exalted, has a violent anger against those who do injustice ...”
Necessary beliefs might or might not be true. Some of them, such
as the belief that God gets angry at the perpetrators of injustice, were
to Maimonides either false or metaphorical. In any case, they fell
roughly into the category of what the Greek philosopher Plato called
“noble lies.” They were “lies” because he thought they were false; “noble” because they had good social and moral results. Maimonides saw
their truth as being almost irrelevant, since their justification (or lack
thereof) was in their results.
Factually correct beliefs are based on logic and evidence, and
might not have any utilitarian value. Maimonides seems to have
thought that factual beliefs often had no such value. They were
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backward-justified by the logic and evidence from which they could
be deduced.
It’s complicated
Justification of human actions can be complex, and the same applies
to justification of beliefs.
For example, a general moral principle says that we should tell the
truth. That is justified both deontologically and on utilitarian grounds.
People feel intuitively that telling the truth is better than lying. And
as for results, if most people didn’t tell the truth most of the time, then
society and human relationships would be impossible. Nobody would
ever believe what anyone else said. That would prevent people from
cooperating for their mutual benefit.
Truth-telling is kind of a standard example to illustrate moral reasoning, but let’s go a little bit off the map. In his book The Righteous
Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes some stories he made up
to test people’s moral reasoning. Consider this story:
A woman is cleaning out her closet, and finds her old American
flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces
and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.
Or this one:
Jennifer works in a hospital pathology lab. She’s a vegetarian for
moral reasons— she thinks it’s wrong to kill animals. But one night
she has to incinerate a fresh human cadaver, and she thinks it’s a
waste to throw away perfectly edible flesh. So she cuts off a piece of
flesh and takes it home. Then she cooks it and eats it.
Did the people in the stories do anything wrong? On utilitarian
grounds, no. What they did was fine. No living person was harmed,
and they got a benefit from their actions. They believed that what they
did was fine. But for most of us, their actions just seem wrong somehow. They make us uncomfortable. We can’t quite believe that they’re
morally acceptable.
Those examples show how actions can be justified one way (producing benefit) and unjustified another way (intuitively seeming
wrong). Let’s consider a different example that’s fairly standard in
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studies of moral psychology. In the “trolley dilemma,” the only way
you can stop a runaway train from killing five people is by pushing
one person off a bridge onto the track below.
On utilitarian grounds, the right action is as clear as it is unintuitive and disturbing: Sacrifice one life to save five lives. Cost: one life.
Benefit: Five lives. Net benefit: Four lives. It’s the kind of moral calculation we might expect from a computer, not from a human being.
On deontological grounds, it’s a lot tougher. We feel intuitively
that we should save five lives, but we also feel intuitively that we
should not kill an innocent person. We’re conflicted and confused.
We don’t know what to do.
The point of these stories is not to discourage flag-cutting, cannibalism, or trolley travel. Judge them on their merits. The point is that
justification is complex. Our behavior can be justified in some ways
while at the same time unjustified in other ways. The same thing applies to belief.
For example, suppose a man believes that exercising and eating a
healthy diet will help prevent him from going bald. His belief is probably false, but it’s not directly falsifiable. If he does those things, he
can’t know how much hair would fall out if he didn’t do them. Some
of his hair might still fall out, but he assumes that healthy habits reduce
his hair loss even if they don’t eliminate it. His doctor might obliquely
encourage the belief but avoid saying that it is correct. If the man made
a diligent study of the relevant scientific literature, he would find little
support for his belief. So is his belief justified or not?
• Looking backward at the evidence, his belief is not justified.
•
Looking forward at the results -- better health in general -- his
belief is justified.
•
Then the question becomes: On balance, overall, is his belief
justified?
There’s no simple, cookie-cutter answer. The answer depends on
whom you ask, and on that person’s intuitive values. Which is more
important, evidence or results? It’s complicated. And it depends.
Moral judgment depends on both reason and emotion; that’s why
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people with certain kinds of brain damage show poor judgment even
if their logical intelligence is intact.
When we evaluate anything -- ice cream, political candidates, beliefs, or whatever -- we usually follow three steps:
• Perceiving what we think are the facts. (We’re often careless
about this step.)
•
Deciding how we feel about what we think are the facts.
•
Applying general moral rules to justify how we feel about
what we think are the facts.
Moral judgments involve both complicated factual situations and
possibly conflicting feelings about those situations. That’s why people
disagree with other people, and even on occasion with themselves.
Remember that an emotion is both a mental and a biological reaction to some situation. The biological side of our reaction heavily influences the mental side, and the biological side was programmed into
us by natural selection. We have certain moral emotions because they
had survival value for our ancestors. Other prehistoric people who
had different, unhelpful moral emotions were eliminated by natural
selection because their feelings either didn’t help them survive to produce offspring or actively hurt their survival and reproduction
chances.
Our basic moral intuitions are prima facie helpful because if they
weren’t, our ancestors who had them would not have succeeded in the
evolutionary struggle.
Misapplying justification
To assess a belief’s justification, it’s necessary to use the appropriate
standards of justification. Sometimes, more than one standard applies.
Those cases are the most challenging. Let’s look at a couple of examples in which we might apply the wrong standard.
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Consider this example of a logical argument:
1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
To any normal person, the validity of the argument is obvious. If
all members of the group “men” are mortal, and Socrates is a member
of the group “men,” then Socrates is mortal. If you want to justify your
belief that Socrates is mortal, then you have two ways to do it:
• Refer backward to the premises of the argument: All men are
mortal, and Socrates is a man.
•
Shoot Socrates and see if he dies. This method is not recommended. Ancient Athenians tried a variation on it and they
got a lot of bad publicity.
What’s not valid in this case is to refer to the moral results of the
belief. It’s a purely factual belief. Whether it’s good or bad for Socrates
to be mortal is irrelevant. That’s not the appropriate standard of justification.
Consider another example. Believing that we can achieve our
goals is almost a necessary condition for achieving them. If we don’t
believe that we can do it, then we won’t even try, or at best we’ll try
half-heartedly. As American industrialist Henry Ford said, “Whether
you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
Before you have actually achieved your goal, can you prove that
you’ll be able to do it? No, and even less can you offer a logical proof
like you would have to give for a geometric theorem. The justification
of your belief is in its results. If it helps you achieve your goal, then
your belief was justified. That’s the appropriate standard of justification. To criticize such a belief as “unproven” is to miss the point of
that kind of belief and what justifies it.
In his book The American Republic, 19th-century political theorist
Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) offered a similar justification for political revolutions. According to Brownson, results were what mattered: if a revolution succeeded, then it was justified; if it failed, it was
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unjustified. But note that this is also a mixed case. A revolution might
succeed and be justified in that way, but cause terrible suffering and
install a regime that was far worse than the old one. And looking backward at moral principles, it would – as all revolutions do – result in
the killing of innocent people, which is wrong. As in many cases, justification is complicated.
Is factual truth intrinsically good?
The principal objection to justifying beliefs by their results is that it
slights the importance of factual truth. But does it?
Things can be good in two ways:
• Instrumentally good: These things aren’t good in themselves,
but they help you get good things. Money is a prime example.
You can’t eat it. You can’t wear it. You can only exchange it
for other things. That’s its value. It’s an instrument to get
other things that you consider good. (Misers and coin collectors are a special case.)
•
Intrinsically good: These things are good in themselves, and
not just as a way to get other things. We value them for their
own sake.
It’s surprisingly hard to find examples of things that are intrinsically good. Pleasure is often suggested as a candidate, but there are
problems even with that. John Stuart Mill puzzled over the question
of whether it was “better to be Socrates dissatisfied or a pig satisfied.”
If pleasure is intrinsically good, and a stupid pig has more pleasure
than wise Socrates, then the pig is better off and we should all want to
be pigs. Mill ultimately decided in favor of Socrates by claiming that
his pleasure was of a higher quality than the pig’s. But let’s leave those
problems aside.
We need intrinsic goodness to avoid an infinite regress, in which
everything is good because of something else but we never find out
what they’re all good for.
For practical tasks, such as designing airplanes or finding your
way to the grocery store, factual truth is important. And notice that
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even in those domains, the value of the truth is not in the truth itself:
it’s in the ability of accurate, truthful information to produce the results that we value: A plane that won’t disintegrate in mid-flight. Getting groceries. And so forth. In other words, truth is instrumentally
good. It helps us act successfully and get things we value.
Our feeling that there’s something intrinsically good about factual
truth is a deontological feeling, programmed into us by natural selection. Accurate factual knowledge helped our evolutionary ancestors
survive and reproduce, so we inherited a preference for accurate factual knowledge. However, modern human life is much more complex
than primitive humans’ life on the African savanna. As a result, the
kinds of goodness we can pursue, and the ways we pursue it, are more
varied. Our deontological feelings sometimes mislead us, and in the
case of truth, they do.
That being so, our obligations to believe or disbelieve are not
purely logical. They also involve considerations of social benefit, personal character, group loyalty, and self-definition. We may believe
things for logical reasons only, moral reasons only, or for both.
In some cases, moral reasons outweigh purely logical ones -- especially when our logical duties are not settled by the available evidence and the moral reasons are of great consequence. We are
sometimes morally justified in holding beliefs to which logic and evidence give little support. On the other hand, we can be logically justified in holding beliefs on the basis of overwhelming evidence even if
their results are negative. It depends on the balance between good and
bad.
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Chapter 10:
Belief in the Braino
Machine
“There is no spoon.”
-- “The Matrix”
WE’VE LOOKED AT WHAT BELIEFS ARE, what they do, and how they’re
justified. But that leaves some important questions unanswered:
What makes beliefs meaningful?
Consider “the book is on the table” vs. “it’s a good book.” Both are
meaningful but in different ways. If we don’t know how they’re meaningful, it’s easy for us to get confused about what they mean. For example, we might think that being good is like being on the table, and
that it’s related somehow to the position or physical properties of the
book. Believe it or not, people sometimes get confused about things
like that.
How can you know if beliefs are true?
This is more obviously important. If we don’t know how to determine if beliefs are true, then we can’t have confidence in any of our
beliefs. And there's one more important question:
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What does it mean for beliefs to be true?
In a way, this asks what our world is like. Is it really true, as Hamlet wondered, that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking
makes it so?” Or is there a reality beyond our beliefs that makes them
true or false?
The answers are the subtext of the 1999 movie “The Matrix.” The
movie got them from millennia of smart people thinking about those
questions. The next few chapters will answer them in more detail. In
this chapter, we’ll set the stage to make the answers easier to understand.
What if nothing you perceive is “real”?
The hero of “The Matrix” is Thomas Anderson, an employee at a
software company who spends his nights online as a hacker named
“Neo.” He discovers that the world he sees around him isn’t real. It’s
only an illusion created by wires attached to his brain. Even his own
body, as he perceives it, is an illusion. His real body sits in a pod that
extracts energy from it, in a dark chamber that uses billions of human
bodies as living batteries.
In one of the movie’s early scenes, Neo has to escape from agents
of the Matrix. He climbs out his office window onto a ledge high above
the city street. He believes that if he slips, he’ll fall to the pavement
and die.
But he’s not really on a ledge. He’s not high above the street. The
pavement isn’t even there, nor is his body. Even so, he has beliefs
about all of those things. As long as the virtual world around him stays
consistent with his previous experience -- as long as there’s no “glitch
in the Matrix” -- his beliefs seem true. But are they? Do they mean
what they seem to mean? And is he justified in believing them?
“The Matrix” is an entertaining movie, not a philosophy seminar.
It raises serious questions but doesn’t try seriously to answer them.
For millennia, some thinkers have tried to answer them.
Plato’s cave prisoners see shadows
The earliest known ancestor of “The Matrix” comes from ancient Athens. In his book The Republic, the philosopher Plato (427-347 BCE)
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told “the allegory of the cave.” For their entire lives, prisoners have
been chained in a cave where they face away from the entrance and
can’t see each other or themselves. As people outside the cave walk
past the entrance, they cast shadows on the wall faced by the prisoners. The shadows are the only reality that the prisoners have ever
known. They can hear each other, so they discuss the activities of the
shadows and theorize about them.
One of the prisoners escapes from the cave and makes his way to
the outside. Though at first blinded by the sunlight, he eventually realizes the truth: What he’s seen all of his life and took to be real were
only the shadows of people in the real world. He makes his way back
into the cave and tells the other prisoners what he discovered. He tells
them haltingly and with great difficulty, because even though he’s
seen the world outside, he has no words to describe it.
The other prisoners don’t understand what he’s talking about.
They don’t have any frame of reference for it. All of their ideas come
from thinking about shadows on the wall. The ideas of open space
with ground, sky, trees, and sunlight make no sense to them because
they can’t be translated into shadow-speak. They think that the returned prisoner must be insane.
Plato wanted to know the nature of our world. Is the world real
and substantial, or like a series of shadows on the wall of our cave?
Descartes thwarts his evil demon
Two millennia later, the French philosopher René Descartes (15961650) told a similar story but with a different question. He wanted to
discover if he could know anything for certain.
And he had a pretty high standard for what counted as certain.
What he perceived with his senses seemed pretty certain – but was it
really? In his Meditations on First Philosophy, he considered:
"... I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing a winter dressing-gown,
holding this piece of paper in my hands, and so on. Again, how
could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are mine?"
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What if he was asleep and was only dreaming about sitting by the
fire? The possibility meant that he couldn’t even be certain about what
he perceived at the moment.
The situation was even worse: What if (like Neo) he didn’t have a
body at all, and was only dreaming that he did? Sure, it was kind of a
goofy idea, but it wasn’t impossible. If it wasn’t impossible, then it was
possible that he was mistaken about having a body. The whole world
might be an illusion. It was possible that a malicious demon:
" ...has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think
that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not
having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things."
Was there anything at all that he could know for certain?
Just one thing, he thought: His mind existed, because if he could
doubt that his mind existed, then he had to have a mind with which to
doubt it. Whatever else might be doubted, he existed as a thinking being. He could know that for sure.
“Cogito, ergo sum!”
he cried, and leapt to his feet, startling the other patrons of the tavern
in which he’d spent the evening.
“Cogito, ergo sum” means “I think, therefore I am.” If he was
thinking, he had to exist.
Tragedy almost struck a few hours later when the tavern was
about to close. The bartender asked, “Would you like another drink,
Mr. Descartes?” Descartes pondered for a moment and then replied,
“I think not.”
Poof! He disappeared in a puff of logic. Luckily for us, he reappeared a moment later, laughing. It was one of his favorite party tricks.
We know that for certain.
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Reid’s common sense strikes back
The story of Descartes would be incomplete if I failed to mention his
most perceptive critic, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (17101796).
Descartes’ argument “I think, therefore I am” is usually considered a pretty good one, but Reid would have none of it.
Reid argued that certain assumptions were necessary for any
thought at all. As a result, you couldn’t prove them without circular
reasoning because in order to prove them, you first had to assume that
they were true. Such assumptions included your own existence, the
existence of the world, and the laws of logic.
According to Reid, it was crazy to reject such assumptions even if
they could never be proven. His book An Inquiry into the Human Mind
is where we get his devastating critique of Descartes.
“A man that disbelieves his own existence is surely as unfit to be
reasoned with as a man who believes he is made of glass. There may
be disorders in the human frame that may produce such extravagances, but they will never be cured by reasoning.”
Reid himself couldn’t quite believe that Descartes was serious:
“Descartes would make us believe that he got out of this delirium by
his logical argument Cogito, ergo sum. But it is evident he was in
his senses all the time, and never seriously doubted his existence.
He takes it for granted in his argument, and proves nothing at all. I
am thinking, says he, therefore I am: And is it not as good reasoning to say, I am sleeping, therefore I am? Or I am doing nothing,
therefore I am?”
As we’ve seen in earlier chapters, these arguments are philosophical stories. Neither Descartes’ view nor Reid’s can be proven conclusively. One story probably makes more sense to you than the other.
Or you might think that since neither story makes a practical difference, it just doesn’t matter. For practical purposes, you’d be right. It
doesn’t make any difference in how you live your life. But if you’re
curious about the world, the dilemma might bother you a little. It’s
bothered a lot of people, and it still does.
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Putnam puts brains in a vat
Plato’s allegory of the cave gets its best contemporary retelling by the
late Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926-2016). Although “The
Matrix” told a version of the story, its focus was on entertainment rather than on the philosophical problems it raised.
Putnam’s version is usually called “the Braino machine story.” All
people’s brains have been removed from their bodies and plugged into
the Braino machine.
Plato wanted to know what our world was like. Descartes wanted
to know if he could know anything for certain. Putnam wanted to
know how beliefs had meaning and what it meant for them to be true.
In Chapter 1 of Reason, Truth, and History, he explains:
"Suppose that the automatic machinery is programmed to give us
all a collective hallucination, rather than separate unrelated hallucinations. Thus, when I seem to myself to be talking to you, you
seem to yourself to be hearing my words. Of course, it is not the
case that my words actually reach your ears – for you don’t have
(real) ears, nor do I have a real mouth and tongue."
All of us in the Braino machine seem to perceive the same world,
but it’s a virtual-reality copy of the physical world instead of shadows
on the wall of a cave. We can communicate with each other, but we
can’t actually see each other or ourselves: we just believe that we do
because the Braino machine creates the illusion.
The only world we know is the world portrayed to us by the
Braino machine. When we see a tree, we’re not seeing a real tree;
we’re just getting the result of electrical impulses sent to our brains by
the machine. And when we believe that the tree is tall – what, exactly,
is our belief about? Is it about a tree, because that’s what we seem to
perceive? Or is it about an illusion?
A lot depends on how we got into the Braino machine and how
long we’ve been there. Based on Putnam's points, we can say that:
• If we previously lived in “the real world,” then we have seen
real trees, people, and so forth.
•
If we have always lived in the Braino machine, then we have
never seen real trees, people, and so forth.
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If we previously lived in the real world, then our ideas about it
were derived from real things. Our words and our beliefs refer to real
things even if we’re currently in the Braino machine looking at a series
of illusions. When we were children living in the real world, our parents pointed to a real tree and said, “That’s called a tree.” Now that
we’re in the Braino world, we think that when we see a “tree,” we’re
seeing at the same kind of thing as we learned about when we were
children. But it’s not. In that case, our beliefs about things in the
Braino world are simply mistaken.
If we have always lived in the Braino machine – like Neo at the
start of “The Matrix” – then our ideas about the world were derived
from illusions. When we were children living in the Braino world, we
perceived our parents pointing to one of the Braino reality’s virtual
trees and saying, “That’s called a tree.” As adults in the Braino world,
we think that when we see a “tree,” we’re seeing at the same kind of
thing as we learned about when we were children. And we are. Our
words and beliefs refer to the illusions. In that case, our beliefs about
the world are (or can be) correct.
To put it in terms of the allegory of the cave, the cave prisoners'
only experiences have been of shadows. They've formed their language and ideas based on the shadows they've seen. If they believe
something about "a man," they can't mean a real man because they've
never seen one. "A man," to them, means the shadow of a man, but
they don't even know it's a shadow because they don't have the concept of a shadow. They think it's the real thing. So if they see a shadow
of a man on the wall and believe, "that's a man," their belief is true.
Their concept of “a man” is that of a shadow. Their belief refers to a
shadow, and that's what it is.
As a result, neither the Matrix prisoners, the cave prisoners, nor
the Braino machine prisoners can refer to the real world or anything
in it. There might not even be a real world outside of the worlds created by the Braino machine. We only know that there is -- at least, we
think we know -- because we're not prisoners in the Matrix, the cave,
or the machine. We're outside of them.
And there’s the problem, according to Putnam:
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“... although the people in [the Braino] world can think and ‘say’
any words we can think and say, they cannot (I claim) refer to what
we can refer to. In particular, they cannot think or say that they are
brains in a vat (even by thinking ‘we are brains in a vat’).”
To believe that we are brains in a vat requires us to have some
concept of a world outside the vat: otherwise, saying that we are “in
the vat” has no meaning.
But if we are lifelong Braino prisoners, then even our idea of “outside” refers to illusory spatial relationships that we’ve perceived inside the Braino machine. Those perceptions were generated by the
machine, not by the real world. If we try to think about what’s outside
the reality created by the machine, we still end up thinking about the
reality inside the machine. Just like the prisoner who escaped from
Plato’s cave and returned, we have no language or concepts with
which to think about anything outside the reality created by the
Braino machine.
For us even to think that our perceptions are illusory and our beliefs mistaken is impossible. When we seem to see a tree, the tree we
see is the same kind of thing we’ve always seen when we saw a tree.
Our beliefs about the tree are about the same things they’ve always
been about. We aren’t wrong.
What we see is not an illusion: It’s exactly what we think it is. What
we believe is true, in the sense relevant for someone who has always
lived in the world of the Braino machine.
And we have no way to know if we’re in the Braino machine or
not.
That’s our predicament. By definition, the Braino machine creates
an illusion of reality so flawless that it contains no evidence of anything outside it. Since we can’t know if we are in the Braino machine
or not, all the conclusions about our beliefs that would apply in the
Braino machine also apply to us:
• Our ideas are derived from our experienced reality, not from
anything outside our experience.
•
Our words and beliefs refer to the reality we’ve experienced,
not to anything beyond it.
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To verify that a belief is true, we look at related experiences and
beliefs based on those experiences. We check to see if the belief is
consistent with them.
For a belief to be true means that it accurately describes the experiences to which it refers. Those experiences are shaped by our
thoughts and circumstances.
Meaning and truth cast their shadows
The next four chapters look at meaning, evidence, and truth in more
detail. But what can we learn from Plato’s cave, Descartes’s demon,
and Putnam’s machine?
From Plato and Descartes, we learn that what reality is and how
we perceive reality are not always the same thing. Our goal is to make
our perception of reality more accurate, but our concepts and circumstances can make it more difficult.
From Putnam, we learn that we can’t even talk about perceived
realities that transcend our experience because we have no language
or concepts with which to do it. To test a belief for truth, we look at
more experiences. For a belief to be true means that it’s consistent
with those experiences.
Let’s look again at the quote from “The Matrix” that begins this
chapter: “There is no spoon.”
It turns out that there really is a spoon after all. It’s just not the
kind of spoon we expected.
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Chapter 11:
How Beliefs Have
Meaning
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think
it means."
-- Inigo Montoya, “The Princess Bride”
THIS CHAPTER IS ABOUT HOW BELIEFS HAVE MEANING. And we’ll get to
that. But as a way into the topic, let’s start with a related question that’s
more familiar:
What is the meaning of life?
It's a good place to start because it reassures us that we're on the
right track. If our analysis applies to something as offbeat as the meaning of life, it probably applies to more conventional examples of meaning, such as "dog" or "the book is on the table."
The meaning of life is one of those questions that people have argued about for centuries without ever coming close to agreement. In
his novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, science fiction writer
Douglas Adams (1952-2001) showed why the argument has been difficult to resolve. Seriously.
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In the novel, a team of scientists built a powerful computer called
“Deep Thought” to answer the ultimate question of life, the universe,
and everything -- in other words, to tell them the meaning of life. But
in Chapter 28, when Deep Thought gave them the answer, they didn’t
understand it:
“’I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve
never actually known what the question is’ [explained Deep
Thought].
‘But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the
Universe, and Everything!’ howled Loonquawl.
‘Yes,’ said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools
gladly, ‘but what actually is it?’
A slow, stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the
computer and then at each other.
‘Well, you know, it’s just Everything … Everything …” offered
Phouchg weakly.
‘Exactly,’ said Deep Thought. ‘So once you know what the question
actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.’”
I won’t tell you Deep Thought’s answer: read Douglas Adams’s
book! However, if we know what the question is, then it can show us
how beliefs are meaningful.
Meaning starts with connection
The question played itself out in the life of John Stuart Mill (18061873), a philosopher and economist who is most famous for his book
On Liberty. He found meaning in life, then he lost it. Eventually –
through the love of a good woman, just like in a romance novel – he
found it again.
Mill was an activist as well as a thinker. From his early youth, he
wrote and campaigned for individual freedom, against arbitrary restraints on people’s ability to live as they wished.
His father was a political reformer with radical ideas about education, and he tested those ideas on his son. From infancy, Mill was subjected to intensive schooling. His father even hired tutors to speak
Ancient Greek in the nursery, so Mill learned it as a native language
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just like he did English.18 By his teens, he was writing articles about
political philosophy. His unusual education made his great mind even
greater, and psychologists estimate his IQ was over 200.
But all that knowledge and understanding came at a price. Mill had
become (in his words) “a reasoning machine” dedicated to political
reform as the purpose of his life. At age 20 in 1826, he asked himself
a question, and the answer devastated him:
"'Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the
changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward
to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a
great joy and happiness to you?'" ' And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'No!'
At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my
life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been
found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to
charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the
means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for."
Then what’s really the question?
For Mill, the meaning of life was to work for the achievement of
his social and political ideals. His life was meaningful because he connected it to things he valued:
• His goals of a free society, the rule of law, and enlightened
social institutions.
•
His activities to help achieve those goals in the future.
•
His pride in past accomplishments to achieve those goals.
Notice two key clauses: "he connected" and "he valued." Both of
those clauses indicate that a conscious mind has done something. Another person might see no connection between his or her life and the
rule of law, but Mill did see it for his own life. And what we value
depends on us: our background, experiences, and psychology.
18
Until the late 20th century, educated people in Western civilization were expected
to have at least some familarity with Ancient Greek language and literature.
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The reason nobody can answer "What is the meaning of life?" is
that it has no single answer. It's like asking "What is the height of the
people in New York?" There are many answers.
The question is really this:
What does person X value enough to feel that it makes his or her
life worth living?
As expected, it implies consciousness (the person is aware of
something), connection (the person connects it to his or her life), and
valuation (the person values it).
So the first lesson of Mill's example is that meaning depends on
consciousness. If nobody is aware of them, things have no meaning.
They get meaning only when a person bestows it on them by connecting them to other things.
Since you're reading this book, you and most of your acquaintances probably value some of the same things as Mill. They're meaningful because you connect them with ideas and experiences you
know. But if you ask most people what they think about the rule of
law, they'll either have no idea of what it is or they'll think it's about
being tough on criminals. It's not a meaningful idea to them because
they have no knowledge or experience with which to connect it.
The second lesson of Mill's example is more subtle: meaning is a
matter of degree. The more connections we make to something, the
more meaningful it becomes to us. The fewer we make, the less meaningful it becomes to us. Consider what would happen to the meaning
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of Mill's life if he had only goals and pride, but wasn't actually doing
anything to accomplish his goals. Then all of his talk about freedom
would be just hot air, and his pride would be less justified:
I call that "the take-away test." If something has meaning, but the
meaning changes when you take away a certain thing, then what you
took away was part of the meaning. If something has more connections for us, it tends to be more meaningful to us. If it has fewer connections, it tends to be less meaningful.
Mill’s drama had a happy ending. He recovered from his depression in 1830, when he fell in love with Harriet Taylor (1807-1858).
That restored his zest for life. They had only a platonic friendship until
her husband died in 1849, whereupon they married. In the dedication
of On Liberty, published after her death, he said that she was:
"the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings— the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right
was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief
reward ... Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one-half
the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave,
I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely
to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted
by her all but unrivalled wisdom."
And notice what happened. Initially, Mill felt that his life had
meaning -- had value -- because he connected it to goals, activities, and
pride that he valued. When he ceased to value them, his life's value
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connection was broken. His life regained value when he connected it
to something new that he valued, his relationship with Harriet Taylor.
His life got value partly by connection to something else that had
value. When we talk about truth in Chapter 13, we'll see a similar process at work for various kinds of true beliefs.
The meaning of life and the meaning of truth
Connections that make our lives meaningful are similar to those that
make beliefs factually true. The former make our lives meaningful by
connecting them to things we value, like this:
If x, y, and z are true, then I feel good about myself and my life.
In Mill’s case, x (goals), y (activities), and z (pride in accomplishments) made him feel good about himself and his life.
The latter make beliefs factually true in various ways by connecting
them to things that produce results we value, like this:
If a, b, and c are true, then I can get to the store by driving north
on Ditch Road.
How much meaning a thing has depends on the number of connections it has. But what kind of meaning it has depends on the kinds of
connections.
The meaning of life affects how we feel about our lives, so we connect our lives to things about which we have feelings -- in other
words, to things we value. The meaning of factual truth has to do
with how to predict the results of our actions, so we connect it to
things we can perceive, do, or experience in the world. Chapter 13
discusses truth in more detail.
Defining meaning
We’re now in a position to define meaning in general. When we talk
about the meaning of life, we’re talking about the connections that individual people make between their lives and some things that they
deeply value. And meaning in general is similar. If something has
meaning, we connect it with other things. Let’s review some of the
facts we’ve identified:
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•
A thing has meaning if we connect it to other meaningful
things.
•
A thing becomes more meaningful by having more connections in a larger network that covers more of reality and is
more internally consistent, and less meaningful otherwise.
Based on those facts, we can define the meaning of a thing for a
person (a mind) as its set of connections to other things with which
the person associates it. Moreover, anything can have meaning if a
person can perceive, imagine, talk about, act on, or understand it.
Different kinds of meaning connections
We connect meaningful things to each other in a variety of
ways. Some of the most common types of connections are:
•
Mere associations: You might remember the restaurant
where you had your first date. Thinking of the restaurant reminds you of the pleasant (or anxious) feelings you had.
•
Logical implications: These can be either direct or indirect.
Different thinkers use different terminology, but they always
distinguish between what we know "by intuition of the intellect" (direct implication) and what we know "by inference"
(indirect implication).
•
Direct implications: For example, if a thing is colored, it occupies space; or if a whole number is even, it cannot be odd.
You don't need to think about it.
•
Indirect implications: You can see by indirect implication
that if all humans are mortal and Socrates is human, then he
must also be mortal. You apply rules that guide you through
steps from one to the other. Each step is a direct implication.
Different kinds of meaning
The kinds of meaning something has depend on the kinds of things to
which we connect it, such as:
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•
Linguistic meaning: We connect it to equivalent expressions
in one or more languages.
•
Ostensive meaning: We connect it to perceivable things to
which we can point.
•
Emotional meaning: We connect it to things about which we
have feelings. For Mill, the things were his goals, activities,
pride, and later, his love for Harriet Taylor. For people of various religions, the things are the texts, symbols, and rituals of
their faiths.
•
Factual meaning: We connect it to things we could achieve
or discover by following specific procedures. (The fancy
name for this is “empirical” meaning.) For example, I have no
particular feelings about “the store is on Ditch Road,” but I can
arrive at the store if I follow the appropriate steps. A doctor
might have no feelings about the fact that antibiotics cure
some diseases, but administering the antibiotics can produce
that result.
•
Moral meaning: We connect it to rules that tell us how we
should behave in order to be good people. For example, moral
rules tell us not to lie, steal, or cause needless pain to other
conscious beings (both people and lower animals).
What things mean, as opposed to the kinds of meaning they have,
depends on the set of connections they have.
Does our definition do what it should?
As with belief, we want a definition that matches our intuitive sense
of what we mean by “meaning.” The reason is not that we’re preoccupied with words, but because we want our definition to be about what
we think it’s about. Our definition should meet essentially the same
criteria as we discussed for belief:
• Requirement #1: Pick out all the cases we’d ordinarily call
“meaning.” If we would say that “X means Y,” then the definition should apply to that case. It should cover all the things
we consider meaningful: words, phrases, statements,
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questions, experiences, relationships, physical phenomena,
and so forth.
•
Requirement #2: Pick out only the cases we’d ordinarily call
“meaning.” If we would not say that “X means Y,” then the
definition should not apply to that case.
Does our definition of meaning satisfy those requirements? We
can’t be totally certain, since it’s always possible that someone will
come up with a counter-example: either a meaningful thing to which
our definition doesn’t apply, or a meaningless thing to which it does
apply. But let’s look at a few examples to increase our confidence in
the definition:
• “John” means John. We connect the word to a person we either see or remember.
•
John means trouble. We connect the word to trouble because
John is a bill collector.
•
“Kaffee” means coffee. We connect the word to a life-giving
brown elixir that we quaff on arising in the morning.
•
“Disinterested” means “impartial” or “unbiased.” We connect
the word to other words that have the same or similar meanings.
•
“Ich brauche Kaffee” means “I need coffee.” We connect the
statement to an equivalent statement in different words.
•
Dark clouds mean that rain is coming. We connect the experience of seeing dark clouds to our memory of dark clouds
being followed by rain.
•
If John is 40 years old and Sarah is 35, it means that John is
older than Sarah. We connect the premises to the conclusion
by rules that seem self-evident.
The Morning Star versus the Evening Star
Defining meaning as a thing's set of connections solves a classic problem about meaning: the problem of "the Morning Star" and "the Evening Star."
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Both phrases refer to the planet Venus, which appears in the Eastern sky in the morning and in the Western sky in the evening. They
use different words and you can know the meaning of one without
knowing the meaning of the other. They refer to the same thing, but
they have different meanings. How is that possible?
The German philosopher Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) solved the
problem by distinguishing between linguistic expressions’ denotation
and their "sense:"
• An expression's denotation is the thing to which it refers, such
as the planet Venus.
•
An expression's sense is an equivalent word, phrase, or sentence. For example, the sense of "your house" is "the house in
which you live."
Frege’s distinction got halfway to the solution of the problem. He
realized that expressions could derive meaning both from connections to what they denoted and from connections to other words or
phrases that said the same thing as they did.
We get all the way to the solution when we define meaning as a
thing's set of connections to other meaningful things, including objects, feelings, memories, and linguistic expressions. A phrase like "the
Morning Star" has a different meaning from "the Evening Star" because it has a different set of connections:
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Look at what contributes to the meanings of the two phrases. We
have:
• A verbal description
•
Perceptual experiences of seeing
•
Memories
•
Non-verbal behavior
•
Speech
If you take away any of those things, it decreases the meaning of
the phrases “the Morning Star” and “the Evening Star.” If you add
things, it increases their meaning. We’ll examine that issue in more
depth a bit later.
And we’ve solved our astronomical problem. The descriptions
“the Morning Star” and “the Evening Star” denote the same object, but
they have different meanings because they are in different places in
the network of expressions, experiences, and behaviors. In addition
to the denotation that they share, each points to a different set of other
things and is pointed to by a different set of other things: that is, each
has a set of connections different from the other.
Meaning of general words and concepts
General words and concepts enable us to think efficiently and accurately. Consider an example. Here’s a list of numbers:
08253704915761928346
Did you read it? Now cover the list and write it on a piece of paper.
Very few people can do it. But let me give you the same numbers
again:
00112233445566778899
You can do it this time. Why? Two reasons.
First, you were able to group the numbers, which reduced from
20 to 10 the number of items you had to remember. General words
and concepts let you group related cases, just as you did with the list
of numbers. It makes your thinking easier and more efficient.
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Second, you saw the pattern (0 to 9, with each number repeated).
That reduced the number of items to remember from 10 to three: the
starting number, the ending number, and the pattern.
You could do that because you’re intelligent. Together with opposable thumbs and coffee, it’s what distinguishes humans from the
rest of the animal kingdom.
Consider another example: "Dogs bark and cats meow." Apart
from stylistic variations, there’s only one way to say it. It’s easy. It’s
efficient. It takes five seconds and not much brainpower.
But suppose for a moment that a few Chihuahuas find that statement insulting. They don’t like being lumped together with German
Shepherds, Bulldogs, and Collies.
A few Siamese cats are also in high dudgeon about it. They don’t
like being lumped together with British Shorthairs, Persians, and
American Bobtails.
Therefore, to avoid offending Chihuahua dogs and Siamese cats,
you must henceforth identify the dog and cat breeds any time you talk
about dogs and cats.
There are 340 breeds of dog and 73 breeds of cat. Suppose that
you now want to say (or think) “Dogs bark and cats meow.”
You can’t say that anymore. It’s hurtful and politically incorrect.
It means you hate Chihuahuas and Siamese cats.
Instead, you must enumerate all the combinations of breeds:
• “Labrador Retrievers bark and British Shorthairs meow.”
•
“Siberian Huskies bark and Bengal cats meow.”
•
“Beagles bark and Turkish Angora cats meow.”
•
… and so on.
You end up with 340 x 73 = 24,820 statements you’ll have to make
in order to say “Dogs bark and cats meow.” In order to make Chihuahuas and Siamese cats feel better about themselves, we have made it
almost impossible to speak or think effectively about dogs and cats.
In summary:
•
General words and concepts make our thinking more efficient
and accurate.
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•
Humanity has the general words and concepts it does because
they have proven practical for millennia in all kinds of societies.
•
General words and concepts that weren’t practical have disappeared because nobody wanted to use them, or because societies that used them died out.
•
To prevent people from thinking clearly about a subject, require them to use general words and concepts that are unintuitive, numerous, impractical, and more complicated than
necessary. Redefine the words frequently, so that no one can
be sure what anyone else is trying to say. Or simply leave the
words undefined.
Meaning for groups of people
What about groups of people? That’s pretty important. In order to
communicate and live in peace with one another, they must have
some meanings in common, even if their meanings don’t match exactly. This might be a little confusing, so we’ll first look at the general
ideas and then look at a simple example.
Suppose that we have a group of four people to whom the word
“fribbit” is meaningful. The word’s meaning to each of them individually consists of these connections:
•
Frank: (A, B, C)
•
Riff: (A, B, C)
•
Brad: (A, C)
•
Janet: (A, C, D)
The meaning of a thing for a group is the intersection of the thing’s
meanings for all the members of the group. In other words, it’s the set
of meaning connections that every one of the group members has for
“fribbit:”
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The intersection of the meanings of all the members of the group
is (A, C). That’s the group meaning, so all members of the group can
communicate about the A and C aspects of fribbits.
That’s rather abstract, so let’s translate it into an example. Suppose that everyone in the group uses “fribbit” to refer to what we’d
call “rabbits.” They all know that rabbits are (A) furry and (C) good
pets. Frank and Riff know that rabbits are also (B) cute. However, Janet is the only biologist in the group, so only she knows that (D) rabbits aren’t the same species as hares, and that they differ from hares
about as much as sheep differ from goats.
If Janet starts talking about the D aspect of fribbits (rabbits aren’t
hares), then nobody else in the group will understand her: she’s the
only one for whom that connection is part of the meaning of “fribbit.”
Frank and Riff can communicate about the A, B, and C aspects of fribbits. However, the rest of the group will think they’re talking only
about A and C, because those are the only meaning connections they
share with Frank and Riff. They will completely miss any references
to the cuteness (B aspects) of fribbits.
Conflicting meanings cause miscommunication
A more dangerous breakdown occurs when meaning connections
seem the same but are really different. Suppose that people have these
meaning connections for “fribbit:”
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Frank and Riff connect it to a very positive idea (B, rabbits are
cute), while Brad and Janet connect it to a very negative idea (b, Peter
Rabbit caused great suffering to the innocent farmer Mr. McGregor).
When Frank and Riff say nice things about fribbits because of B, Brad
and Janet think they’re endorsing b and that they want farmers to suffer. As a result, Brad and Janet believe that Frank and Riff maliciously
enjoy causing harm to other people.
For a more realistic example, a Muslim woman might consider
wearing a burqa to mean a commitment to peace and purity, while a
non-Muslim might consider it an endorsement of terrorism. A Virginian might see the Confederate flag as meaning heroism and independence, while a New Yorker sees it as meaning racism and slavery.
These examples show that things can be meaningful relative to
one system, but either:
• Have no meaning relative to a different network in which they
have no pointing connections to other things in the network;
or
•
Have a different meaning relative to a different network in
which they have different pointing connections to other
things in the network. This kind of disconnect can cause wars.
People use the same words but give different meanings to
them. They think they’re communicating, but they’re not; instead, they lead the other side to beliefs that are doomed to
disappointment, and that might be interpreted as betrayal.
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How "unbelievable" beliefs have meaning
Beliefs about God and the transcendent are more difficult to explain.
In Chapter 4, we looked at how the philosophers Saadia Gaon and
Maimonides struggled with belief. They both thought that:
• A belief is a mental representation of a real-world fact.
•
Our minds can only comprehend what is finite. We cannot
conceive of the infinite.
If Saadia and Maimonides had been atheists, those assumptions
wouldn't have caused them a problem. But they both believed in God.
They believed, as Saadia wrote in The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, that
God is infinite,
"so that it would be impossible to fathom [the idea of God] at all ...
what is infinite and endless cannot be embraced by the human
mind."
That leads directly to their problem, and to ours if we accept their
definition of belief:
1. To believe something is to represent it mentally.
2. We can only represent mentally what is finite.
3. God is not finite.
4. Therefore, we cannot represent God mentally.
5. Therefore, we cannot hold beliefs about God.
Modest belief gives better results
According to Maimonides, Saadia, and thinkers of other religions
(though they use different words), the transcendent is beyond our
perception or understanding. We cannot understand God, and we
cannot understand what our normal words mean when we apply them
to God.
Relative to our normal experience, to say that “God is good” is
equivalent to saying “Blank blank blank.” We are in the peculiar position of making a statement without understanding what it means, at
least in terms we know from observing our world.
This problem occurs with all religions that affirm the existence of
transcendent realities, though those most familiar to us in the West
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are Judaism, Christianity, and (increasingly) Islam. It goes back to a
question we discussed in Chapter 4:
Can we think about or talk about things we can’t even imagine?
Yes, we can.
Saadia, Maimonides, and other thinkers require for belief that we
represent facts mentally. However, in this chapter, we gave a more
modest definition of belief:
The meaning of a thing for a person is its set of connections to
other things with which the person associates it.
Based on that definition, we can hold beliefs about things we can’t imagine. The beliefs can be meaningful in two ways:
•
They can be meaningful by their pointing connections to each
other.
•
They can be meaningful by our associating them with imaginable things that have pointing connections to other imaginable things.
This resembles Spinoza's answer to how we can know about God.
He identified God with the universe (Deus sive natura), so the more
we knew about the universe, the more we knew about God. It was a
matter of degree, not an all-or-nothing dilemma as with Saadia and
Maimonides.
Similarly, on this book's definition of belief, the meaningfulness
of our beliefs about God is a matter of degree. It depends on the number and strength of connections to other meaningful things in our belief networks.
Meaning within a belief network
Let’s look at some beliefs about the transcendent, according to Maimonides:
• God exists.
•
God is one.
•
God is the creator of everything.
•
The first being created everything.
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The meaning network might look like this:
“God is one” points to “God exists” and “God is not two or three.”
God is the creator of everything, and the first being created everything; since God is one, therefore God is also the first being. And that
God created everything points to “God is powerful.”
If we believe Maimonides, we can’t know what any of those statements means outside of the transcendent meaning network. We can’t
know what they mean for our ordinary world because they don’t connect to our ordinary world at all. Even the words we use to describe
transcendent reality mean something different from what they mean
when we talk about ordinary reality.
However, we can know that our expressions for transcendent realities have pointing relations within the network. On that basis, they
have some meaning even to us. Of course, it’s a network “as seen by
us,” so we can’t even know for sure what the pointing connections
denote. But we can take our best shot, and make as much sense out of
it as we can.
The problem of meaning with mixed domains
Now we come to the trickiest problem in our survey of meaning. We
know what ordinary-world statements mean because they connect to
each other and to our experience. In a more limited way, we know
what transcendent-world statements mean because they connect to
each other -- even though their pointing connections are all we can
know about their meaning. The two domains do not connect to each
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other in any obvious way. Thus, within each domain, expressions
from the other domain are disconnected and meaningless.
Notice something else about statement-beliefs that apply to only
one domain: Their different parts connect to each other. For example,
consider a statement about the ordinary world:
John bought a car.
We know what all those terms mean, and moreover, we know
what they mean relative to each other. John is a human. “Bought” is
an activity that humans sometimes do. “A car” is a physical object that,
given enough money, we can buy. And consider a statement about
God:
God is omnipotent.
In terms of our ordinary world, we don’t know what “God” means.
We don’t know what “is” means: “God exists, but not through an existence other than His essence,” says Maimonides. We don’t know
what “omnipotent” means, since the idea leads directly to contradictions in our ordinary reasoning. Can God tie a knot that He cannot
untie?
However, we do know that in the transcendent domain, all those
terms are defined relative to each other and to other statements in
that domain. They are meaningful relative to each other, they form a
grammatically-correct statement, and the statement has pointing relations to other statements in the domain.
But what about statements that draw from both domains? From
the examples we’ve just looked at, we can see a problem immediately:
The words from the transcendent domain are not defined relative to
the words from the ordinary domain, and vice versa. The parts of the
statement don’t connect to each other.
Consider the canonical belief from the Bible’s Book of Exodus:
God gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai.
Let’s agree at the outset that the statement means something. It is
a statement in human language, and billions of people over two millennia have guided their lives partly by a belief in that statement. A
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theory that says the statement is meaningless is disproven immediately by the facts of human life and human history.
On the other hand, how can such a statement possibly be meaningful? It combines terms from both the transcendent and the ordinary domains. Terms in each domain are unconnected to terms from
the other, so the statement as a whole doesn't hang together.
How mixed-domain beliefs are meaningful
Remember that the meaning of a thing for a person is its set of pointing connections to other things with which the person associates it.
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Those associations can be either direct (thinking of John causes an
image of John to appear in our imagination) or indirect (thinking of
statements A and B leads to a conclusion C by direct steps, using rules
we can explain).
Taken literally, mixed-domain statements are logically incoherent. In that sense, therefore, they don't mean anything. But human
history, common sense, and our own experience show they do have
meaning somehow. Moreover, their meaning isn't confined to woozy
metaphors that might not say anything in particular. In their effects
on our lives and behavior, they often have meaning that is specific and
beneficial. But how? In three main ways:
• By simple faith: Unreflective people interpret the statements
literally, as referring to anthropomorphic beings and earthlike realities.
•
By anthropomorphic substitution: In practical situations,
even reflective people substitute simple, anthropomorphic
ideas of God for the more sophisticated ideas they use in other
contexts.
•
By value connection: Just as John Stuart Mill found value in
his life by connecting it to things he valued, other people can
find value and inspiration by connecting their lives to a transcendent "Something" that they value. People of simple faith
see the Something as an anthropomorphic Deity. More reflective people see the Something as an indefinable source of
comfort and courage.
Whether simple or reflective, substitution of anthropomorphic imagery enables believers to transform logically meaningless statements
into meaningful and helpful beliefs. This is what cognitive scientist Jason Slone observed in his book Theological Incorrectness:
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“While religious believers produce theologically correct ideas in situations that allow them the time and space to reflect systematically
on their beliefs, the same people can stray from those theological
beliefs under situational pressures that require them to solve conceptual problems rapidly ..."
Suppose that a man finds a lost wallet containing several hundred dollars in cash. He wants to decide on the morally correct course of action.
He imagines God as a white-robed father figure in the sky, Who
gave the Torah to Moses at Sinai and Who prescribed a demanding
moral code. What would the father figure want him to do? Naturally
— that is, supernaturally — God would want him to do the honest
thing and return the wallet.
The man is not trying to do theology: he’s trying to solve a practical problem. For him to “go full Maimonides” and start philosophizing
about God’s nature would mean he never gets around to returning the
wallet. Instead, he imagines a quick, highly inaccurate, indubitably
primitive image of God to tell him what to do. He gets the answer he
needs.
If you cornered the man in a theology class, he might give you a
sophisticated philosophical explanation; but that’s a different context
with a different purpose. In that situation, it’s just as unhelpful for him
to use a primitive father-figure image as it would be for him to use a
theological explanation of God in trying to decide about a lost wallet.
In each case, the thinking he does is appropriate for the problem
he is trying to solve, and his thinking is efficient in solving it.
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Chapter 12:
How the Ineffable
Leads to Religion
“The world becomes apprehensible as world, as cosmos, in the
measure to which it reveals itself as a sacred world.”
-- Mircea Eliade
IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, we saw how anthropomorphic substitution
connects the unknowable and transcendent reality of God (or whatever you call it) to our ordinary beliefs about the world.
We are now in a position to understand in more depth how the
same process leads to religion: to rituals, rules, institutions, and our
choices in personal conduct.
Our religious beliefs generally depend on realities whose content
we cannot describe or verify.
The fact that we can’t describe or verify such realities means we
can’t know, in any normal way, that they even exist. Different people
interpret them in conflicting ways. If we disagree with others about
them, neither we nor they can prove that an interpretation is correct.
Far too often in human history, such arguments end up with the frustrated participants trying to kill each other.
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There are at least three explanations for our varied intuitions
about ineffable realities:
• We sense only our own emotions, impulses, and fantasies, but
people interpret them differently based on their individual
beliefs, personalities, and cultural contexts.
•
We sense ineffable realities, but people interpret them differently based on their individual beliefs, personalities, and cultural contexts.
•
We sense both ineffable realities and our own emotions, impulses, and fantasies, but we cannot distinguish between them
so we combine them into an interpretation based partly on
reality and partly on our own fantasies.
Even most theists would concede that we sometimes mistake our
emotions, impulses, and fantasies for more than what they are. The
real question is whether or not we ever sense ineffable realities that
exist beyond our own feelings. By definition, such realities can't be
stated in any way that we could test scientifically. Therefore, reasonable people can believe in them or not. This book assumes that we do
sometimes sense such realities, even if they are often colored by our
feelings and fantasies.
Our unavoidable leap of faith
The challenge is to make the “leap of faith” from ineffable reality to
beliefs that say something about ourselves and our world.
Here’s why it’s a leap of faith. Consider a simple process of reasoning:
1. John owns a car.
2. Therefore, John owns something.
So far, so good. Whether it’s a good car or a piece of junk isn’t at issue.
Every step asserts a belief that is logically true or false. If the first step
is true, then the second step must be true.
But suppose that the first step referred to something transcendent
and ineffable. It wouldn’t assert anything that was logically true or
false:
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How the Ineffable Leads to Religion
1. Blah.
2. Therefore, John owns something.
As a logical argument, that just doesn’t work. We can’t rely on logic to
get us from the first step to the second. The first step gives us nothing
to work with. We could assume that if the first step is true, then the
second step must be true. But that doesn’t help us: the first step isn’t
true in any way we can understand. If we’re going to reach the conclusion, we must make a leap of faith.
Your own perceptual leap of faith
The “blah, therefore X” argument might seem like a silly example, but
here’s a surprise: You’re living in it right now, as you read this book.
Light waves hit the book page, which reflects them to your eyes.
The reflected waves go through the lenses of your eyes and hit your
retinas at the back of your eyes. In your retinas, cells for vision (rods
and cones) activate and fire in the same pattern as the reflected light
that hits them. Your optic nerves transmit the pattern to the visual
cortex at the back of your brain, which interprets it in ways that we
do not fully understand. From that process, you get sensations of light
and darkness corresponding to the text on the page.
The sensations by themselves can’t be true or false. They don’t
assert anything: they simply are. From those sensations – somehow –
you get words and beliefs that mean something.
You’ve had such experiences often enough to remember them.
Consider a simpler example.
Maybe you were just waking up, or the room was dimly lit. Your
eyes registered a color, but it took a couple seconds for your mind to
see it as the color. Your eyes gave you a sensation that was neither
true nor false. On the basis of the sensation (and other sensations),
your mind made a perceptual judgment that was true or false. From
“blah,” you deduced “that is blue.”
Of course, you didn’t make that inference consciously. You’re an
adult. From infancy, you’ve been taught to associate that particular
sensation with the sound “blue.” As soon as you have the sensation,
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your mind goes through a process that produces “blue.” It’s not yet a
process of reasoning, and it’s almost entirely unconscious:
1. Sensation pattern (eyes): blah.
2. Recognition (association): Your brain pops up a memory of
the sound “blue.”
Even now, we have only a partial explanation of how this happens. If we are repeatedly exposed to two sensory patterns
together, our brains form pathways between the memory of
one and the memory of the other. After that, when we’re exposed to one of the patterns, our brains send a message via the
pathway to retrieve the memory of the other. If you want to
know more about the process, look up “long-term potentiation.” Scientists used to believe that specific memories were
stored in specific brain locations, called engrams. However,
more recent research suggests that even specific memories
are distributed throughout the brain instead of being stored at
only one location apiece.
3. Perceptual association (almost true or false): That [sensation]
:: [memory of sound].
4. Explicit belief (true or false): “That is blue.”
The last step – from things that aren’t true or false to things that are –
is a little more complicated than the example shows. However, what
we’ve got is enough to make the point.
Every time you look at anything and recognize it as something,
you make the leap from blah to blue. Even if you don’t put it into
words and say, “That is X,” your recognition of it as something can be
mistaken. If it can be mistaken, then it’s true or false. It’s a belief.
Therefore, you start with things that aren’t true or false, and you
deduce things that are true or false. As a matter of logic, that’s not
allowed. But as a matter of how the world works, it’s very much allowed. It works for us very well. It enables us to survive and prosper.
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What makes associations true or false
Like a bare sensation, an association by itself isn’t true or false: it
simply is. It has the potential to become true or false, but not all by
itself. We need another factor. A simple change provides the missing
factor. Suppose that in the dimly-lit room, you only saw the color for
a second. You saw it, but you weren’t sure what it was:
1. Sensation (eyes): fuzzy image (blah).
You didn’t see it clearly, so the image was indistinct. You saw
it well enough for your brain to make some guesses.
2. Hypotheses (association): “blue”? “black”?
Your brain pops up memories of two sounds that might match
the indistinct image. The sounds (“linguistic pegs”) provide
entry into your system of language.
3. Sensation pattern (look again): “blue.”
You look again. This time, you pay careful attention to anything that might distinguish a sensation of blue from a sensation of black. You recognize it as blue.
4. Perceptual belief (true or false): “That-blue.”
The final step is true or false because it excludes other possibilities. It’s the existence of other possibilities that make associations true or false.
Notice that your recognition of the image as blue is true based on
the evidence you have in hand. Further evidence, however, could
prove you wrong. If your spouse walks into the room and flips on the
light, you might see that what looked blue or black was actually a light
brown stain on the ceiling from a roof leak.
For people with normal vision, the sensations of black, blue, and
light brown are different: we don’t need logic for that. It’s intuitive.
Therefore, our association “that-black” conflicts with the association
“that-blue,” and both of them conflict with "that-light-brown." As a
result, when we translate our sensations first into perceptual
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judgments and then into explicitly-stated beliefs, identifying an image
as one color conflicts with identifying it as some other color. From (4)
and a few other beliefs, we can logically conclude that:
• That is colored.
•
That occupies space.
•
That is not black.
If either the image isn't colored or it doesn't occupy space, then it can't
be blue. If the image is black, then it can't be blue. As a result of other
associations with which it could conflict, the association that-blue can
be mistaken. It can be mistaken because if we accept that-blue, then
we must accept that-colored, that-occupies-space, and that-not-black.
By its connections, it has become true or false.
Recall from Chapter 11 that a thing’s meaning is its set of connections to other things. We now start to see that its truth or falsity also
resides in those connections. Those connections not only give meaning to things like associations, but also make them true or false, and
provide the ways we can decide if they are true or false.
In order for something to be a true or false belief, it must at least
implicitly have a subject, predicate, and sometimes an object. When
an association has a connection, the original thing is the subject, the
connection the predicate, and the thing at the other end of the connection is the object. Multiply that connection and you’ve got a meaningful belief that can be true (consistent with its objects) or false
(inconsistent with its objects).
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How we leap into religion
How does the leap “from blah to blue” occur in religion? How do we
get from an unknowable transcendent reality to rules and rituals,
prayers and priests, synagogues and churches?
From our analysis in the previous chapter, the figure shows the
structure of the process:
The transcendent (1)
Our experience starts with an ineffable layer that has qualities we can’t
describe.
Different people vary in their ability to sense the transcendent
layer. Some people can’t sense it at all. Others sense it very strongly.
The former think the latter are superstitious. The latter think the former are spiritually barren.
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, referred to the difference between those two groups of people in his book Civilization
and Its Discontents. He recounted his correspondence with an “esteemed friend” for whom he obviously had some respect:
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"I sent him a little piece of mine that treats religion as an illusion,
and in his reply he said that he wholly agreed with my view of religion, but regretted that I had failed to appreciate the real source of
religiosity. This was a feeling of which he himself was never free,
which he had found confirmed by many others and which he assumed was shared by millions, a feeling that he was inclined to call
a sense of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded –
as it were ‘oceanic’."
Freud said that he “could discover no trace of this oceanic feeling”
in himself, but he summarized the situation as follows:
“It is a feeling, then, of being indissolubly bound up with and belonging to the whole of the world outside oneself … ... The only
question is whether it is correctly interpreted and whether it should
be acknowledged as the fons et origo of all religious needs.”
That is, of course, exactly the dilemma with which we now grapple. Some people have the feeling intensely, some people have a little
of it, and some people don’t feel it at all. The question is how to interpret those facts.
Theology (2)
Prophets associate words with the way they experience the layer and
its qualities.
Prophets and religious leaders put the words into statements and
relationships that are based on logic and ideas from ordinary human
life.
The statements and relationships have meaning relative to each
other. They can be understood within their own network, but not outside of it.
Bridging beliefs (3)
Prophets and religious leaders combine words and beliefs from Level
2 and from the normal world to create bridging beliefs between Level
2 and the normal world.
Prophets state bridging beliefs in terms of their own era’s concepts, cosmology, traditions, customs, and mores.
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The personalities of prophets and religious leaders also influence
what they state as bridging beliefs.
As historian Mircea Eliade observed in his classic book The Sacred
and the Profane, “Since the religious life of humanity is realized in history, its expressions are inevitably conditioned by the variety of historical moments and cultural styles.”
Moral beliefs (4)
Religious leaders codify moral beliefs, rituals, required behaviors, and
sacred dogmas backed by the authority of bridging beliefs.
They enhance the bridging beliefs by telling various stories about
their origins.
Why look for transcendence?
Why do people look for transcendence in the first place? There are
many reasons, but one of them is that they can’t find the answers they
need in their ordinary experience of the world.
Their quest for answers starts with the seen, such as night, day,
stars, moon, sun, youth, maturity, age, and death. Sometimes, the
earth shakes for no apparent reason. Sometimes, terrible storms or
epidemics occur. They know what happens, but not why.
To satisfy their need for a “why,” they infer the existence of unseen forces that can explain it. They explain the unseen in terms that
are familiar to them and their group, such as their history, dominant
psychologies, attitudes, and customs:
• Seen: Thunder, earthquakes, war, life, health, illness, death.
•
Anxiety: Why do bad things happen? How can we prevent
them? How can we make good things happen instead?
•
Need: Anxiety prompts a need for answers to restore feelings
of security and control.
•
Answers: Posit unseen forces (gods, God, etc.) to explain observed events.
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•
Down to earth: Bridging statements describe unseen forces in
anthropomorphic terms, prescribing rituals to make the
forces do good things and not bad things to the faithful.
Note that the worldview need not be religious in the traditional sense.
Mental illness, for example, was long ago explained as demon possession; then in a later era as moral failure; still later as a result of unhappy
childhood; and today, often, as an imbalance of brain chemistry. Each
era uses concepts that are widely accepted at the time.
How Judaism made the leap
Judaism provides one example of the leap from the ineffable to the
mundane. Jews look to the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) as their ultimate source of authority on religious questions.
The Torah makes a variety of statements about the transcendent, often combining primitive anthropomorphic imagery with sophisticated philosophical ideas. Exodus 19:3-4 shows the influence of
earlier Israelite beliefs that God was a mountain god similar to other
supposed deities of the Ancient Near East:
“The Lord called to [Moses] from the mountain, saying, ‘Thus shall
you say to the house of Jacob and declare to the children of Israel:
‘You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me.’”
Elsewhere, however, the Torah hints at God’s transcendence and ineffability. For example, Exodus 19:18-21:
"Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke … The Lord said to Moses, 'Go
down, warn the people not to break through to the Lord to gaze, lest
many of them perish.’”
Exodus 33:17-20 adds that even Moses, the greatest of the prophets,
could not see the unseeable:
“And the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will also do this thing that you have
asked; for you have truly gained My favor and I have singled you out
by name.’ [Moses] said, ‘Oh, let me behold Your Presence!’ And He
answered, ‘I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will
proclaim before you the name Lord, and the grace that I grant and
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the compassion that I show. But,’ He said, ‘you cannot see My face,
for man may not see Me and live.’"
In spite of its depth, the Torah provides few direct answers for practical questions of life. Over the centuries, ancient rabbis debated about
what Torah passages required or forbade people to do. The official
record of these debates is the Talmud, which constitutes “the Oral Torah.”
But how authoritative was the Oral Torah? Mainstream Jews believed that the written Torah was authoritative because God gave it to
Moses at Sinai. But if the Oral Torah was just some rabbis’ interpretations of the written Torah, then why should other Jews accept their
interpretations as, pardon the expression, “Gospel”?
The rabbis had an answer. At Sinai, God didn’t just dictate the
written Torah to Moses. He also dictated all the debates and interpretations that ancient rabbis would give in centuries to come. According
to Maimonides in his Introduction to the Mishnah:
“Every commandment that the Holy One, Blessed be He, gave to
Moses our Teacher, may he rest in peace, was given with its clarification. First, He told him the commandment, and then He expounded on its explanation and content, including all that which is
included in the Torah.”
Maimonides goes on to explain that after God had taught the Torah
and Talmud to Moses, Moses then taught them to Aaron. After he
taught them to Aaron, he taught them to Aaron’s sons Elazar and
Itamar. Then he taught them to the 70 elders of the Israelites. Then he
taught them to “the masses of people:”
“The result is that Aaron heard that precept from Moses four times,
his sons three times, the elders twice, and the remainder of the populace once.”
After that, Aaron, Elazar, Itamar, and the elders taught the Torah
and Talmud once again to the populace. Following the events at Sinai,
they continued teaching them to groups of Israelites.
Thus, Judaism asserts that both the written Torah and the Oral
Torah came from God. Because they both came from God, they have
the same Divine authority and are binding on all Jews.
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Even granting that the events at Sinai were supernatural, such an
assertion strains the credulity of any unbiased observer. To recite the
entire Torah would take a considerable amount of time. To recite both
the Torah and Talmud repeatedly to various groups of people would
take much more time. And of course, the Talmud records discussions
that would not occur until centuries in the future.
However, belief in the Divine origin of the Oral Torah serves the
twin goals of providing moral authority and uniting the Jewish people.
It’s not applied to other things, and it serves a useful social goal. It gets
very little support from historical and archaeological evidence, but it
gets very strong support from its moral results. Reasonable people
may hold it as a justified belief.
How Christianity made the leap
Christianity has trod a similar path from the transcendent to the mundane.
When I was in high school, my roommate was Catholic. The priest
who did services at the school was an endearingly cantankerous old
fellow who smoked awful cigars. Whenever my roommate missed
Mass, the priest showed up in the dorm that evening to scold him. I’m
sure that my memory has enhanced the situation to make it more interesting, but I recall him blowing cigar smoke in my roommate’s face
and asking why the hell he had been absent.
At any rate, two things puzzled me about Catholicism. The first
thing was that my roommate was constantly going to confession, a
Catholic ritual in which someone confesses his or her sins to the
priest, does some tasks as penance, and receives absolution. I couldn’t
imagine what my roommate had to confess, since I could rarely think
of anything I would have needed to confess, and I didn’t think I was a
better person than my roommate.
The second puzzlement was more germane to our current topic. I
occasionally engaged the priest in conversation about theology since
it was a subject of mutual interest. And it seemed that whenever I
asked a really interesting question, his answer was always “It’s a mystery.” In other words, we had come up against the ineffable and
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transcendent. From such mysteries, the Catholic church had to establish explicit beliefs, rituals, institutions, and rules of conduct. And in
order to do that, it had first to establish its authority to do so.
Appropriately enough, it looked to the Bible -- to the Christian
New Testament, of course -- for its source of authority. Matthew 16:18
reports that Jesus said to his disciple Peter:
“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock [petros = rock, so he makes a
pun] I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail
against it.”
The Catholic Church, based in Rome, maintains that Peter traveled to
Rome and established the church there. By what Catholics call “apostolic succession,” authority passed from Peter to the first Bishop of
Rome, who passed it to his successors. Thus does the Catholic Church
maintain its own authority as having a Divine origin.
Of course, the story about Peter has some of the same plausibility
issues as the story about the Oral Torah. Peter wasn’t exactly a poster
boy for courage or for loyalty to Jesus. John 18:15-27 reports that after
Jesus was arrested by the Romans, Peter three times denied knowing
him. In addition to that, secular historians think it improbable that Peter ever visited Rome.
However, belief in the Divine authority of the church via apostolic succession has served Catholics reasonably well over the centuries. It’s not applied to other things, and it serves a useful social goal.
Reasonable people may hold it as a justified belief.
Note that Catholics' reasonable belief in the Divine authority of
the Catholic church does not preclude other beliefs from being reasonable even if they conflict with it. Jews, Protestants, and Muslims
all deny the Divine authority of the Catholic church even if they agree
with many of its teachings. All of the beliefs rest on their moral and
social results; logic and evidence are just so much window dressing. If
their beliefs help people of faith to lead happy, moral, productive lives
that do not include hating and killing each other, then their beliefs are
justified.
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Chapter 13:
How Description
Shapes Truth
“To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
-- Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3
ARE YOU BEING TRUE TO YOURSELF?
We started Chapter 11 with a question about the meaning of life
because it was a good way to start thinking about meaning. We discovered that the meaning of life was different for everyone. It depended on what people valued enough to feel that it made their lives
worthwhile. Moreover, things can be meaningful in different ways.
Likewise, the question about being true to yourself is a good way
to start thinking about truth. What does it mean to be true to yourself?
How can you know if you're being true to yourself? How do those
questions connect (or do they) to more conventional cases where
things can be true or false and you can know it, such as:
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•
That is blue.
(Recall the previous chapter's example of waking up in a
dimly-lit room, seeing something, and deciding that what you
see is blue.)
•
The area of a circle is approximately equal to that of a square
with sides whose length is 8/9ths the diameter of the circle.
•
Abraham Lincoln was 16th President of the United States.
•
Dogs are mammals.
•
It's wrong to lie.
From those examples, as well as from the example of being true
to yourself, you might start to wonder about a couple of things:
• Are there different ways for things to be true (or false)?
•
Are there different ways to know that they're true (or false)?
For now, just keep those questions in the back of your mind and
we'll get on with the chapter. At the end, we'll return to the question
of being true to yourself. You'll be surprised how well it fits.
Just as most people never give any thought to the nature of belief,
they never give any thought to the nature of truth. They believe
vaguely that a true statement somehow matches a fact in the world,
but that’s about as much thought as they’ve given to the matter. Even
great thinkers like Maimonides and Bertrand Russell tend to adopt
similar though more developed views of truth.
In this chapter, we’ll examine three aspects of truth:
• How foundational descriptions shape the truth: How a belief
network’s basic concepts and assumptions determine which
of its beliefs are true.
•
How we test for truth: How we can decide if beliefs are true.
Philosophy books often call this the “criterion” of truth.
•
How we define truth: What it means for beliefs to be true.
Philosophy books often call this the “nature” of truth.
The three aspects are intimately related, since they all involve
connections of beliefs within a network of other beliefs (which, to
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recall, include verbal and non-verbal behaviors, memories, feelings,
and so forth). However, they ask different questions that we can answer separately.
Since it’s impossible to determine if we are or aren’t in some version of the “Braino machine,” our answers must apply to either situation. But there’s also good news: the Braino possibility makes it a lot
easier to understand the second aspect (the test of truth) and the third
aspect (the definition of truth).
How foundational descriptions shape truth
In the chapter about justifying belief, we looked at the difference between two types of good things:
• Instrumentally good things are good only because they help us
get other good things.
•
Intrinsically good things are good in themselves, not just because they help us get other good things.
We need at least one thing to be intrinsically good because otherwise, we’d be trapped in an infinite regress, where everything was
good because of something else and we never got to the end of the
line.
We’re in a similar situation when it comes to knowing about
things in the world. To justify or explain a belief is to tell a story about
why you think it’s true. But every story you tell must have endpoints,
both at the beginning (with "Once upon a time ...") and at the end
(when you stop talking or write “The End”). If it didn’t end, then
you’d have to go on talking forever, which would be bad because
you’ve got tickets to the opera this evening. You’d be trapped in another infinite regress.
Foundationalism and self-evident beliefs
To avoid the infinite regress, philosophers (at least since Aristotle,
and probably even earlier) came up with the idea of foundationalism.
It argues that all our explanations depend ultimately on foundational
beliefs requiring no justification beyond themselves. They are the
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bedrock on which we build our house of knowledge. In school, you
might have learned the famous words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776):
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. -- That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed …”
Foundational beliefs are said to be “self-evident.” If you understand them, then you know they are true. You don’t need to know
anything else. Of course, people disagree about what is self-evident,
so philosophers joke that “self-evident” means “evident to oneself.”
Many supposedly self-evident beliefs, such as the ones in the Declaration of Independence, depend on many other assumptions and beliefs. As a result, they’re arguably not self-evident at all. What the
Declaration of Independence means by “self-evident” is:
“Obviously and indisputably true based on assumptions of Western
European, particularly British, post-Enlightenment Era thought.”
But that’s quite a mouthful, so the Declaration settled for calling
the beliefs “self-evident” instead. Are any beliefs actually self-evident? If self-evident just means they’re evident if you understand
them, then yes, there are some, such as the statements that:
•
The whole of a thing is more than a part of the thing.
•
Black and blue are different.
•
1>0
But -- and it’s a crucial “but” -- remember that to understand
something means you can tell a story about it, connecting it to other
things. None of those supposedly self-evident beliefs can stand on its
own, any more than “all men are created equal.” If you can’t tell a story
about it, then you don’t understand it or know what it means.
If you know only one thing, then you really don’t know anything
at all, because you can’t tell a story about the one thing.
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And understanding beliefs is only half the battle. Whether or not
they’re “evident” -- that is, whether or not you’re justified in believing
them -- depends on the story you tell. That applies both to supposedly
self-evident beliefs and to perceptual beliefs from which foundationalist philosophers want to construct our reality.
Such basic beliefs, combined with how you describe them and the
story you tell about them, are a foundational description of a situation.
It lays out the basic concepts and assumptions that you will use to talk
about the situation, and shapes what you will see as meaningful, true,
or false. It differs from “foundationalism” as discussed by philosophers because foundational descriptions include a lot of things beyond
supposedly self-evident beliefs.
The same applies in writing fictional stories: you start with a foundational description. You give some background details, describing
the stage on which the action will take place. Often, you give some
information about the main characters:
Time: "Once upon a time, ..."
The opening phrase implies that the events occur far in the past.
Place: "in a peaceful kingdom by the sea, ..."
You give some details of the setting. You omit other details because
they're either implied by your description or are common enough that
readers will assume they exist, such as a castle and a beach.
Protagonist: "a wise and courageous king ruled over a free and
happy people."
Then you introduce the purpose of the story. Usually, it's either a conflict or an antagonist:
Antagonist: "But one day, a terrifying monster emerged from the
sea. Its baleful gaze drove people insane, and its fiery breath incinerated whatever it touched. Legends said its name was "Schrecklichkeit." (Its name had originally been "Smiley," but the monster
changed it for business reasons.)
Without that foundational description, the rest of your fictional
story wouldn't make any sense. The same is true of non-fictional stories, whether they are factual, procedural, or moral.
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Notice that even in a fictional story, your foundational description
determines the meaning and truth of events that occur later in the
story. If you described the king as "reckless and violent," it would
change the implications of any battle with the monster. If you said that
the monster was a handsome prince under an evil spell, that would
change it again.
Foundationalism’s insight and errors
As described by various philosophers, foundationalism gets one big
thing right and two smaller things wrong.
What it gets right is that knowledge has to start someplace. Philosophers usually locate the beginning in our sensations, like C.I.
Lewis in his book Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation:
“Our empirical knowledge rises as a structure of enormous complexity, most parts of which are stabilized in measure by their mutual support, but all rest, at bottom, on direct findings of sense.”
However, philosophers tie themselves into knots trying to figure
out how they can get from sensations that aren’t true or false to beliefs
that are. The problem results from their naïve (though often ponderously elaborated) theories of truth and meaning. We looked at the issue briefly in the previous chapter under the heading, “How
associations become true or false.”
Confusion about that issue leads to the things they get wrong.
First, they think that foundational beliefs are completely certain,
so that the beliefs can’t become more or less certain than they already
are. Additional evidence is irrelevant to them.
Some foundationalists avoid this mistake by claiming only that the
beliefs are justified, not certain. But that remedy suffers from circular
reasoning.19 It also rejects the essential idea of foundationalism and
moves toward the view in this book: that beliefs get their meaning,
justification, and truth from a network of other beliefs that they also
support (called “coherentism”). It’s an entirely different model of
19
If you are interested in this issue, see Appendix A, “Why Modest Foundationalism Is
Circular Reasoning.” That material is not needed to understand the main arguments of
this book.
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knowledge. Foundationalism justifies all beliefs from the bottom up,
by reliance on the foundational beliefs. Coherentism justifies all beliefs -- including “foundational” ones -- by connections in a network
of beliefs, whether bottom-up, top-down, or sideways.
Second, they think that foundational beliefs are immutable, so
their meaning can’t change or expand as more connections are added
to them.
But we’ve seen already that if we add more connections to a belief,
we add to its meaning; and if we subtract connections (as in the takeaway test), we diminish its meaning. Even foundational beliefs are not
immutable.
If foundational beliefs aren’t immutable, then they can’t be certain. For example, “A=A” is as certain as beliefs get. If you can change
its meaning, you can add connections to it, such as “+Bill has a headache.” Then the belief’s meaning is “A=A and Bill has a headache,”
which is not certain because Bill might not have a headache.
Thus, foundationalism and coherentism agree that knowledge has
to start from beliefs that we accept without proof. They disagree about
what happens after that. Foundationalism treats the initial beliefs as
untouchable and unchangeable.
By contrast, coherentism treats them as a “starter set” of beliefs
whose meaning, justification, and truth evolve with the growth of
their belief networks.
What is a foundational description?
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We’ve talked previously about the role of descriptions and how they
are related to purposes, but we haven’t yet specified what we mean by
a description:
A description is a finite set of connected concepts and beliefs about
the basic features of a particular thing, area, event type, or aspect
of reality that is of interest.
You can describe the same thing or situation in different ways depending on your purpose, your viewpoint, and the concepts you already have available. Afterward, how you described it affects how you
understand the things in it. That applies especially to new things. You
interpret them in terms of what you already believe.
For example, depending on your purpose, you can describe a cell
phone as a product of labor, as a thing for which consumers will pay,
or as a complex electronic device. Each description focuses on a different aspect: the first on production, the second on sales, and the
third on engineering. But they’re all correct descriptions. And note:
• If you see a new handheld device to talk wirelessly to other
people, you’ll probably consider it a cell phone because that’s
in your existing stock of descriptions.
•
Depending on whether you’re a factory worker, a salesperson,
or an engineer, you’ll connect your idea of the cell phone to
different experiences and beliefs.
Another example is a boat. The boat is just one thing -- unless you
are recycling it for lumber. Then, it’s a hundred or so pieces of wood,
in various sizes and shapes. Your goal determines whether it’s one
thing or many.
Any system of beliefs about the world must deal with the same
basic observations. The sun seems to rise in the morning and set in the
evening. The stars and other astronomical bodies move in repeated
patterns every day, month, and year. People are born, grow to adulthood, grow old, and die. Life is to some degree predictable, but seems
also to include an element of chance, or luck if you prefer.
Once you’ve decided on your basic description, some beliefs:
•
Will make sense, or not.
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•
Will be verifiable, or not.
•
Will be true, or not.
Relatively foundational descriptions
Descriptions can be foundational at different levels. Describing the
universe as a physical system is foundational at a very basic level. It
covers everything that exists, but only in terms of physical properties
and relationships. It tells you about a lot of things, but says nothing
specific about any of them. If your goal is simply to understand the
laws governing all physical objects, then it works fine. But if your purpose is more specific, you need simply to assume the physical description and push it into the background. Then, you start your story at a
different level that's better suited to your goal:
• Somewhat higher, based on that description, we can describe
the human body as a biological system that follows the same
laws as other systems in the physical universe.
•
Even higher than that, we can describe “Bill’s body” as the biological system that we see standing in front of our desk.
•
Still higher, we can refer to Bill, the person who (in some
manner) inhabits Bill’s body and nags us about forgetting to
put cover sheets on our printed reports at the office.
•
At higher levels, we think only of the description level immediately below them. When we talk about Bill, we don’t see him
in terms of a truly foundational description of the universe.
We see him only in terms of a relatively (relative to Bill) foundational description of human beings.
Fictional stories work similarly. The story about the kingdom
omitted descriptions of the castle and the beach because those are
standard images that occur in many stories, just as the laws of physics
apply in all stories about physical objects. If the fictional story spent
its first five pages describing the castle and the beach, it would have
both wasted the readers' time and obscured the more important aspects of the story.
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The same applies to non-fictional stories. If you had to explain
physics, biology, anatomy, and neuroscience before you could explain
why Bill has a headache, then by the time you finished explaining, the
headache would be long gone. Instead, you just say it’s because Bill
didn’t get enough sleep last night. You simply assume all the lowerlevel descriptions that underlie your statement. Foundational descriptions focus on what is relevant for the story's purpose.
The reason that it’s important to know the idea of relatively foundational descriptions is that they affect how we perceive situations
and what we believe about them. Describing humans as mere animals
with delusions of grandeur leads to beliefs far different from those we
get if we describe them as children of God with a moral sense.
Similarly, if we look at immigration through the lens of 1939 in
Europe, we’ll arrive at beliefs far different from those we get if we
view it through the lens of the latest terrorist attacks in Europe and
North America.
Let’s consider a couple examples of foundational descriptions.
A scientific example
Astronomy provides an example of how purpose affects basic description, and description determines what is true or false. Consider a true
proposition that’s known to every school child:
The earth revolves around the sun, and the sun does not revolve
around the earth.
What most people do not know is that for predicting observations
of astronomical bodies, the choice between the Copernican (sun-centered) and Ptolemaic (earth-centered) view of the solar system is arbitrary. Astronomers say that the earth revolves around the sun not
because it is true in some absolute sense -- it isn’t -- but because it
makes astronomical calculations simpler.
The Ptolemaic and Copernican descriptions of the solar system
had related but different goals. Both wanted to explain and predict
movements of stars, planets, and other heavenly bodies. However, the
Ptolemaic model was complicated, clumsy, and unaesthetic.
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Copernicus believed that the sky was an area of heavenly perfection,
but complicated and clumsy were imperfect. So he wanted a basic description that made planetary movement simpler, astronomical calculations easier, and all of it more aesthetically pleasing.
If one adopts the Ptolemaic view of the solar system, one starts
with the proposition that the sun revolves around the earth, as do the
other planets and the stars.
But therein lies a problem when you look up at the sky to observe
the movements of the planets and stars. The planets appear to move
backwards a little bit (retrograde motion), then forward in their orbits, then backward a little bit, and so on.
In the Copernican model, we explain planetary retrograde motion
by saying that the earth is also moving relative to the other planets:
that’s a basic assumption of the Copernican description. Copernicus
thought that all the planets, including earth, had circular orbits because heavenly motion had to be perfect and circles were perfect geometric figures. Today, we modify his picture of the solar system to
show that the orbits are elliptical.
In the Ptolemaic model, however, the earth isn’t moving. Ptolemaic astronomers had to find some other explanation for planetary
retrograde motion. The explanation had to fit all the same observed
facts as the Copernican model, but with the earth at the center of the
universe. To solve this problem, Ptolemaic astronomers said that as
planets and stars orbited the earth, each one of them made smaller
circles along its orbit, called “epicycles” (epi = on, cycle = orbit).
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The Ptolemaic model fit observed facts just as well as the later Copernican model did, and it enabled astronomers to predict the movements of heavenly bodies. However, it was more complicated and
difficult than the Copernican model. Simplicity might not equal absolute truth, but it has its advantages. So now we all “know” that Copernicus was right, Ptolemy was wrong, and that the earth revolves
around the sun.
Under the Ptolemaic description, for example, planets move in
epicycles as they orbit the earth. Under the Copernican description,
they don’t. Which is right?
The answer is that relative to their basic description of the situation,
they are both right. Relative to the other description, they are both
wrong.
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An ordinary-life example
Let’s look at something more down to earth. Imagine a man sitting on
a bench just south of a railway track that goes east and west.
A train passes him, traveling west at 50 kilometers per hour. Having keen eyesight, he looks through one of the train windows and sees
another man sitting at a table with a coffee cup in front of him. The
man on the bench believes that the coffee cup is moving west at 50
kilometers per hour.
The man on the train is also looking at the coffee cup. He believes
that the cup is not moving except for a slight vibration owing to the
movement of the train.
So we are presented with two beliefs:
• The cup is moving west at 50 kilometers per hour.
•
The cup is not moving.
Common sense tells us that the beliefs don’t really conflict. Each man
views the coffee cup from a situation whose basic description differs
from the other. The basic description implies which belief is correct.
Suppose someone asked you if the cup was “really” moving, and
if so, with what direction and speed. You could not answer without
knowing the basic description. Without that, the question has no answer. And depending on the description, different answers are true or
false.
Only the most basic facts are given to us. Their interpretation -for example, if the cup is moving, how fast, in which direction, even
its size and color -- depend on the foundational description. Without
an explicit or assumed foundational description, statements about the
cup are neither true nor false. They make no sense. The man in the
train car applies a description with beliefs that:
• The train car is the standard to determine if something is moving or not.
•
The coffee cup is not moving relative to the train car.
•
Therefore, the coffee cup is not moving.
But the man on the bench applies a different description, including
beliefs that:
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•
The ground is the standard determine if something is moving
or not.
•
The coffee cup is moving relative to the ground.
•
Therefore, the coffee cup is moving.
Those considerations apply in other areas:
• In physics, relativity (for astrophysics), quantum mechanics
(for sub-atomic phenomena) and classical mechanics (for engineering). Each works well in some contexts and not in others.
•
In economics, the labor theory of value (a thing's price depends on how much labor is needed to produce it) and the
subjective theory of value (a thing's price depends on how
much consumers value it and will pay for it). Each works well
in some contexts and not in others.
•
In psychology, Freudian psychoanalysis, Gestalt, cognitivebehavioral therapy, and neuroscientific theories. Each works
well in some contexts and not in others.
That doesn’t mean there is no truth to be had. But it does mean
we shouldn’t assume some beliefs are false when they are just based
on different foundational concepts and descriptions. Conversely, we
shouldn’t assume that some beliefs are universally true regardless of
how we describe the world.
It also doesn’t mean that all descriptions are equally useful for particular purposes. In economics, you can treat economic value either
as subjective or based on labor. Each leads to a viewpoint that is more
helpful in analyzing some situations than others. However, you can
usually make an argument for any unwieldy description of reality, depending on how many logical acrobatics you’ll do to keep it.
The main theories of truth
Descriptions shape truth. But how do we know what is true? And what
is truth?
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Truth is such integral part of our intellectual world that it’s hard
to answer the questions without sounding trivial or being totally obscure. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle put it this way:
“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false;
while to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is
true.”
Both secular and religious philosophers, from Thomas Reid
(Christian) to Maimonides (Jewish), Thomas Aquinas (Christian),
and Avicenna (Islamic) have found inspiration in Aristotle’s ideas. In
the 20th century, the secular philosopher Alfred Tarski gave a similar
formulation:
“A sentence is true if it designates an existing state of affairs.”
To realize how slippery the idea is, notice that none of those formulations gives a definition of truth. They all tell us when something
is true, but not what it means for something to be true. What is involved, exactly, in a sentence "designating" a state of affairs?
Back in Chapter 1, we listed criteria for a correct definition of belief, such as that it should cover all and only cases we'd normally call
belief. Notice that what Aristotle and the others give us is the same
kind of thing. They give us criteria to determine if beliefs are true, but
they don’t tell us what truth is. They don't give us a definition.
As with belief, a reasonable approach is to look at some examples.
And we will. But to provide some context, let’s briefly look at the
three main theories of truth.
Each has its own definition of truth and test of truth. Philosophers
argue about which is correct, but the theories are much more alike
than different. They all define truth as a relation between a belief and
something else. They test beliefs by looking for the “something else.”
When you get past the details, their essential difference is in what they
say the something else is:
• Correspondence: Truth is a relation between a belief and a
non-mental fact in the world, such that the fact matches the
statement. The nature of the “matching” is left vague. The
statement is either true or false. There is no third option.
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•
Coherence: Truth is a relation between a belief and a network
of other beliefs, such that the belief gives support to and gets
support from other beliefs in the network. Depending on the
size of the system and strength of support, a belief is more
true or less true. Truth (like meaning) is a matter of degree,
so there are in effect an infinite number of options.
•
Pragmatic: Truth is a relation between an action-guiding belief and the result that the action is meant to produce. If the
action succeeds, then the belief is true. If the action fails, then
the belief is false. Since “success” can be a matter of degree,
truth can also be a matter of degree. Some pragmatists accept
that and some don’t.
Using your Braino to figure it out
In a moment, we’ll look in more detail at how these theories handle
the test and definition of truth. At the outset, however, note that the
Braino possibility simplifies the whole problem.
Recall that the Braino machine creates an “illusion” of reality so
perfect that we have no way to know if we are in the Braino machine
or not. When we look at a tree, are we really looking at a real tree, or
are we only having an experience created by the Braino machine feeding electrical impulses into our brains? In the latter case, not only is
the non-mental, physical tree not there, but in addition, our eyes are
not there, nor our bodies, nor the rest of the non-mental, physical
world we seem to perceive. There’s only our perception of the tree
and ourselves, possibly with our perceptions of other people confirming our belief.
However, our experiences are exactly the same whether or not
we are in the Braino machine. As a result, we test truth in the same
way whether or not we’re in the machine. We might have spent our
lives in the machine. If so, our concepts and beliefs refer only to the
experiences that the machine generated for us, not to anything that
exists outside of it. Whether or not we have always been in the machine, our experiences would have been the same.
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For example, suppose we look at something and believe “that is a
tree.” If we’re in the machine, the tree is a network of experiences
created by the machine combined with our judgments about those experiences. We formed our concept of “tree” based on previous experiences of the same kind. Therefore, if we say “that is a tree,” it refers
to the same experiences we would have in the Braino machine or outside of it. Because the world looks the same to us whether or not we’re
in the Braino machine, the same definition of truth must work in either situation. Truth also means the same thing whether or not we are
in the Braino machine.
Truth is always a relation between a belief and something else.
Whichever theory we choose, that “something else” must be consistent with the Braino machine. Therefore:
• If we adopt the correspondence theory, then the something
else is nothing, because we can have beliefs only about our experiences in the machine. We do not know about any nonmental facts.
•
If we adopt the coherence theory, then the something else is
a network of other beliefs. This is consistent with the Braino
machine.
•
If we adopt the pragmatic theory, then the something else results from an action guided by our belief. This is also consistent with the Braino machine, since belief, action, and
results are all experiences we can have in the machine.
How we test for truth
To be sure, correspondence with fact is the most natural and intuitive
theory of truth: that’s why it’s so popular.
Even coherentists, in their ordinary life, think and act as if correspondence were both the test and the definition of truth. Nobody
looks at a rose and thinks, “I now see a red patch with a particular
shape, I smell a pleasing aroma, I feel pain in my finger after moving
it to touch a shape that looks like a thorn. Therefore, that’s a rose.”
Instead, they look, they see a rose, and boom! It’s done. That’s a rose.
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If you asked them how they tested the truth of their belief, they’d
simply point at it and say, “Look. See? It’s a rose.” The rose is “something out there.”
It’s less clear in the case of historical beliefs: “Abraham Lincoln
delivered the Gettysburg Address at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery
on November 19, 1863.” Abraham Lincoln is long dead. The Soldiers’
National Cemetery is quiet. The crowds are gone. The subject of our
belief doesn’t exist at present. On one hand, there’s a belief; on the
other hand, there’s -- nothing?
No, not nothing, but nothing that corresponds to the belief. What
exists is a vast collection of evidence: Eyewitness accounts. Newspaper clippings. Historical books. Comments about the speech written
by Lincoln’s contemporaries. We believe in the existence and accuracy of all that evidence. If we rejected the belief about Lincoln, we
would be forced to reject those other beliefs as well. Therefore, what
verifies the belief about Lincoln is not correspondence with facts that
no longer exist. The belief is verified by connection to other beliefs
about facts that do exist. That is to say, the belief is verified by its coherence with the rest of our beliefs:
“What really tests the judgment is the extent of our accepted world
that is implicated with it and would be carried down with it if it fell.
And that is the test of coherence.”20
So are beliefs about history verified by coherence, but beliefs
about cats by correspondence? Let's take another look at the beliefs
from the beginning of the chapter:
20
•
That is blue.
•
The area of a circle is approximately equal to that of a square
with sides whose length is 8/9ths the diameter of the circle.
•
Abraham Lincoln was 16th President of the United States.
•
Dogs are mammals.
•
It's wrong to lie.
Blanshard, B. (1939), Volume II, p. 227.
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Consider the first belief. You just woke up. You open your eyes.
In the dim light, you see an object. You decide the object is blue. You
then conclude that your belief is correct.
What is it that verifies your belief? Is it a non-mental, physical fact
that the object is blue? The answer is “no,” for three reasons:
• If the object is blue and you do not see it, the fact is the same
but your belief is still unverified.
•
If the object is blue, but you fail to recognize it as blue, then
your belief is still unverified.
•
If the object is not blue, but you mistakenly perceive it as blue,
then your belief is still unverified and your perception was
mistaken.
You test the other beliefs similarly, although the details differ:
• For the area of a circle, you do a calculation:
ü The formula for the area is 𝜋𝑟 ! , where 𝜋 is about 3.1416
and 𝑟 ! is the circle's radius multiplied by itself.
" !
ü The radius is half the diameter, so 𝑟 ! is # ! $ , or #$$ 𝐷! .
#
ü So if a circle had a diameter of 9, its area would be 3.1416
times one-fourth of 81, which equals about 63.62.
ü If you construct a square whose sides have length 8 (that
is, 8/9ths the diameter of the circle), its area is 8 times 8
= 64, very close to the modern value. That's how ancient
Egyptians calculated the area of circles. Their value for 𝜋
comes out to about 3.16. Amaze your friends at parties.
You're welcome.
•
For the belief about Abraham Lincoln, you consult books and
historical records.
•
For the belief about dogs, you check the definition of "mammal" to see if dogs fit the definition.
•
For the belief that it's wrong to lie, you consult wise people,
books of moral instruction, your own experiences, and your
conscience.
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Despite the differences in detail, in each case you are collecting
more beliefs against which to compare your original belief. If the additional beliefs support the original belief, then it is verified. If they
contradict it, then it is falsified. If the beliefs fit coherently into our
network of other beliefs, we pronounce them true; if not, false.
People often believe that science is more reliable than religion because it’s based on hard facts, not theories and assumptions. However,
scientific beliefs are even more removed from anything resembling
hard facts than are ordinary beliefs. The luminiferous aether, space
bent by gravity, time altered by velocity, electrons as mathematical
probability functions, or quarks that no one, even in principle, can
perceive: all are the subjects of physical science. They are not facts
given in our experience. They are creatures of theory, of the belief
systems in which they play a part.
What is truth? Let’s stay for an answer.
In case you think the section heading sounds odd, it’s a riff on a quote
that most people think appears in the Bible but which actually doesn’t:
“’What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”
That’s from Francis Bacon’s (1561-1626) “On Truth” in his book
Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral. Bacon, in turn, was riffing on the
New Testament’s Gospel of John 18:38:
"Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this,
he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him
no fault at all."21
This section answers Pilate’s question: perhaps not as well as Jesus
might have answered it,22 but at least the section’s answer is in English
instead of in Aramaic (the language of Jesus).
21
Whether or not you’re a believer, knowing the Bible is essential for understanding
most of Western civilization.
22
Neither the Tanakh (the Old Testament) nor the New Testament shows much interest in purely philosophical questions. Both focus more on practical, moral, and theological issues. Pilate’s question was probably “What is the truth?”, i.e., what are the facts?
Jesus would probably have given an answer about God, not truth per se.
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We’ve already got enough scratches from fighting with the cat, so
let’s consider a less injurious example: a pencil on a desk. That seems
like a clear example of correspondence. You believe that “A pencil is
on the desk.” There’s a pencil on the desk. The fact corresponds to
your belief. Case closed.
Well, maybe not. Let’s look at it.
After you flunked out of the first grade in Chapter 3, you managed
to get your job back at the nuclear power plant. Yes, they’ve lowered
their hiring standards a lot. As long as you haven’t shot anyone or
starred in a reality TV show, you can be a nuclear power technician.
Your supervisor needs to write down a phone number. He asks if
you have a pencil. “Yes,” you reply. “There’s a pencil on the desk.”
What does it mean for that to be true? Obviously, that there’s a
pencil on the desk. But what does that mean -- for a pencil to be on
the desk?
Suppose that you looked at the desk and saw no pencil. You ran
your hands over the desk surface and felt no pencil. You called over a
few co-workers who repeated the same procedure. Nobody saw or felt
a pencil on the desk. Could there still be a pencil on the desk?
“Excuse me,” interrupts your supervisor. “Are you going to give
me the damn pencil or just keep jabbering about truth?”
“Oh, sorry,” you say. “Here you are … wait a minute …” You look
for the pencil on the desk, but you forgot that we made it go away in
the previous paragraph. You pull a pen out of your pocket and hand it
to him. For the moment, your job is safe.
Your supervisor writes the number, returns your pen, and walks
away. Now that he's out of earshot, we can take a minute to finish our
discussion about truth.
You believed there was a pencil on the desk. You and other people
tested your belief by performing actions that led to additional beliefs:
"I don't see any pencil on the desk," "I don't feel any pencil on the
desk," "Don't you ever clean your desktop?" Those beliefs tested your
original belief by coherence. It failed the tests.
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Can truth be correspondence with fact?
We test truth by coherence. But can truth itself be correspondence
with fact?
The possibility that we're in the Braino machine suggests that it
can't be. In that reality, we cannot discover any non-mental facts to
correspond to our beliefs. And since we can't know if we are in the
Braino machine or not, the same analysis must apply in both cases.
But there's an even stronger argument. Suppose that we test truth
by coherence with beliefs, but truth is correspondence with non-mental facts. Let's see how it works with the pencil on the desk.
Suppose that "There is a pencil on the desk" is true (by correspondence), but fails every test of truth (by coherence). That means:
• You look at the desk but don't see the pencil.
•
You feel every inch of the desktop but don't feel the pencil.
•
You try to pick the pencil up from the desk and write with it,
but you can't.
•
You bring in scientific equipment to detect an invisible pencil,
but it doesn't.
•
You perform every other test you can think of but never detect the pencil.
•
Other people do their tests, but nobody detects the pencil.
•
Nobody remembers ever seeing the pencil on the desk.
In spite of all that, there's really a pencil on the desk. The belief
"There is a pencil on the desk" is true because it corresponds to a nonmental fact.
What kind of pencil is it? It's a pencil that you can't see, can't feel,
can't write with, can't detect with scientific equipment, and can't remember ever having seen.
In other words, whatever it is, it's not a pencil. If "There is a pencil
on the desk" is true because it corresponds with fact, the fact with
which it corresponds does not include a pencil. Therefore, the belief
"There is a pencil on the desk" is false.
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How Description Shapes Truth
If coherence is the test of truth, then taking correspondence as the
nature of truth leads straight to a contradiction. Either coherence is
not the test of truth, or correspondence is not the nature of truth. We
already established that coherence is the test of truth. Therefore, correspondence is not the nature of truth.
And because coherence is the test of truth, we have good reason
to believe it is also the nature of truth. As Brand Blanshard observed:
"If the criterion A could be present while the B it was supposed to
indicate was absent, and the criterion be absent when the thing indicated was present, the connection would be intolerably loose. A
surgeon who operated or a jury that convicted on evidence of this
kind would in most [people's] opinion be acting irresponsibly."23
And note something interesting: Because our definition of belief
includes behaviors, feelings, and other kinds of experiences, this definition of truth includes the pragmatic definition. Beliefs can include
the results of our actions, so the pragmatic theory is bundled into it.
Blanshard’s proof that
truth’s test and nature must be the same
Like “Plantinga versus the logicians,” this section has information
that’s not needed for the main argument but is interesting to philosophy nerds. You can skip it if you want.
Brand Blanshard’s book The Nature of Thought was a landmark in
20th-century philosophy. It took him 15 years to write, much of that
time spent at a desk in the reading room of the British Museum. In the
second volume of his book, he argued that coherence was both the
test and the nature of truth.
Some philosophers conceded that we test truth by coherence, but
still insisted that the nature of truth was correspondence. I've slightly
simplified his reply:
1. Suppose the test of truth is coherence with systems of belief,
but truth itself is correspondence with non-mental facts.
23
Schilpp, P.A. (1980), p. 595.
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2. Then we must be able to test the belief “Truth is correspondence with non-mental facts” by coherence with systems of belief.
3. But we can’t test that belief by coherence, since it requires us
to know about non-mental facts.
4. Therefore, if truth is correspondence, the test of truth can’t
be coherence.
Either we must accept coherence as both the test and the nature
of truth, or we have to explain how we can know about the non-mental facts that correspondence requires.
Be true to yourself
Let's return to the question with which we started the chapter: Are
you being true to yourself?
Being true to yourself means living in ways that connect to your
most important moral values and your most heartfelt desires. Your life
supports them, and they in turn support it.
You know that you are true to yourself by comparing how you live
with your most important moral values and heartfelt desires.
Though more consequential, it's similar to believing "there is a
pencil on the desk."
For a pencil to be on the desk means that your belief in the pencil
connects with other beliefs that are relevant -- i.e., "most important."
It connects to the belief that you see a pencil on the desk, you feel it,
you can pick it up, and so forth. It supports them and they support it.
Other beliefs are there, too, but they're less relevant: the desk is grey
and has a scratch on the side.
You know that there is a pencil on the desk is by comparing your
belief in the pencil with the other relevant beliefs you acquire by action and observation.
So be true to yourself, and it follows as night follows day, you cannot then be false to anyone. It's a good way to live.
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Chapter 14:
Does It Make Any
Difference What We
Believe?
“'We were just discussing a most interesting subject,' said the earnest matron. 'Dr. Pritchett was telling us that nothing is anything.'
'He should, undoubtedly, know more than anyone else about that,'
Francisco answered ...
'Just what did Hugh Akston teach?' asked the earnest matron.
Francisco answered, 'He taught that everything is something.'"
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The previous chapter might suggest a good question: If all the truth
we can know is relative to one or another network of beliefs, then isn’t
any “truth” just as good as any other? Does it make any difference
what we believe?
Yes, it makes a lot of difference. The law of gravity is only true
relative to some systems of belief, but if you step off the top of a tall
building, those are the relevant systems and they will make you absolutely dead. Any philosophy that says otherwise is just plain nuts. The
key is to remember:
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•
Each network of beliefs is connected to one or more purposes.
A system about the physical universe has beliefs to help us
succeed in physical reality. A system about our spiritual place
in the universe has beliefs to help us succeed in living happily
and morally. And many belief systems also serve the purpose
of uniting people for mutual benefit in social groups. We rely
on beliefs in each system to guide us for achieving our purposes in the corresponding area of life.
•
A belief is true to the extent that it gives and gets support from
other elements in a network of beliefs. The other elements
can include observations, statements, behaviors, feelings,
memories, rituals, and other such things.
•
A belief with more supporting links is more true than a belief
with fewer supporting links. If a belief is supported by a larger
and more comprehensive system, it’s more true than one
that’s supported by a smaller system because more of observable reality stands or falls (off a building) with the former belief.
Purposes are crucial. In the abstract, all of our belief systems are
created equal, but practically they have different value for different
purposes. And "practically" refers to their effectiveness in dealing
with realities existing beyond us and our beliefs.
If our beliefs were only about themselves, and not about independent reality, then practicality wouldn't be an issue: You could step
off the top of a tall building, turn into a helicopter, and fly to Capistrano. The fact that it never happens shows that our beliefs are
about something beyond themselves -- even in the Braino machine.
Beliefs are practical if they work, and they work to the extent that they
are consistent with objective reality, whatever it is.
If we ask whether any belief is "as good as" any other, we're asking
if any belief is as good as any other for doing something, for achieving
some worthwhile goal. When we uncover that hidden assumption,
then the answer is obviously "no," because we have many different
goals and we do many different things.
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For designing an airplane, the belief system of physics works well,
but the belief system of religious faith doesn’t work at all. For finding
meaning in life, the situation is reversed: physics tells you to commit
suicide now, because according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy increases), things can only get worse. It’s not the encouragement you need for a healthy and happy life. Religious faith can
provide that. Of course, it can also do the opposite: just like scientific
theories, religious beliefs and belief systems can work well or poorly.
In specific areas of life for specific purposes, truth is not relative
at all. Some truths and belief systems work better than others. Some
work so badly that it is foolish to use them even if their beliefs are true
relative to their own basic descriptions and assumptions. The only exception is the case of beliefs that are simply equivalent ways of describing the same thing, and even then some work better than others
-- as in the case of Ptolemaic versus Copernican astronomy. Both work
but the latter is better. Even if truth is relative in principle, it’s often
absolute in practice.
Postmodernism substitutes power for truth
The suggestion that truth is in any sense absolute – or even important
-- runs up against the reigning ideology of contemporary academia:
postmodernism. If you hold common-sense beliefs about life, society,
human nature, or even physical science, postmodernists argue it’s because you're ignorant of postmodernist theories. That kind of blind
faith has the aroma of a cult: a cult for very smart, highly-educated
people to be sure, but a cult nonetheless. Harvard psychologist Steven
Pinker argues that postmodernism has severely damaged universities
"... with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness. Many of its luminaries—Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, the Critical Theorists—are
morose cultural pessimists who declare that modernity is odious, all
statements are paradoxical, works of art are tools of oppression,
liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization
is circling the drain."24
24
Pinker. S. (2018), p. 406.
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What postmodernism asserts is a little difficult to pin down. Various postmodernist writers make various claims -- and not clearly. Its
key texts are obscure. Its sources range from Marxist study groups to
writers on art, architecture, and literature.
As a result, any overview of postmodernism will seem over-simplified. Its arguments, concerns, and approaches are so varied that to
discuss it fully is to get lost in a thicket of details. However, Its key
ideas seem to be:
• Objective truth doesn't exist. All truth is relative to the stories we tell and the language we use. There's only "my truth"
competing with "your truth." As far as postmodernists are
concerned, the idea of “the truth” is a myth -- and they're sure
that's the truth.
•
Objective reality doesn't exist. All reality is shaped by the
stories we tell and the language we use. There is "no there,
there" to which our stories should conform.
•
Everything is about power. Stories justify some groups' oppression of others. The idea that stories provide factual and
moral guidance, help groups cooperate, or promote human
happiness is dismissed as bourgeois propaganda.
The central error of postmodernism is the same as that of most
ideologies: It focuses on a few small insights and insists that they're
the whole story of everything. It bakes a single grain of truth into a
thousand loaves of falsehood. Let's look at its claims.
Claim: Objective truth doesn't exist
Postmodernism's first claim is that objective truth doesn't exist. What
does that mean?
People have defined "objective" in various ways. Here, we use it
to mean "not depending for its existence on any individual person's
set of beliefs." With Thomas Reid and Hilary Putnam (see Chapter
10), we assume that:
• We ourselves exist in some way.
•
Other people like us exist in some way.
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•
We can perceive other people and communicate with them.
Based on those assumptions and our experiences, we deduce that
we all perceive a shared "reality" of some kind.25 It might be the real
world or some version of the Braino world. It exists independently of
our individual consciousness and beliefs about it. We can and do interpret the world in different ways, but it's the same world.
As previously discussed, truth is always a relation between a belief
and "something else." The something else is a system of other beliefs,
which can include statements, behaviors, feelings, memories, and
other things we can do or experience. But our belief systems are always finite. They don't cover all of reality. Some people know more
than other people. Different people's systems cover different things,
describe them differently, and often conflict with each other. Sometimes, our belief conflict is only apparent because we define the same
words in different ways.
So far, so good. Postmodernism says the same thing. If that's all it
said, then it would be correct as far as it went. Yale postmodernist
Seyla Benhabib writes in Situating the Self (1992):
"Transcendental guarantees of truth are dead; in the agonal struggle of language games there is no commensurability; there are no
criteria of truth transcending local discourses, but only the endless
struggle of local narratives vying with one another for legitimation."
Notice that what she says is still consistent with the existence of
objective truth. She's not talking about truth itself: she's talking about
"guarantees" and "criteria" of truth. In other words, she's talking about
how we know things and how certain we can be about them.
She also mentions the fact that words and beliefs have different
meanings in different belief networks. Depending on how much overlap there is between the belief networks, the words and beliefs might
25
This is different from Descartes’s problem about whether or not anything existed
except his mind. With Reid and Putnam, we assume that other people exist independently of our own minds. Therefore, if we were trying to solve Descartes’s problem,
we would have assumed what we wanted to prove, a logical fallacy called “questionbegging.”
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not be "commensurable" -- that is, similar enough in meaning that people with different belief networks are talking about the same things.26
So she is correct: We have no absolute guarantees of truth, let
alone of transcendental truth. But it's neither a new insight nor unique
to postmodernism. One of her predecessors in Yale's Philosophy Department, Brand Blanshard wrote in 1939 that:
"The road of history is so thick with discarded certainties as to suggest that any theory which distributes absolute guarantees is
touched with charlatanism ... For all the ordinary purposes of life,
coherence does not mean coherence with some inaccessible absolute, but with the system of present knowledge."27
But postmodernism doesn't stop there. It goes on to a sweeping
and unfounded conclusion: That because different belief systems support different truths, there is no objective truth at all. Instead, there
are only people's beliefs and the systems ("discourses") that support
them.
Apart from its obvious self-contradiction (the claim that "there is
no objective truth" is objectively true), the denial of objective truth
falls prey to the "jumping off a building" problem.
Suppose that you're looking for your cat. As before, you get down
on your hands and knees to look under the bed. You don't see the cat,
but in the shadows, you perceive a sweater that you thought you'd
lost. "My missing sweater is under the bed:" That's your truth. You
reach for the sweater, hear a loud hiss, and get your hand clawed. "I'm
what's under the bed:" that's your cat's truth. In this case, your cat's
truth is closer to objective reality than yours.
But think about that for a second. If there were no objective truth,
only "my truth," "your truth," and "the cat's truth," then your belief
about the sweater under the bed would be just as true as the cat's belief
that it's not a sweater. You would reach for the sweater, and it would
be there.
The same applies to jumping off a building. If the postmodernists’
truth that “We won’t die” were just as true as my truth that “Sorry, but
26
See the section "Meaning for groups of people" in Chapter 11 of this book.
27
Blanshard, B., The Nature of Thought, Vol. II, pp. 270-271.
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you will,” then they could step off the building and remain suspended
in mid-air. I, on the other hand, would plummet to certain death because that’s what “my truth” requires.
Those things don’t happen. Even postmodernists know it when
they’re not making their confused arguments. Even if beliefs are true
relative to their systems of belief, objective truth still exists independently of our belief systems. As we test our beliefs by comparing
them with new evidence and analysis, our beliefs approach objective
truth asymptotically -- i.e, they get closer and closer to reality but they
can never quite reach it because our belief systems are finite and reality isn't.
Even if there are multiple narratives that work (e.g., Ptolemaic vs.
Copernican astronomy), we must choose one in order to think or do
anything. It's like a restaurant menu. The menu might have many acceptable entrees, but to have dinner, you must choose one and not the
others. After we choose one, we can compare it to new observations
and modify it as needed to fit the new things we’ve learned about the
world.
As different narratives evolve to fit more and more observations,
they often start to look more and more alike. In economics, the “classical” approach uses the labor theory of value but had to be modified
to recognize the influence of supply and demand. At the same time,
the “neoclassical” approach uses supply and demand, but had to be
modified to recognize the influence of labor costs and quality. The two
approaches end up using different terminology to say increasingly
similar things.
Postmodernism says (correctly) that the meanings of words are
arbitrary. However, in order to use words, we must choose the specific meanings with which we intend to use them. A particular choice
will be more or less helpful, depending on the situation. If we want
directions to the Eiffel Tower, we should choose French words; to the
Brandenburg Gate, German; likewise for other situations. If we change
words' meanings each time we use them, they don't work.
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Claim: Objective reality doesn't exist
The flip side of the postmodernists’ claim that objective truth doesn’t
exist is their claim that objective reality doesn’t exist.
There's a story about U.S. President Abraham Lincoln (18091865) that is probably apocryphal but still instructive. Lincoln was
giving a speech and posed a question to his audience:
"If you call a tail a leg, then how many legs does a dog have?"
"Five!" shouted several people from the audience.
"No, it's got four," Lincoln replied. "Calling a tail a leg doesn't make
it one."
That quote from Lincoln, apocryphal or not, highlights the basic
error of postmodernists' denial that there is any objective reality.
Like Dr. Pritchett in the quote that begins this chapter, they argue
that "nothing is anything." In other words, things have no definite nature that circumscribes what they are and what they do. The opposing
claim, “everything is something,” is central to the idea of an objective
reality that exists and is what it is regardless of our beliefs. As writer
Neil deGrasse Tyson succinctly observed:
"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you
believe in it."
Postmodernism starts with a grain of truth. Our words, concepts,
and beliefs really do influence how we perceive and talk about the
world. However, it’s a mistake to leap from that fact to conclude that
objective reality doesn’t exist, or what amounts to the same thing, that
it changes depending on how we talk about it. Our success in life depends on how closely we align our beliefs and our goals with objective
reality. If changing our beliefs and goals changed reality, then success
would be guaranteed and we’d never fail.
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The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn’t part of the postmodernist canon,
but it might as well be. It declares that “our worldview is determined
by the structures of the particular language that we happen to speak.”28
In other words, what we see is determined by the words we use. It’s
not an implausible idea. Consider these pictures. On the left, you can
see a fashionable young French woman with her face turned away
from the viewer. On the right, you can see a black vase.
If you’ve seen those pictures before, you know they’re a popular
example of how we can perceive the same thing in different ways. If
you shift your focus a little, the left-side picture shows an older
woman, frowning as if she’s been beaten down by life. The right-side
picture shows the silhouettes of two people facing each other.
Whether we describe the pictures in one way or another does seem
to affect how we perceive them.
So does the left-side picture show a young woman or an older
woman? Does the picture on the right show a vase or two faces? It
28
Cameron, D., in Jackson, S. and Jones, J. (eds), Contemporary Feminist Theories
(1998), p. 150.
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depends on how you look at them. That gives support to the postmodernists' belief that there is no single, objective reality in the pictures
and, by extension, in anything else we see.
But that conclusion goes too far. Notice that "What does the picture show?" omits an essential part of the question: "What does the
picture show to observer X?" To a blind person, it shows nothing. To
someone who had never seen a young woman or a vase, it might show
something completely different. "Show" always means "show to someone," so it makes a hidden reference to someone's interpretation of
what's being shown.
We can interpret each picture in a variety of ways, but that variety
has limits. If I described the left-side picture as a vase and the rightside picture as a young woman, you probably couldn't see that no matter how hard you tried. Similarly, you can call a tail a leg if you wish,
but a dog still can't walk on it.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is one of those seemingly obvious
ideas for which evidence is very hard to find. That’s why, over 60
years after its formulation, it’s still called a “hypothesis.”
In spite of that, two grains of truth make the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seem plausible. First, its "strong" formulation -- that our language
determines what we perceive -- is clearly wrong. But Sapir-Whorf also
has a weaker version: that our language influences what we perceive.
That influence exerts itself in two ways.
First, language can make it easier or more difficult to express certain kinds of ideas. In George Orwell's novel 1984, Newspeak makes
it impossible to express ideas about freedom. A variation on the tactic
is to require everyone to use terminology that assumes your viewpoint is correct. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has become a
minor celebrity by denouncing laws requiring everyone to use such
terminology.
Second, belief networks associate words with thoughts and emotions to which they have little or no logical connection. Car commercials, for example, always urge you to "own" a car instead of urging
you to “buy” it. "Owning" suggests thoughts of driving a new car and
showing it to your friends, with pleasant emotions. "Buying" reminds
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you that you have to pay for the car. Likewise, car commercials have
abandoned the older term "used car" (which reminds you that the car
has been driven and possibly damaged) in favor of "pre-owned car"
(which suggests that the car might have been sitting in someone's garage so it's in perfect condition). In politics, the smartest thing that gaymarriage advocates ever did was to re-brand their crusade as "marriage equality." Instead of suggesting that they wanted to impose a new
institution, gay marriage, their new term implied that they only
wanted equal rights. That put it over the top.
So the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is false, but
the weaker version is true. The words we use don't control how we
think, but they make it easier or more difficult and can influence our
emotions. And none of it changes objective reality at all.
That being said, don’t get so preoccupied with theory that you forget common sense. If a word annoys your spouse, friends, or co-workers, then don’t use it unless there’s a good reason that you must. It's
not an infringement on your freedom if you choose to exercise courtesy and good judgment. That’s one thing you can do to promote social
harmony.
"Postmodernism" in 1000 BCE
One thing that postmodernism gets right is that our words, concepts,
and beliefs play a role in "creating" the world as we perceive it. We
think that a thing is real when it has a name and we can separate it
from other things.
But postmodernists didn't invent the idea. It goes all the way back
to the Book of Genesis. Do you remember the first verse of Genesis?
It's usually translated "In the beginning, God created the heaven and
the earth." The translation suggests that God created the world out of
nothing. However, modern Biblical scholars think that this translation
is more accurate:
“When God began to create heaven and earth — the earth being
unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and
a wind from God sweeping over the water … "
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That translation suggests that something "unformed and void" already existed before God's creative acts. Most people of the Ancient
Near East believed that the pre-existing world was made of water,
which is interesting because -- even though they didn't know it -- life
on earth began in the oceans.
On this reading of Genesis, God didn't create the world out of
nothing. Instead, He imposed order on chaos by separating things
from each other and giving them names:
"God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light
day, and the darkness He called night ... God made the firmament,
and it separated the water which was below the firmament from the
water which was above the firmament ... God called the firmament
Sky ... God said, 'Let the water below the sky be gathered into one
place, that the dry land may appear.' And it was so. God called the
dry land Earth, and the gathering of waters He called Seas." (Genesis 1:4-1:10)
The translation is also consistent with the other creation stories
of the Ancient Near East. As John Walton observes in Ancient Near
Eastern Thought and the Old Testament:
“In the ancient world something came into existence when it was
separated out as a distinct entity, given a function, and given a
name.”
Postmodernists claim that we create our realities by separating
things and naming them -- just as in the first book of the Bible, whose
origins date from 3,000 years ago. That idea of theirs is more premodern than postmodern.
Arguing against "essentialism"
Another way that postmodernists deny objective reality is to attack
the idea of "essentialism," i.e., the idea that anything has a specific nature that makes it what it is.
The attack on essentialism argues that even if everything is something, it can't be anything specific because most qualities are a matter
of degree.
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If you took Philosophy 101, you might recognize that argument as
"the fallacy of the beard." A clean-shaven man has no (unshaven)
whiskers on his face. So how many whiskers does it take to make a
beard? One whisker isn't a beard. If you add one more, that's not a
beard either. Add another, still no beard. At no point can you say that
one more whisker makes it a beard. Thus, goes the argument, there's
no such thing as being clean-shaven or having a beard. There's only a
continuum of beardedness. The argument is disproven by the simple
fact that there are clean-shaven and bearded people.
Zeno's beard
True nerds might recognize the fallacy of the beard as another version
of Zeno's paradox. The Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (490-430
BCE) argued that motion was impossible.
Suppose you want to walk across the room to pick up a book from
a table. First, you must walk half the distance to the table. Then you
must walk half the remaining distance, half of the rest, and so on. You
must take an infinite number of steps to get to the table, so you never
arrive at your destination. Zeno's paradox is disproven by the fact that
you can walk across the room to pick up a book, just as the fallacy of
the beard is disproven by the existence of clean-shaven and bearded
people.
Claim: Everything is about power
Postmodernists see almost everything in terms of power. In their
view, things like scientific facts and voluntary cooperation are just
smokescreens that hide exploitation of some social groups by other
social groups.
In a kind of grumpy, unrealistic way, their claim is true, even
though they don't believe in truth. No matter how a society is organized, some people will be objectively worse off than other people,
and some people will at least feel that they are even if they're not.
In addition, every society must explain how and why it’s organized in the way that it is. Since every society will have some groups
that are better or worse off, then its self-explanation can always be
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portrayed negatively as an apologetic for “oppressing” some groups.
But that applies to every human society that has ever existed or ever
will exist. It assumes the possibility of an alternative human society
that has no imperfections or complaints. Those don't exist.
Notice that postmodernists’ viewpoint is a philosophical story. It's
a way of interpreting the world and it is in itself neither true nor false.
That said, it leads to interpretations that are often beside the point,
unhelpful, and downright silly.
Postmodernist luminary Jean-Francis Lyotard, in his book The
Postmodern Condition, stated frankly his view about the unimportance
of truth as compared to power. In Chapter 2, he said that his own analysis “makes no claims of being original, or even true:”
“Our hypotheses, therefore, should not be accorded predictive value
in relation to reality, but strategic value in relation to [its effects on
public power and civil institutions].”
Equally odd is anthropologist Emily Martin's claim in her article
"The Egg and the Sperm" that biological explanations of how human
eggs are fertilized:
"... imply not only that female biological processes are less worthy
than their male counterparts but also that women are less worthy
than men."
Note that neither statement disputes any scientific facts: they just
don't like what science says. Of course, odd interpretations of scientific facts do not make a philosophical story false. But they do make it
less plausible.
Such claims dovetail with arguments by other postmodernists that
since we can use reason to understand and work with ("dominate")
nature, rationality is just a tool for dominating people. That kind of argument is called a "non-sequitur," meaning its conclusion does not follow from its premises. Its only connection is that you can use the word
"dominate" (in different senses) for controlling nature and for coercing people. It's typical of the free-association wordplay that postmodernists offer as a substitute for logical argument.
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Why the obsession with power?
What's really behind the postmodernist obsession with power? As
usual, there's a grain of truth, baked up into a warehouse full of junkfood snack cakes. You can take almost any description of anything and
turn it into a story about how it oppresses someone. Any human interaction can be portrayed as exploitation. But does it make sense to
do it? That depends on the situation.
For example, suppose that you're looking for a car. Your neighbor
offers to sell you his old car for $5,000. It's more than you want to pay:
you'd prefer to get the car for nothing. It's less than your neighbor
wants to get: he'd prefer to sell the car for a million dollars. However,
after a bit of obligatory haggling, you both agree on the price of $5,000.
On the surface, it looks like a voluntary exchange in which both
parties benefit. You could choose not to buy the car, and your neighbor could choose not to sell it. Each of you makes a free choice because
you value what you get more than what you give.
Postmodernists aren't buying any of it: the story, that is, not the
car. On their view, the story about voluntary exchange is a "discourse"
that hides something nefarious. Somebody must be exploiting somebody because of capitalism, or privilege, or something else. They
would want to "interrogate" the situation to find the hidden oppression.
It turns out that you need the car to get to your new job, which
starts tomorrow. You don't have time to look around for a better deal.
If you have the money, you pretty much have to accept the price that
your neighbor offers. Your neighbor is exploiting you to get more
money for the car. At the same time, your new salary isn't as high as
you'd like. Your new employer is exploiting your need for a job to
make you work for less money than you'd like.
On the other hand, your neighbor's wife was just taken to the hospital for emergency surgery. The surgery isn't even over yet, but the
bill is already astronomical. Your neighbor desperately needs to get
some money. Your new job is at a startup company that is cash-poor.
Its founder isn't taking a salary and bought most of the equipment with
his personal credit cards. So you are exploiting your neighbor's tragic
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situation to pay less money, while exploiting your boss's risky business venture to get more money.
The conclusion is simple: if everything is exploitation, then nothing
is exploitation. Postmodernists apply the word so widely and promiscuously that they empty it of meaning. Completely ordinary, wholesome, and necessary human interactions are supposedly all about
power and exploitation. Science is a conspiracy to keep down [insert
name of oppressed group]. Such reasoning might be politically appealing to its proponents, but it's an inaccurate and unwise guide to action.
Knowledge approaches absolute truth
If objective truth exists but we can never reach it, how do we even
know it’s there?
First, it helps to distinguish between absolute truth, which we can
never reach, and objective truth, which we can reach. They're very different.
Absolute truth cannot be relative to any network of beliefs or set
of circumstances. No matter what you assume, what concepts you use,
or what situation you're in, it applies and it's true. Otherwise, it's only
true relative to those factors. Absolute truth needs to cover everything, so it requires infinite knowledge -- which we never have.
Objective truth, as we defined it earlier in the chapter, is truth that
doesn't depend on any individual person's set of beliefs. Whether or
not you believe it, the speed of light is 186,282 miles per second. A
meter is 39.37 inches long. If you step off the top of a tall building,
you'll almost certainly die unless Superman swoops in to catch you.
And Superman doesn't exist even if you believe that he does, so you
would be wise not to step off any tall buildings.
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Knowledge = belief divided by ignorance
Here’s a useful metaphor: a metaphor, not a definition. Think of
knowledge as justified belief divided by ignorance: for math nerds,
that’s 𝐾 = 𝐵⁄𝐼. Ignorance includes both things we don't know and
things we believe that aren't objectively true. Then several things can
happen:
• As we use observation and reasoning, we remove items of ignorance from I and move them to B. B gets bigger and I gets
smaller, so B/I also gets bigger and our knowledge expands.
•
If we don’t get more ignorant, which has happened occasionally in history, then I either decreases or stays the same. Our
knowledge (B/I) either increases or stays the same.
Let's look at a simplified example of how that metaphor might
work. Suppose that you hold three justified beliefs:
• Dogs exist.
•
Dogs are domesticated carnivorous mammals of the biological
species canis familiaris that bark, chase cars, and help the
Scooby-Doo gang solve mysteries.
•
A dog can walk on its legs.
You also hold one false belief (“A tail is a leg”), and there are 2,999
things of which you’re unaware. The false belief is grouped with the
things of which you're unaware, so you have 3,000 items of ignorance:
I = 3,000. Then K (your knowledge) = 3 divided by 3,000 = 0.001, or
one-thousandth.
Suppose you do 296 experiments and can never get a dog to use
its tail as a leg. Therefore, you decide that your belief “A tail is a leg”
is false. You change it to “A tail is not a leg” and move it to the “justified beliefs” group with the 296 beliefs from your experiments. Your
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knowledge has grown from 3 divided by 3,000 = 0.001 to 300 divided
by 2,999 = about 0.1. Quite an increase.
Can the progress go on forever, until we have infinite knowledge
and absolute truth? No. There are two reasons. First, we are finite beings with finite intellectual capacities. We cannot achieve infinite
knowledge. Second, and I grant it's kind of a math nerd thing, infinite
knowledge means we have zero ignorance:
K = infinity / zero
and we can't divide by zero. Division doesn't work if we do.29
In mathematics, knowledge would be called an “asymptotic function.” Our knowledge approaches a limiting value -- in this case, absolute truth -- but it never gets there and it never can get there. What
we can get are increasingly accurate and comprehensive approximations for absolute truth.
Ignorance can never be zero, but as we learn more and more, it
gets closer to zero. As that happens, our knowledge gets closer and
closer to reality but it never quite gets there. If it gets close enough for
the purpose at hand (that is, if it’s a fully or partly objective story instead of a purely subjective story), then it’s a good, true story. It’s true
enough for now, even if we might find a truer story tomorrow.
Situations and purposes with “one truth”
It often makes sense to act as if there is “only one truth.” In many
standard situations, everyone involved shares the same purpose and
the same assumptions for achieving it. Those conditions are so important that they bear repeating. The people involved must share:
• The same purpose, and
•
The same assumptions for achieving it.
It’s also important for the subject under discussion to have practical implications that can be checked to prove or disprove beliefs
about it. Some disagreements are only different ways of interpreting
facts that are not themselves in dispute. They are not genuine
29
See "Division by Zero" at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DivisionbyZero.html.
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disagreements, but simply alternative ways of looking at or feeling
about the world. We might adopt or change our views on them for
emotional, personal, or group reasons, but logical arguments are irrelevant. For subjects with practical implications, however, logic and evidence are relevant.
For example, in a scientific laboratory, we want to discover useful
facts about the physical universe. Part of what makes it work is that
everyone involved defines the physical universe roughly as “what we
can study with the methods of physical science.” So they all have the
same purpose, accept the same methods, and make the same assumptions about the things they are studying.
Similarly, students in an art history class often share assumptions
about what they’re studying and what’s relevant to it. How did Van
Gogh’s mental illness affect his style of painting? How did he feel
when he painted “Starry Night”? Such questions are irrelevant in
physical science: “How did Carl Anderson feel when he discovered
the positron?” Nobody cares. That information is not relevant in physical science, but it’s very relevant in art history.
Most situations in life are fairly common: Getting to work. Eating
lunch. Having a romantic talk with your spouse. Reassuring your child
by checking under the bed to make sure there are no monsters lurking.
Just like the situations themselves, the purposes and belief systems we use in them are standard, especially in the same society and
social group. They’re standard because they’ve worked for us in those
situations in the past, and we don’t need to rethink them every time.
Yes, the truths we use in such situations are relative and not absolute.
Usually, however, it serves no purpose to worry about such things. In
principle, truth is relative. In practice, most situations work fine if we
assume that the particular truth we’re using is absolute -- even though
it isn’t.
Four seductive fallacies of postmodernism
Certain errors are so common that they merit at least a brief mention.
They creep into most debates about social policy and related topics.
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They are the moralistic fallacy, the naturalistic fallacy, the rationalistic
fallacy, and the existentialist fallacy:
• Fallacy: morality determines reality. This fallacy (the moralistic fallacy) assumes that whatever seems morally desirable
must be true. If something is undesirable, it must be false. This
fallacy is most often committed by the political left.
•
Fallacy: reality determines morality. This fallacy (the naturalistic fallacy30) assumes that whatever seems true must be
moral. This fallacy is most often committed by the political
right.
•
Fallacy: if it seems to make sense, it’s true. This fallacy (the
rationalistic fallacy) assumes that whatever seems to make
sense must be true, even if there’s no evidence for it. This fallacy is most often committed by college students debating in
the dormitory late at night, but many others commit it as well.
A joke says if you show economists that something works in
practice, they object: “Yes, but does it work in theory?”31
•
Fallacy: if you want it to be true, then it is. This fallacy (the
existentialist fallacy) assumes that reality is whatever you
want it to be. It is loosely suggested by the philosophy of existentialism, which argues that people must define the meaning of their own lives. It’s also a kind of “get out of jail free”
card to justify the other fallacies. For example, it enables 52-
30
In academic philosophy, the naturalistic fallacy also means either trying to define
moral ideas in terms of non-moral ideas, or trying to deduce moral beliefs from factual
beliefs. The versions of the fallacy are obviously related.
31
Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard gives an admirably candid example of the
fallacy in paragraph 2 of his article, “In Defense of Extreme Apriorism,” which is available on the web. He argues that because they seem to make sense, his economic analyses
are “absolutely true” and “there is consequently no need for empirical testing.” It was
originally published in The Southern Economic Journal, January 1957.
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year-old men to claim that they are six-year-old girls and
make everyone else pretend to believe it.32
When argument can make a difference
If all the truth we can know is relative to foundational concepts and
descriptions, then is there any point in arguing about it? If Joe believes
in socialism but Jim believes in capitalism, should they agree to disagree, or can they have a reasonable argument in which one of them
might convince the other – at least on some points?
The crucial factor is whether or not they share enough concepts,
assumptions, and goals for there to be “one truth” that both will accept. Within the same society or civilization, that’s very often the
case. Even if they disagree about matters of substance, similar people
think in similar ways and have similar goals. As Cambridge philosopher and two-time Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell observed:
"Reliance upon reason assumes a certain community of interest between oneself and one's audience. It is true that Mrs. Bond tried it
on her ducks when she cried, 'come and be killed, for you must be
stuffed and my customers filled'; but in general the appeal to reason
is thought ineffective with those whom we mean to devour. Those
who believe in eating meat do not attempt to find arguments that
would seem valid to a sheep ..."33
For example, both Socialist Joe and Capitalist Jim want their society to be fair and prosperous, its citizens to be safe and happy. They
disagree about how to accomplish those goals, but both of them accept
facts of economics and political science as relevant to their argument.
If both of them are more committed to their positive goals than to
competitively “winning” the argument, then the facts can lead them
to change their opinions. They compare their beliefs with observed
facts that they both accept.
They probably also disagree about the meaning of fairness. Resolving that disagreement would require a deeper dive into their
32
Transgender woman leaves wife and 7 kids to live as a 6-year-old girl,” New York
Daily News, Dec. 12, 2015.
33
"The Ancestry of Fascism," In Praise of Idleness, p. 67.
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assumptions and moral feelings, but it’s at least possible. Each would
ask the other to imagine situations in which fairness is relevant, and
then to compare his beliefs with his feelings about the example. If Joe
or Jim finds that his idea of fairness conflicts with his feelings about
some situations, then he’ll be more open to changing his mind about
it.
Rational disagreement and reasonable argument are possible:
they’re just difficult. Arguments about morals, politics, and social policies – when reasonable – usually involve these moves:
• Each side starts with its own opinion, call them X and Y.
•
Each side argues that the other opinion is inconsistent either
with:
ü Factual beliefs on which they agree, or
ü Moral feelings or beliefs on which they agree.
•
If one side can convince the other side that its opinion X or Y
is inconsistent with agreed-upon factual or moral beliefs, then
the other side might change its opinion.
People aren’t always rational, but they can be if they don’t feel
threatened or overwhelmed by emotion. A crucial part of productive
argument is to stay focused on facts and issues, making it very clear
that the argument is not about the people involved. The writer Dale
Carnegie offered some wise advice in his best-selling book How to Win
Friends and Influence People:
“A man convinced against his will
Is of the same opinion still.”
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Chapter 15:
Why Be Tolerant?
“The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those
ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours … To dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices
and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make
the angels weep.”
-- William James
IN EARLIER CHAPTERS, WE LOOKED AT A LOT OF FACTS: about belief, history, biology, religion, meaning, and truth. But facts don’t do much
good unless we can apply them to improving ourselves, our societies,
and our world.
The changes we can make in our societies, in our religions, and
even in our own attitudes are limited by the facts of human nature. To
have even partial success -- and partial success is the best we’re going
to get -- we must know what we’re up against. What is the nature that
we have to obey in order to command such a result? What are the facts
we must overcome?
We’ve seen that biological creatures tend to trust, help, and cooperate with those they perceive as their genetic relatives. The degree
of such trust, help, and cooperation is in proportion to the nearness of
the perceived relation. Genetic competitors tend to provoke the
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opposite reaction: suspicion, hostility, and attack. Human beings are
unique among animal species in that we use not only the same cues as
most other animals, but also use cues based on our intellectual and
social behaviors -- that is, on our beliefs, languages, traditions, and ritual practices.
As people of goodwill, we want to “command” a goal that is both
simple and seemingly impossible: A world of peace. An end to hatred
and bloodshed. A cessation of injustice.
In our past efforts to achieve that goal, we’ve tried ignoring nature
or pretending it’s something other than what it plainly is.
We’ve cherry-picked stories about peaceful encounters between
people from different groups: usually people who were highly educated, culturally assimilated, and morally pacifistic. We’ve argued that
what applies to a few very unusual people, some of the time, applies
to people in general, all of the time. We’ve seen the results: from Mogadishu, Paris, London, and Ferguson. The results are unacceptable.
We have to do better. We can do better.
Doing better requires us to answer two questions:
• Why should we be tolerant of beliefs that conflict with our
own beliefs?
•
How can we build societies that maximize tolerance of different groups and beliefs?
The “why” question is more important than you might think. It’s
not obvious that we should tolerate beliefs we don’t like. Throughout
history, most people haven’t. Today, most people don’t. If we don’t
know why we should be tolerant, then as soon as we hit a difficulty,
our kin selection instincts will kick in and we’ll be tempted to start
attacking each other again.
The “how” question’s importance is clearer. It doesn’t do us any
good to seek tolerance if we have no idea how to achieve it. If the
answer were obvious to everyone, we would have done it by now. The
answer isn’t rocket science: from reading this book, you know a lot of
it already. But we need to transform all that information into action
plans to make it happen.
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This chapter reviews what we know about why to be tolerant. The
next chapter applies what we’ve learned to show how we can build
tolerant societies.
What is tolerance?
Homogeneous societies like 2017 Japan (98.5 percent ethnic Japanese), 2017 China (91.6 percent Han Chinese), and 1965 America (88
percent European-American) have it pretty easy. The vast majority of
people tend to perceive others, often accurately, as their genetic kin.
They agree about language, customs, religion, culture, and all the important issues of life. They still have conflict, but the majority’s overwhelming dominance keeps it at a lower level than it otherwise would
be. The resulting social peace will have flaws but will benefit most
people.
In a diverse society, on the other hand, tolerance is essential for
any social peace at all. It requires at least three things:
• Letting other people live and believe as they wish, as long as
they don’t harm us or innocent third parties by violence, coercion, or fraud.
•
Listening to other people’s viewpoints, considering the merits
of their arguments, and showing respect for them as people
even if we think they’re wrong.
•
Using violence or coercion only as a last resort, and:
ü After we have understood and fairly considered objections to our ideas and plans;
ü Only when the harm avoided by violence far exceeds the
harm done by it;
ü With respect for the costs, feelings, and dignity of people
attacked or coerced;
ü Through public, impersonal, and predictable legal processes wherever possible.
Tolerance isn’t the same thing as approval. In fact, if we approve
of something, tolerance doesn’t make any sense. We don’t “tolerate”
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it if our children get good grades in school, or if a stranger performs
an act of kindness. We can only tolerate things we don’t like.
Tolerance is also not the same as active support. Requiring people
to say or do things that support what they disapprove is intolerant of
their right to live and believe as they wish without harming others.
Zealots are often confused about that point.
Tolerance has limits
Tolerance does not mean that we must tolerate everything, especially
if someone is harming other people by violence, coercion, or fraud (or
abuse in the case of children). That’s the point of the proviso to let
others live as they wish as long as they don’t harm us or innocent third
parties.
Sir Charles Napier (1782-1853) told a relevant story about his experience as a British officer in India.
When he and his soldiers arrived at a village, they found the locals
preparing to burn a widow alive on her late husband’s funeral pyre.
The village elders explained that it was their traditional custom to do
so. Napier listened respectfully, then replied:
"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn
women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My
carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."34
The widow was set free. Today, we might make a similar argument
about female genital mutilation (FGM) and other practices of some
non-Western migrants in Western countries.
And some limits are conventional
Behavior that clearly harms people is an easy case. Under normal circumstances, it should not be tolerated.
34
Napier, W. (1851), p. 35.
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But societies, social groups, and institutions often refuse to tolerate some relatively harmless behavior. Is such intolerance always illegitimate?
It depends on the situation.
All societies, groups, and so forth have customary behaviors that
members see as “just how we do things.” The obvious function of such
behaviors is to distinguish members of the group from non-members.
Following the customs also shows respect for the group and its members, since it reinforces their feeling of personal and group security. It
makes daily life:
• Predictable: Customs enable members to predict how other
people will behave in standard situations. That smooths interactions and prevents misunderstanding.
•
Reflective: Customs reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the
group based on its history, purposes, and personalities.
•
Confirming: Customs confirm the validity of group members’
attitudes and beliefs, thereby giving them psychological support and tending to increase their happiness.
•
Unifying: Customs unify the group by mandating shared behaviors, giving group members visible signs of their shared
values and (real or imagined) genetic kinship.
For example, it’s illegal almost everywhere in America to walk naked on a city street. It harms no one in any material way, but it makes
people uncomfortable because it conflicts with long-established traditions about wearing clothes in public. To flout that convention is to
show lack of respect for the society and its people.
In his famous book On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill identifies
the difficult tradeoffs that any society must make between tolerance
and conformity:
"All that makes life valuable to anyone, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of
conduct must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion
on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law."
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Refusing to behave in customary ways harms the integrity of the
group. If we think it’s good for the group to continue, then it must be
able to enforce such customs by legal or social sanctions. Public nakedness gets you a ticket or a night in jail. Boorish language in inappropriate contexts gets you scolded or shunned.
Because such customs are somewhat arbitrary, they vary between
societies and groups. What also varies is the degree to which the societies and groups tolerate deviations. If a custom has social benefits,
intolerance of deviation is justified by the custom’s benefits. If a custom is neutral or slightly harmful, intolerance of deviation makes less
sense.
A fine point: intolerance as the least evil alternative
Our presumption should always be against intolerance, but in some
situations, moderate intolerance might be the least harmful of the
available choices. A medical analogy is helpful.
In the 18th century, the disease of smallpox was widespread, killing about 30 percent of its victims. However, farm laborers who
worked with cows often contracted the disease of cowpox, similar to
smallpox but much less harmful. People who’d had cowpox were immune to smallpox. Using pus from infected cows, British physician
Edward Jenner (1749-1823) created a vaccine that gave people a mild
case of cowpox but made them immune to smallpox. In effect, he gave
them a less serious illness that protected them from getting a more serious illness. That's not an example of intolerance, but it shows how
lesser evils can "immunize" people against greater evils.
All societies throughout history have seemed to need scapegoat
groups toward which members of the majority can direct the inevitable anger and frustration of their own lives. Sometimes the scapegoats
are religious, sometimes ethnic, sometimes chosen by practices such
as the use of forbidden drugs. Attempts to create a perfect society
without injustice or persecution have ended with even more of the
evils they hoped to eliminate, such as the terror and mass slaughter of
the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions.
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History supports Voltaire’s famous advice: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Pursuit of a perfect society not only creates worse
problems: it also prevents us from embracing practical but imperfect
solutions that might be the best we can achieve. Human beings are
imperfect, and we can never build a perfect society with imperfect
people. Our choice is not between perfect and imperfect, but between
the less harmful and the more harmful imperfect.
We need to consider the possibility that some cases of intolerance
act as social safety valves. Though evil, they might provide a less destructive social catharsis than the alternatives, just as Jenner showed
that cowpox protected people from smallpox. Our presumption must
always be against intolerance, but in a small number of cases, it might
be our least-evil choice.
Tolerance recognizes our own self-interest
Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged is notoriously a paean to the virtue
of selfishness. Of course, it’s only “notorious” if you disagree with her
premise that selfishness is a good thing.
In fairness, Rand (née Aliza Rosenbaum, born in Russia under
Communism) is not talking about mindless selfishness on the order of
“Jimmy grabs Sally’s ice cream cone because he wants it.” She emphasizes that she’s talking about rational selfishness, which is a different
thing. What is really in our self-interest, if we think about it instead of
acting impulsively?
One little-noticed feature of Atlas Shrugged (and of Rand’s earlier
novel, The Fountainhead) is that its heroes often do things most people
would consider unselfish. Before they do, however, the heroes usually
make a five-page speech about how what they’re doing is really in their
self-interest even though it seems unselfish. When one character sacrifices his life for another, for example, it’s because upholding justice
is in his own interest -- even if he gets killed doing it. The routine becomes almost comical: Rand wants her heroes to do heroic things but
only for selfish reasons. Their explanations of why their heroism is
selfish sometimes get a little farfetched.
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That being said, a reasonable person might think that everyone’s
welfare matters. That includes both other people and ourselves. As a
result, it’s sometimes justified to act in our own interest, sometimes in
the interest of other people, and sometimes in the interest of both.
Tolerance falls into the final category: It’s in everyone’s rational
self-interest to live in a tolerant society, even if we sometimes have to
put up with things and ideas we don’t like. As noted in the previous
section, if we like things, we don’t need to tolerate them: we support
them. At the same time, other people who don’t like them tolerate us.
Tolerance and traffic laws
In some ways, the case for tolerance is the same as the case for traffic
laws.
Suppose that it’s 8:45pm and you’re driving to meet a friend at a
coffee shop. The shop closes at 9pm. You arrive at an intersection that
has a stop sign. There’s no traffic. You looked. There’s no police car
around. You looked twice. Do you stop for the stop sign, or just ignore
it?
If you’re like most of us, you’re not sure. There’s no risk that you’ll
cause an accident or get a ticket. What’s the harm? You’re running
late. You need to get to the coffee shop before 9pm.
But it might bother you a little. You’d be breaking the law: not an
unjust law, but a legitimate law that was enacted for the public good.
Act utilitarianism versus rule utilitarianism
Your moral uneasiness reflects the difference between two theories
of morality: act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism says that you should try to produce the greatest
good for the greatest number of people.35 But what’s the most effective way to do that?
35
“Which people count?” is a question that utilitarianism itself doesn’t answer. Many
political arguments result from answering it in different ways.
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Act utilitarianism says that in each situation, you should act in a
way that produces the greatest good. If you’re an act utilitarian, you
ignore the stop sign and drive past it.
Rule utilitarianism says that in each situation, you should act according to a rule that produces the greatest good if everyone follows it.
If you’re a rule utilitarian, you stop for the stop sign. If everyone follows the rules (traffic laws), then there will be fewer automobile accidents.
Politeness is another example. When I walked out of the coffee
shop this morning with a briefcase in one hand and a paper cup of
coffee in the other, the person in front of me held the door for me.
From an act-utilitarian viewpoint, his action produced no net benefit:
I got out a little faster and he got out a little slower. But from a ruleutilitarian viewpoint, his action promoted social harmony by showing
consideration for another person. He increased the probability not
only that I would hold the door for others in similar situations, but
that I would treat others with consideration for their welfare and happiness.
When we tolerate other people’s behavior or beliefs that we dislike, we do it as rule utilitarians. We accept a little discomfort in the
current situation in order to sustain a much greater good: a society
where other people tolerate our and each other’s beliefs and behaviors
that they dislike.
If we want other people to tolerate our beliefs and ways of living,
we should start by tolerating theirs, and by promoting tolerance as an
important social value. It’s in our self-interest to do so.
Tolerating risks
Risk might seem unrelated to tolerance, but it’s a tricky problem. The
problem is tricky because there’s no provable, cookie-cutter answer
that applies to everyone and every society.
Every society tolerates some risks and prohibits others. Where
they differ is in the risks they tolerate and the risks they prohibit.
For example, in modern America, driving while drunk is against
the law. A drunk driver might not harm anyone, but has a greater risk
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of harming someone. Therefore, drunk driving is illegal, and most
states outlawed it in the early 20th century. Since the 1980s, when
people’s perception of the risk has intensified, the legal penalties for
drunk driving have become more severe.
That's a clear example of risk. But then we get into murkier issues
of belief and free speech. Those are more clearly connected to tolerance.
For example, some college students believe it’s too risky to tolerate professors or campus speakers who say things with which they
disagree. Such speech makes them “feel unsafe.” They believe that violent protest, even violent attacks on speakers and college officials,
are justified by the risks of allowing dissent. They don’t want to tolerate any ideas they dislike.
It’s easy to mock such people as “snowflakes.” Their alleged fears
have no basis in reality and most of their information – to the extent
that they have any – is wrong. However, their argument doesn’t differ
logically from the argument against drunk driving. Risk is hard to
quantify. People’s anxiety about risk is subjective. And as Nobel laureate physicist Niels Bohr said, “Prediction is difficult, especially
about the future.”
Beware of our own psychology
When we dislike things, our minds automatically start looking for reasons to ban them. If an activity doesn’t do any harm, we’ll unconsciously make up some harm to justify banning it.
And if there really are risks of harm, we tend to exaggerate the
risks of things we don’t like and minimize the risks of things we do
like. The 1936 movie “Reefer Madness,” which suggests that smoking
marijuana turns people into homicidal maniacs, is a famous example.
It became a cult classic movie (taken as comedy) because its message
about risk was so ludicrously exaggerated.
The things we want to ban are sometimes bad, sometimes debatable, but the main thing is that we just don’t like them. Our primary
motivation is often not logical, but psychological.
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For those reasons, tolerance should be our default attitude toward
people, beliefs, and behavior. The burden of proof is on those who
want to ban them. Sometimes, the proof is clear. But other times, there
isn’t any proof of danger: there’s only hostility masquerading as selfdefense.
Tolerance recognizes the reasons for difference
We differ from each other in many ways: appearance, nationality, language, religion, moral beliefs, and personality are just a few examples.
Any of those differences can trigger our kin selection instincts to see
other people as genetic competitors who must be either thwarted or
destroyed.
For lower animals, that’s the end of the story: Fight or flight. But
we have an ability that lower animals don’t have: We can think. We
can understand the reasons for our differences. If the differences really mean a “fight or flight” situation, then we can deal with it. But if
they’re harmless or nearly so, we can reframe them intellectually so
we see them for what they are instead of what our animal instincts
fear they might be.
Differences in appearance
People look different for many reasons. In the United States, people
tend to obsess about race, but it’s only one of many reasons why people look different.
Here's a personal example: I’m not a big fan of tattoos and body
piercings, but some people are. One of my friends and colleagues has
tattoos all the way up both arms, but he’s as smart and sane a person
as you’ll ever meet. A barista at the local Starbucks has so many tattoos
and piercings, including face piercings, that I can barely stand to look
at her. Do I think she’s a bad person? Of course not. But there’s an “ick
factor,” an involuntary reaction of disgust at her appearance. To deal
with the barista, giving her the courtesy she deserves as a human being, I override my ick factor, carefully controlling my voice, expressions, and behavior. That takes concentration and causes stress.
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Not all differences in appearance provoke disgust, which makes
us avoid people who are disfigured by disease and substances that
make us sick, “as an unconscious defense against biological contamination."36 Other appearance differences provoke hostility to perceived genetic competitors. If you add up the hundreds of millions of
such encounters every day, you can see the emotional load on society
from some (though obviously not all) kinds of difference in appearance. At best, they cause tension. At worst, they provoke violence.
Almost any difference can hook people’s kin selection instincts.
Racial appearance plays a role in social conflict, but mainly because
it’s a clearly visible marker of genetic difference. It’s the kind of difference that triggers our kin selection instincts to see people of other
races as genetic competitors. Neither the difference nor our instinctive reaction is likely to change. What we can change, however, is how
we respond to those facts. We should remember that just as we sometimes react negatively to others' unfamiliar or unconventional appearance, they react the same way to our appearance. Usually, no one
involved is a villain; we're just human.
Tolerance reflects our commitment to treat people as individuals,
with their own individual lives, thoughts, and human dignity, rather
than as mere symbols of one group or another.
Differences in belief
Differences in belief affect our appearance and behavior, including
our verbal behavior when we declare our support for our beliefs. All
of that tends to hook our kin selection instincts to perceive others as
genetic competitors.
Even people who know better – i.e., most of us – often interpret
differences in belief as a threat and as an indication of moral evil. Occasionally it’s true, but usually it isn’t.
If someone says that he believes morality is nonsense and that he’s
entitled to do whatever he wants, that really is a warning sign: look up
“Leopold and Loeb.” But if someone merely says, for instance, “We
36
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, p. 71.
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should permit / outlaw abortion,” he or she most likely believes it because of:
• A particular foundational description of human beings and the
world, such as traditional religion or contemporary secularism.
•
Dominant peer group beliefs one way or the other. Living in
the wealthier areas of Los Angeles tends to make people see
things one way, while living in middle-class areas of Indianapolis tends to make them see things differently.
•
Personal experiences, such as knowing a rape victim or seeing
an ultrasound of a baby.
What we learn first has an especially strong effect on our subsequent beliefs. We interpret new information in terms of what we already believe. We try to fit it into our existing stock of concepts and
test its truth partly by comparing it with our existing beliefs. Regardless of the content of our beliefs, we all tend to reason about them in
the same ways. And relative to our own foundational descriptions of
the world, our conflicting beliefs can all be true.
Finally, our economic interests play a role in forming our beliefs.
We don’t have to go as far as the 19th-century political economist Karl
Marx, who thought that society's material “means of production” determined our beliefs. However, American writer Upton Sinclair
struck the right balance when he wrote that:
“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary
depends on his not understanding it.”
Tolerance recognizes our own limitations
Each of us has a viewpoint limited by our knowledge, experience, biases, and emotions. We can be wrong for the same reasons as other
people. If we’re reasonably self-aware, we know that we have been
wrong about many things in the past, and that we’re almost certainly
wrong about some things now.
That kind of awareness is discouraged by political and moral debates that reward screaming more than logic, self-righteousness more
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than evidence. When our emotions are enraged, our intelligence tends
to go out the window. We stop trying to find the truth and start trying
to find an advantage over the people with whom we disagree.
That’s not because we’re bad people. It’s because we’re people.
We’re not passionless robots. Like most things, being human is simultaneously a blessing and -- well, if not a curse, at least a challenge.
When we are tempted by intolerance, to force other people to act
or believe as we do, we should always stop and ask: “Could I be
wrong?” If we can’t give an answer that would satisfy someone who
doesn’t already agree with us, we should err on the side of tolerance.
Welcoming disagreement with our beliefs
Being tolerant of other people’s beliefs isn’t just a matter of being nice.
It’s very practical.
As thoughtful people, we recognize that some of our beliefs are
wrong. But which ones? How are they wrong? And if they’re wrong,
then what’s right?
The best way to find out is to tolerate disagreement with our beliefs. In fact, we shouldn’t just tolerate it: we should welcome it. And
we should listen to disagreement as fairly as we can.
If someone who disagrees with us proves that our beliefs are illogical, unsupported by evidence, or contradicted by the facts, then he or
she has done us a favor. As a result, we can replace the incorrect belief
with a more correct belief. We understand the world better.
On the other hand, if the other person fails to disprove our belief,
that’s indirect confirmation that our belief is correct as it stands. We
can have more confidence in it.
We make a great mistake if we invest too much of our egos in “always being right.” An old co-worker of mine named Tony had worked
at Microsoft and was one of the smartest people I’ve met. Unfortunately, his abrasive personality eventually got him fired. That bothered me, because I’d rather work with abrasive smart people than
friendly stupid people.
Tony and I once got into a fairly heated political argument. At the
end, it was pretty clear that he was right and I was wrong. Later that
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week, I bought him lunch. He was surprised because he thought I’d be
angry that he’d proven me wrong. I told him exactly what I told you:
He had done me a favor by correcting a false belief of mine.
If I had refused to talk to Tony because we disagreed, or if I’d listened to him only with the goal of refuting what he said, I would still
hold that mistaken belief.
In a serious argument, as opposed to a political shouting match,
the only way to “win” is to find out the truth. Tolerance of disagreement is an essential step toward finding it.37
The error of Whig history
Most people haven’t heard of Whig history, but they believe in it.
The term was coined by Cambridge University historian Herbert
Butterfield in a 1931 book The Whig Interpretation of History. It’s the
view that history is inevitably progress, so later eras are always more
enlightened than earlier ones.
To some degree, we are all the intellectual prisoners of our own
era. The ancient Israelites, arguably among the most enlightened people of their time, slaughtered the Canaanites without mercy. Aristotle
considered women to be on about the same level as horses. Spartacus
led a slave revolt but didn’t oppose slavery on principle; he just didn’t
want to be a slave himself. A belief that our own time is uniquely wise
and morally advanced is a prescription for intolerance.
Knowing history partly frees us from the prison of our era. Ignorance makes us more inclined to believe that history is a steady upward march from barbarism to sophistication. It’s not.
Indoor plumbing, antibiotics, printed books, ebooks, and cell
phones are undeniable advances, but they are only technological advances. They change the conditions in which we live, but not human
nature. And it's human nature that shapes society, using whatever
technologies are available.
37
Recall from Chapter 13 that even though all the truth we know is relative, it can be
treated as “absolute” in standard situations where people share the same goals and
enough common assumptions to make argument possible.
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People can’t see parallels between the United States and the Roman Empire if they know little about the former and nothing about
the latter. They can’t know that exactly the same political problems
and moral dilemmas we face today were already debated, and sometimes solved, in Ancient Athens, Rome, England, and in the early
years of the United States. They can’t know if 1940s America was better or worse than it is in 2018 because they know hardly anything
about either.
Americans in 2018 have socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and the
Occupy movement to call for better treatment of the poor. Ancient
Romans had the Tribunes of the Plebs (government officials who
could veto laws that hurt the poor) and "the struggle of the orders"38
between the Patricians (the old-money rich) and the Plebians (the
working class). The basics don’t change; only the details and the technology do.
Of course, sometimes the details and the technology are significant. Even if “the poor are always with us,” as Jesus advised, technology has reduced extreme poverty all over the world. The poor still
have less than the rich, but a much smaller percentage are so poor that
they can barely stay alive. And the advent of a computer-connected
world is a true game-changer whose ultimate results are unpredictable. So it’s not quite true that nothing ever changes.
What doesn’t change much, or very fast, is human nature, and human society reflects human nature. Each new generation faces the
same kinds of social problems, has the same kinds of debates, and
reaches solutions that have usually been tried many times before -sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Each generation can learn from previous generations, but only if
it listens to them through the record of history. And even history
doesn’t dictate the moral values or political institutions that we should
adopt. Often, as with the Baby Boom generation of the 1960s, new values seem to come more from adolescent rebellion against their parents than from any considered rejection on the merits.
38
Sometimes called "the conflict of the orders," if you decide to look it up.
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People who know nothing of history are trapped in the present
moment. As far as they know, beliefs that are now popular have always been obviously true. Beliefs from 10 years ago are suspect, while
beliefs from 50 or 100 years ago are automatically presumed wrong.
Ideas that they encountered for the first time on a website this morning seem completely new, never before having been tried and eventually rejected when their defects became obvious.
Let’s consider just one example. Americans in 2018 disagree about
many basic moral and political values. They argue bitterly and struggle
to control the federal government so that they can impose their own
values on people with whom they disagree. Whether the issue is
prayer in schools, abortion, transgender bathrooms, Islam, or affirmative action, their disagreements are largely regional: people in California and Kentucky might as well be on different planets. You could
describe the situation like this:
“A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points; an attachment to different leaders
ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power … have, in
turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress
each other than to co-operate for their common good.”
Okay, the word “vex” might have tipped you off that the quote
didn’t come from today’s issue of The New York Times. It’s from Federalist Paper #10 by James Madison, published in 1788. He was one of
the architects of the U.S. Constitution. The bitter national dissension
we see today is a problem that was solved (as well as it can be) a long
time ago. We just forgot the solution.
The American Founders needed to unite the colonies into one nation in spite of their disagreements. They did it with the last article in
the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,
nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” (10th Amendment)
In Federalist Paper #45, Madison explained the meaning:
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“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal
government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the
State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be
exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation,
and foreign commerce …The powers reserved to the several States
will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs,
concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.”
Federalism has no necessary connection with libertarianism, or
indeed with any particular political philosophy. It is most of all a practical strategy for uniting a society in which different groups have irresolvable disagreements. Each group, in its own geographical area, can
follow its own majority viewpoint as long as it recognizes the same
right for other groups in their own areas. The areas cooperate on the
"few and defined" issues about which they agree and that affect the
country as a whole.
Tolerance recognizes inherent dignity of all people
A lesson of this book is that for good and for ill, we share the animal
side of our nature with lower animals. We have many of the same impulses and weaknesses as they do.
But even the most dedicated skeptic knows we are more than that.
For one thing, we can think, without which skepticism is impossible.
We can speculate about our future and dig up artifacts to learn about
our past. We can wonder why the world works as it does. We can
yearn for some kind of meaning beyond ourselves. We can ask if our
lives really matter.
If you have a religious background, it’s easy to find your place in
the universe. Whether or not you take them literally, you know the
foundational beliefs of your own tradition. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all look to Genesis 1:27:
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created
He him; male and female created He them.”
If you believe it or even half-believe it, it's a good answer. Every
human life is sacred because every person is created in the image of
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God. Even skeptics draw inspiration from it, as did Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) in his Oration on the Dignity of Man:
“We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and
proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you
may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish
forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise
again to the superior orders whose life is Divine.”
American novelist Mark Twain had a similar view. In his book Letters from the Earth (published posthumously because Twain knew it
would cause an uproar), Twain tells how Satan was exiled from
heaven and sent to earth. Satan wrote to the other archangels to tell
them about humanity:
“Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very best he is a
sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the ‘noblest
work of God.’ This is the truth I am telling you. And this is not a
new idea with him, he has talked it through the ages, and believed
it. Believed it, and found nobody among all his race to laugh at it.”
What if you’re neither believer, half-believer, nor even a sympathetic skeptic? “Praise Jesus,” if you’ll pardon the expression, there’s
still hope for you. There’s a purely secular explanation for why everyone’s life matters, deserving respect and tolerance. Human beings
have inalienable value because they are self-aware.
Goodness and self-awareness
In Chapter 11, we discussed why meaning depends on consciousness.
Meaning is connection. In a lifeless world, marks on paper wouldn’t
mean anything. To someone who didn’t understand the language in
which they were written, marks on paper wouldn’t mean anything.
It’s only to a mind that things can have meaning. Consciousness bestows meaning on what was previously meaningless.
Likewise, goodness depends on consciousness. However we define goodness, it depends on a mind that connects it with something
else. Exercise is good because it promotes health; health is good
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because it enables us to achieve our other goals and suffer less pain.
Achieving our goals is good because it fulfills our abilities and gives us
pleasure. And pleasure is good, while pain is bad, because (according
to many people) they are intrinsically so.
As far as we can tell, all animals feel pleasure and pain. In a different way, even plants seem to feel them. But humans not only feel
pleasure and pain, they can be aware of themselves feeling pleasure and
pain. They not only see, but can be aware they are seeing. They not
only think, but – just like Descartes – they can realize “I am thinking.”
The crucial difference between humans and lower animals is that
humans can be aware of their own existence, lives, and consciousness.
That higher-level awareness means they can bestow value on themselves. In other words, they can value their own lives whether or not
anyone else values them.
Like God, human beings are self-aware. In philosophical jargon (in
case you want to impress people at a party), they are simultaneously
the subject and object of their own consciousness. As a result, they
have reflexive self-value. Their value, dignity, and rights are independent of what anyone else thinks about them. As long as they are alive
and capable of self-awareness, they can value themselves. They have
reflexive self-value of which no one else can deprive them. In the
words of the Declaration of Independence, their value as people is
“unalienable.”
Whatever we think about other people’s beliefs or ways of life,
their inherent and unalienable value restricts what we can morally do
to them. Some things such as murder are always off-limits: even in
extreme cases that have some justification, they are still wrong. Other
things such as intolerance are presumed wrong unless proven otherwise: the burden of proof is on the people who want to restrict others
or inflict suffering on them because of their beliefs.
Tolerance is essential not just for a good human society, but for a
good human life.
Recognizing the inherent value and dignity in all people is a necessary part of being a decent person and a good citizen.
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Chapter 16:
Building Tolerant
Societies
“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
-- Francis Bacon
THE QUOTE THAT INTRODUCES THIS CHAPTER makes an important point:
To live successfully, we must pay attention to facts and natural laws.
Ignorance, whether accidental or willful, is a prescription for failure.
Wishful thinking about politics and social policy is a prescription for
failure.
Nowhere is that more true than in dealing with human nature. It’s
easy to say nice words about tolerance, and most people do. It’s very
easy to say nice words about peace, and most people do. Books are full
of it. How much good has it done? To judge by each day’s news, not
much.
Uttering platitudes is easy. That’s why people do it so much. It’s
more daunting to arrange social relations in a way that maximizes tolerance and peace while minimizing hatred and bloodshed.
This chapter explores how to create such social arrangements.
There’s a lot we can do. It’s also important to know what we can’t do,
or not very well, or without much likelihood of success.
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Choose the achievable imperfect
The first thing we can’t do is create a perfect society. Unless human
nature changes, there can never be a perfect society. Accepting that
fact is the first step to making society better in ways that are possible
instead of dreamy and utopian. Tolerance is very much on the agenda,
but it won’t be perfect and some people won’t think it’s enough.
A perfect society is impossible for three reasons.
First, human beings are imperfect. We are capable of intelligent
thought and moral nobility, but not always or even most of the time.
Too often, we are selfish, narrow-minded, impatient, cruel, and
thoughtless. We want what we want, and we don’t care about others
or the common good. We easily rationalize whatever sins we can’t
deny. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) described it in his Essay on Man:
“Virtuous and vicious every man must be,
Few in the extreme, but all in the degree;
The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise;
And even the best by fits what they despise.”
Second, social perfection is subjective. What we consider a “perfect society” depends on our life experience, emotional makeup,
moral values, and settled beliefs. Even people who have a lot in common often disagree about the details of a good society. Any large society has many groups of people with little in common, so it has many
such disagreements. Those who disagree are all right, and they’re all
wrong. There’s no provable definition of a perfect society because it’s
only partly dependent on facts. The rest depends on the people defining it.
In order to survive, a society needs a majority population who
agree on enough to work together for the common good and see each
other as members of the same in-group. It also needs some general
agreement about what the common good is.
Third, no matter how fortunate people are, they are never satisfied with what they have. Smart people want to be popular. Popular
people want to be smart. Poor people wish they had money. Rich people fondly recall the simplicity of their lives when they were broke.
Young people want to be older, older people want to be younger.
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Single people yearn for the security of marriage, while married people
yearn for the freedom of being single. Wherever we are, we always
seem to think there’s a better place just over the horizon. As Pope later
observed in the same poem:
"Hope springs eternal in the human brest;
Man never is, but always to be, blest."
If society were totally peaceful and loving, with everyone having
enough and no one suffering injustice, we’d still find reasons to complain about it. The Harvard philosopher William James (1842-1910)
once visited a utopian community in Chautauqua, New York that came
as close to a perfect society as any ever has. He described it in his essay
“What Makes a Life Significant?”
“I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, spellbound by the
charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without
a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.”
The surprise came when he departed from the society of humanity’s
highest ideals:
“What was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and
wicked world again, to catch myself saying: ‘What a relief! Now for
something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an
Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is
too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This drama without a villain, this atrocious harmlessness of all
things -- I cannot abide with it. Let me take my chances again in the
big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings.’”
Amazingly, imperfection is like a vitamin
“Perfection” is impossible in human society because it is imperfection that motivates us and helps give meaning to our lives. Like the
utopian community James described, a perfect society would be too
tame, too second-rate, and too uninspiring. We are not merely thinking machines. We are full-blooded human beings, with energy, drives,
and passions that we need to exercise on meeting challenges and solving problems. Without them, we stagnate in mediocrity.
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That’s why many people in prosperous countries react to trivial
problems as if they were earth-shaking, life-or-death struggles. They
have no life-or-death struggles, but they need them: it’s part of being
human. We need to feel that our lives have a significance beyond our
span of years. We hope that we’ll achieve some great good to survive
us and to remind the world that we were here.39 But when the worst
social problems of which we have first-hand knowledge are who gets
to use which bathroom or who used the wrong pronoun, we feel bereft. Where is the great challenge we can overcome, the invincible
monster we can defeat, the intolerable wrong we can set right? Where
is our chance to make a mark on the world: to be remembered, even
if only by a few?
We cannot achieve perfection, but in striving to improve what we
can, we make our societies and ourselves the best they can be. That’s
how we make our mark. And that’s good enough.
Understand the social possibilities frontier
We also need to set realistic expectations about what we can accomplish. The possibilities for any society are limited not only by human
nature but also by the history, customs, institutions, and dominant
populations of the society. Those create a “social possibilities frontier”40 beyond which a society cannot progress without prior improvements in its social resources.
For example, if some group of people has always lived under despotic government, then that experience formed their foundational beliefs about freedom, rights, and the rule of law. If you tell them that
democratic government is better, they will evaluate what you say in
terms of what they already believe, so they won't believe you. It’s outside of their social possibilities frontier.
Similarly, you cannot take an illiterate population that believes in
magic instead of science, give it some computers, and expect it to
39
It’s not a new thing. The ancient Greeks called it kleos, usually translated as “glory.”
It was the desire to do something important enough to be remembered by future generations.
40
Analogous to the “production possibilities frontier” concept in economics.
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sustain an advanced technological society. That’s outside of its social
possibilities frontier.
Education and cultural evolution can move the social possibilities
frontier and change a society, but that takes generations and creates
conflict. We must balance the possible future good it might achieve
against the guaranteed present evils that it causes. British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott explains in his book Rationalism in Politics:
““Innovation entails certain loss and possible gain. Therefore, the
burden of proof, to show that the proposed change will be on the
whole beneficial, is with the would-be innovator.”
Understand the second law of social dynamics
As far as I know, nobody has stated a second law of social dynamics,
but there is one. It’s the reason for Oakeshott’s caution about the risks
of innovation.
The corresponding law in physical science is the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. It says that in a closed system, disorder (entropy)
increases over time. That’s why cars eventually fall apart, and it’s part
of the reason for human aging.
Disorder increases because there are more ways for things to be
chaotic than for them to be organized in useful ways. As a result, the
probability of disorder is greater than the probability of order.
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Suppose that you throw a deck of cards on the floor. There is only
one way for the cards to fall so that they’re in order, but there are 52!
ways for them to fall out of order.41 Therefore, it’s much more likely
they will fall out of order (see figure).
Applied to human society, it means that there are many more
ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right. That implies
three important points:
• Other things being equal, the overall result of any social
change is more likely to be bad than to be good. The overall
result includes not only the intended result, but also all the
other results that nobody expected or considered.
•
Therefore, it’s important to make any social changes slowly
and carefully, allowing time to evaluate their results before
taking them any further. Evaluation includes considering the
social consensus about the results, not merely their abstract
merits or demerits.
•
Social improvements are not permanent. Unless they are sustained by continuous effort and proper education of each new
generation, they disappear. Taking their place will be new
“improvements” that will probably make things worse.
American Founder Benjamin Franklin alluded to the second law
of social dynamics when a woman asked what the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had given to the people. “A republic,” he replied, “if
you can keep it.”
Franklin knew that as time passed, disorder would start to eat
away at America’s Constitutional system of government. Constant
work would be needed to keep it from falling into chaos like a pile of
playing cards on the floor.
Understand that benefits have costs
The second law of social dynamics implies something that it's easy to
forget: benefits have costs. That applies just as much to social policies
as it does to buying a car. In order to get one thing, societies usually
41
That’s “52 factorial,” if you want to look it up.
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must give up something else. Social groups disagree about whether the
new thing is worth the cost. It's often because the people who get the
benefits are different from the people who pay the costs. For example:
• Supporters of medical licensing argue that it reduces the risk
of incompetent doctors. Critics of licensing (including Nobel
laureate economist Milton Friedman) argue that it increases
the cost of medical care. Both sides are right, but they disagree
about whether it's more important to reduce risks or reduce
costs.
•
Gay marriage supporters argue that equal treatment under the
law requires devoutly Christian bakers to create wedding
cakes for gay couples even if they have religious objections.
Devout Christians argue that it infringes on their freedom of
religion. Both sides are right, but they disagree about which
principle is more important.42
There is no perfect way to resolve such zero-sum disputes. The
best of the imperfect ways is to decide them locally through the democratic process at the lowest practical level of government, such as
states or provinces.
Understand variation in empathy
Social theorists often make a deadly mistake: they assume that people
are all alike. In some ways, that's true: they all share a common nature
with the same basic rights and human dignity. But in other ways, it's
false. Empathy is one of the ways it's false.
Empathy is our ability to care about, imagine, and understand how
other people feel. Lack of empathy increases the risk of conflict. We
don’t naturally feel empathy for those we see as outsiders, but society
can do things to encourage such feelings. Even if we feel like attacking
each other, empathy can stop us from doing it. Empathy requires that:
42
On June 4, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court decided by a vote of 7 to 2 that religious
freedom was more important (Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission).
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•
We perceive what other people feel.
•
We feel what we think other people feel.
•
We care about what other people feel.
All three of those factors are lessened when we confront people who
differ from us:
• We find it harder to perceive what they’re feeling because different cultures have different conventional expressions and
behaviors to indicate emotion.
•
We find it harder to feel what they feel because kin selection
makes us perceive them as “other.” We don’t identify with
them emotionally.
•
We find it harder to care about what they feel because we
have no instinctive emotional investment in their welfare.
Like most human traits, empathy also varies within populations.
Some people (16 percent) naturally have a lot of empathy, some (16
percent) have very little, and most (68 percent) have a medium
amount.43 People’s natural empathy can be damaged by trauma such
as war, violence, or abuse, especially in childhood.
Adding the high-empathy and medium-empathy groups means
that 84 percent of people either aren’t likely to harm others or can be
talked out of it by appeals to conscience. The low-empathy 16 percent
can’t be talked out of it. If they want to harm others, they will unless
they’re deterred by the threat of punishment. Offenses must be defined as clearly as possible by the law, and the punishments of those
found guilty must be severe, swift, and certain.
Make Tolerance Easier
We aren’t machines. Our ability to tolerate difference has limits. The
more strongly we disapprove of something, the harder it is for us to
tolerate it. That’s why tolerance requires at least some common
ground, some shared beliefs, shared loyalty, or shared commitment to
43
If you want to look it up, those percentages are what the science of statistics calls a
“normal distribution.”
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the common good. In his 1993 book Political Liberalism, the Harvard
philosopher John Rawls wondered:
“How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by
reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?”
And Rawls concluded:
“In fact, historical experience suggests that it rarely is.”
Every society will have divisions: urban versus rural, political parties, religions, and so forth. The problem arises not if society is divided, because that’s inevitable. The problem arises when it is, as
Rawls said, profoundly divided, to the extent that people feel they have
no common ground: that people who disagree with them are “other.”
In that situation, people’s emotions start supplying them with reasons
to attack each other.
For example, consider two societies. Society #1 has X as its dominant culture, which could be Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or secular
materialism: it almost doesn’t matter what it is. Society #2 has no dominant culture, but has a dozen or more incompatible cultures.
Because Society #1 has a dominant culture, most people in the society will either agree with the mainstream or be fairly close to it. That
means three important things:
• Their shared beliefs bias them to perceive other people as genetic relatives.
•
Their individual beliefs usually won’t stray too far from the
mainstream.
•
They are less likely to express beliefs that enrage other people
to the point of violence.
Remember: we don’t expect perfection. It’s impossible to eliminate violence and intolerance. Even in a dominant-culture society,
there will still be strong disagreements and sometimes there will be
violence. Our goal is to improve the odds.
On the other hand, society #2 has multiple non-dominant cultures. Most people only agree with members of their own small segment of the population. That means three important things:
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•
Their different beliefs bias them to perceive unbelievers as
genetic competitors.
•
Their individual beliefs sometimes stray far, far away from
those of other groups.
•
They are more likely to express beliefs that enrage other people to the point of violence.
When we talk about beliefs enraging people to the point of violence, it’s important to recall that we’re not talking about polite disagreements at the Harvard Club. Those certainly exist, but they are not
the rule.
Yes, people with vastly different cultures and belief systems can
get along. It does happen. But the opposite is much more common. As
Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok observed in a talk to representatives
of international organizations:
"'I have asked my ministry this and I will pose the question here as
well. Give me an example of a multi-ethnic or multi-cultural society
in which the original population still lives, and where there is a
peaceful cohabitation. I don't know of one.'
The minister went further and said it might be all fun and games to
go to a 'Turkish bakery on Sunday' if you live in a well-off part of
the city, but 'a number of side effects' promptly become tangible if
one lives in a migrant-packed neighborhood. 'You very quickly
reach the limits of what a society can take,' Blok stated."44
Tolerance is most easily achieved in societies that have a dominant culture held by an overwhelming majority of the population.
Other cultures, religions, and the like should certainly be allowed, not
legally persecuted, but also not encouraged.
The larger point is: If you’ve got social division, then deal with it
as well as you can. Avoid doing anything that would make the situation worse by creating even more social division. Manage the problems
you have, but don't go looking for more of them.
44
"Peaceful multicultural societies don't exist, Dutch FM says in explosive leaked
speech," RT News, July 18, 2018.
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Use federalism to reduce conflict
Even in a society with a dominant majority population and culture,
there will still be some strong disagreements. Those lead to zero-sum
situations where if one side wins, the other loses. Such situations
cause harm both to individuals (unhappiness) and to society (division
and distrust).
If such situations are unavoidable, then we can’t do anything
about them. However, if beliefs differ geographically, then federalism
can help minimize the harm they cause. Federalism has three main
components:
• Limiting the national government to decisions that affect the
entire country, such as international trade, foreign policy, national defense, and basic human rights.
•
Leaving all other decisions to lower-level authorities, such as
state governments, local governments, or even (in innocuous
cases) to social groups and peer pressure.
•
A willingness to “live and let live” if people in other regions,
states, or communities follow beliefs and practices with which
we disagree.
“Live and let live” is hard for most people to accept, which leads
them to reject the first two components as well. People dominated by
emotion instead of reason are convinced of their right to control what
everyone does anywhere in their country or even the entire world.
When they get the power, they go on wild binges of coercion. They
don’t imagine that other people might legitimately disagree with
them. Nor do they pause to think that they might someday lose power
and fall victim to coercion or revenge by those they formerly coerced
-- as happens fairly often in history.
Arbitrary power seems like a great idea when you’re the one who
has it. When it’s wielded by someone with whom you disagree, it suddenly becomes much less attractive.
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Follow stare decisis
Stare decisis (“to stand by things decided”) is a crucial legal doctrine.
It tells courts that if an issue has previously been decided, then they
should abide by the earlier decision unless there are overwhelmingly
important reasons to overturn it.
The doctrine comes from one of the main purposes of law: to
make social life predictable so people can plan their actions rationally.
The law needs to make it very clear what is allowed, what is forbidden,
and what people can legitimately expect in various situations.
For example, suppose you’re buying a used car. The seller knows
there is something wrong with it that you won’t discover until later.
Is the seller required to tell you about it? Do you have a right to expect
such a warning? Based on established law and custom, you might or
might not.
That highlights another purpose of law beyond mere prediction:
enabling people to know what they are morally entitled to expect in
certain situations. If they don’t get what they expect, they feel frustrated and angry. They think that their rights have been violated because past practice says someone must do X but he did Y instead.
A third goal of law is to foster peaceful and harmonious societies,
so stare decisis supports all three goals: to make life predictable, to set
moral expectations, and to support social peace.
Therefore, government and society should follow settled law and
custom unless there is an overwhelmingly important reason to overturn them.
Sometimes, there really is such a reason. The U.S. Supreme
Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision held that African-Americans could
not be U.S. citizens and that slaves living in states where slavery was
outlawed were still slaves. Even at the time, the decision was widely
condemned. Later, in 1865, the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment
set aside stare decisis to outlaw slavery in the United States. The issue
was important enough to insist on a change from past practice.
Even in our own time, stare decisis controls – and should control
– important decisions in law and social policy. For example, a legally
scrupulous judge in 2008 would rule against gay marriage because it
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was opposed by existing law and past court decisions, not to mention
the statements of both major parties’ presidential candidates. However, the same judge in 2018 would rule in favor of gay marriage because the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges
settled the issue and declared that gay marriage is a Constitutional
right.
The bottom line is that people form beliefs about their rights
partly by their expectations based on past law and custom. To frustrate those expectations causes individual unhappiness and threatens
social peace. Unless there is an overwhelmingly important reason to
change past law or practice – and we’re really sure about the result,
per the second law of social dynamics – we should “stand by things
decided” and follow stare decisis. In other words:
•
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
•
If it is broke, then decide if it’s important enough to fix. Not
everything is.
•
Remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Just because a situation is imperfect does not mean that it can or
should be fixed. Some imperfection is inevitable, and when
we try to correct one imperfection, we are likely to cause others. Our only choice is which imperfections we accept and
which we try to correct.
If you fix it, then do it slowly and carefully so you don’t make
the situation worse.
Encourage civil and respectful behavior
We all tend to see our cherished beliefs as part of who we are. In other
words, we identify our beliefs with ourselves. The same applies to our
important symbols, texts, and relationships. We tend to perceive criticisms of them as attacks on us. We react instinctively with hostility
and “counter-attack,” as if we were in physical danger.
That’s why civil and respectful behavior are important, especially
in debates over emotionally-charged issues. We need to show from
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the outset that we are focused on the issues and not on the people with
whom we disagree.
That’s why, for example, politicians debating legislation used to
refer to each other by terms such as “my honorable colleague.” Even
if they hated each other’s guts, it was (and still is) counter-productive
to bring that into the discussion. Such customs focus attention away
from people and onto issues. They help resolve disputes both peacefully and more efficiently than would otherwise be possible.
So how can we put those ideas to work for a more harmonious
society? That’s the tough part because it requires sensible leadership
and changed social expectations:
• Social and political leaders should set a good example by civil
and respectful behavior in their public statements and activities.
•
News media should report facts objectively and with minimal
emotionalism, particularly in covering events or issues about
which emotions already run hot.
•
Entertainment media should portray positive role models
with protagonists who act rationally and responsibly.
•
Individuals and private associations should enforce social
sanctions against those who violate norms of civil and respectful behavior.
Encourage stable social roles
As discussed in Chapter 15, some forms of intolerance are socially
beneficial. However, they also limit individual freedom. For that reason, intolerance should be avoided when possible and minimized
when necessary.
Customary social roles are a case of intolerance that limits individual autonomy but that can be socially beneficial. It can be, though
it's not always.
In Chapter 11, we saw how general words and concepts make
thinking more efficient by letting us group things together. In a similar
way, social roles make thinking, acting, and social interactions more
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efficient. Whether they are a good thing or a bad thing depends on the
tradeoff: How much individual freedom is surrendered in exchange
for how much individual and social good?
Paradoxically, social roles can benefit individuals as well as society at large. As Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein observed:
"Are social roles an obstacle to freedom? In a way, the answer is
yes, since people would often like to do things that their role forbids.
But this would be a far too simple conclusion. Without roles, life
would be very hard to negotiate. Like social norms, social roles are
facilitating as well as constraining ... In fact, norms make freedom
possible. Social life is not possible -- not even imaginable -- without
them ... In the absence of social norms, we would be unable to understand each other."45
There's the paradox: "Norms make freedom possible." In other
words, limitations on freedom make freedom possible. It seems like a
contradiction. How can that be?
Consider an example. You go to a restaurant for dinner. The
server arrives and asks what you want. When you request a menu, the
server says there are no menus. You are completely free to order anything you wish. Your choices are not limited to those on a menu. Water? Would you like spring water from Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Switzerland, Iceland or elsewhere? Tap water? From where? In a bottle? What kind of bottle: plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, leather? Should
the bottle be large or small, tall or short? How tall or short? What temperature should the water be? When do you want it? Where should
the server put it?
You spend so much time trying to get a glass of water that you
starve to death before you can ever order dinner. And even if you survive the "trial by water," you face the same process when you try to
get your food.
A restaurant menu limits your freedom. Your choices are limited
to those on the menu. Even if you can order something that's not on
the menu, the server will impose social sanctions (giving you an
45
Sunstein, C., "Social Roles and Social Norms." University of Chicago Program in Law
and Economics Working Paper No. 36, 1996.
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annoyed look, expecting a larger tip) as a cost of your behavior. Every
restaurant tries to have things on its menu that will satisfy most of its
customers: if it didn't, it would quickly go out of business. To get your
dinner efficiently, you sacrifice a little freedom but are still mostly
happy with the result.
Of course, it matters how individual freedom is limited. If it's limited only by social sanctions (an annoyed look from the server), then
it can meet a lower standard than if it's limited by coercion (you go to
jail if you don't order from the menu).
Roles that are enforced by social sanctions can be violated by determined people. The great French mathematician Sophie Germain
(1776-1831) defied her parents, French society, and French universities to study mathematics. Women weren't allowed to attend university lectures, so she listened from outside lecture halls and borrowed
notes from male students. She wrote most of her work under a male
pseudonym and earned the respect of Carl Friedrich Gauss, the greatest mathematician of her era.
The important questions to ask about social roles are:
• Are they enforced by social sanctions or by coercion?
•
Roles enforced by coercion must have more justification than
roles enforced only by social sanctions.
Do they match the needs and desires of most people in the
society?
Just as a restaurant goes out of business if most people dislike
its menu items, a society suffers if most people dislike their
social roles. Remember that "the perfect is the enemy of the
•
good." No set of social roles will satisfy everyone, and few
roles will satisfy anyone completely: "Man never is, but always to be, blest."
Do they match human nature?
Postmodernists deny the existence of human nature because
it seems to limit the autonomy of groups they consider oppressed. Even so, humans show regular patterns of biology
and behavior that can be considered their "nature." Roles that
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•
match human nature make most people happy, while those
that conflict with it make them unhappy.
Do they support a peaceful, happy, and successful society?
Roles affect society as well as individuals. For example, Western societies now face a "birth dearth" as they fail to produce
enough children to sustain their populations.46 Feminism
broke down arbitrary limits on women's freedom, and that
was a good thing -- but it had a cost. Post-feminist women
marry later, if at all, and have fewer children than women in
earlier eras and in traditional societies. As a result, Western
populations are shrinking. In that case, we looked at the
tradeoff between individual freedom and social good, and we
decided in favor of freedom. Our population deficit is being
remedied by immigrants who believe neither in freedom nor
feminism. The results are not entirely predictable.
Mitigate kin selection hostilities
What are some things that a society can do to reduce irrational hostility, division, and violence?
Use visual cues to override instinctive hostility
Physical appearance is one of the main factors by which animals, including humans, identify potential allies or enemies. When people
look like us, it inclines us to feel that they are genetic relatives to
whom we should give trust and cooperation. Conversely, when they
look different from us, it inclines us to feel that they are genetic competitors who pose a threat, thus inspiring fear and hostility. Racial differences and discord are a prime example of this problem.
Our reaction to such visual cues is instantaneous and unconscious.
We feel before we think, which in this case is a tragic riff on Mark
Twain’s joke that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the
46
Demographer Ben Wattenberg discussed the problem in his books The Birth Dearth
(1987) and Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future
(2005).
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truth is putting on its shoes.” We need to slow down the lie or speed
up the truth.
Fortunately, we can do both: not perfectly, nor always, but often
enough to make a difference. The strategy is twofold:
• Distract people’s attention away from the visual cues that
cause hostility and harm.
•
Attract people’s attention to a visual marker of in-group membership.
Various experiments have shown this strategy can be effective. In
one experiment, psychologist Robert Kurzban had people watch videos of arguments between two mixed-race basketball teams. In the absence of any other visual cues, people’s reactions were biased by the
race of the players making the arguments. However, in the second
phase of the experiment, Kurzban gave the players colorful t-shirts
that clearly marked them as belonging to one team or the other. That
minor change caused his test subjects to ignore the race of the players
and to focus instead on their team membership.47
Would it have worked just as well if Kurzban had simply told his
test subjects which teams had which players? No. The test subjects’
instant emotional reaction was based on what they saw. By the time
they could think about team membership, they had already reacted
emotionally. The key to the remedy was that Kurzban provided a
clear, attention-grabbing visual cue to which the people could also react instantly. That blocked the simultaneous racial reaction and redirected the test subjects to a harmless reaction instead.
Government and social leaders should identify which visual cues
most often lead to hatred and violence. Then, they should encourage
or mandate use of alternate visual cues that can block reaction to the
harmful cues. Such cues are already used in many contexts:
• Military: Uniforms show the wearer’s tribe (Army, Navy,
etc.), family (infantry, legal, etc.), identity (name), and position in the hierarchy (rank). They imply that the wearer’s primary and important identity is as a member of the military,
47
Greene, J., Moral Tribes, p. 52.
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not as a member of a racial or sexual group. It’s an imperfect
solution but has been used for millennia in societies around
the world. History has proven that it works.
•
Business: Identification badges show the wearer’s tribe (company), identity (name and photo), and provide access to company facilities (buildings, computers, etc.).
•
Education: School uniforms show the wearer’s tribe (school)
and other information (class rank, club memberships, etc.).
Some schools go even further: One high school in Osaka, Japan requires students who do not have black hair to dye it
black.48
In some cases, mandated clothing or behaviors do even more than
just distract from divisive visual cues: they replace them with cues
that support cooperation. Uniforms replace clothing that might cause
division within the group. Mandated behaviors, to some extent, work
similarly: If you’re doing one thing, you’re probably not doing another
at the same time.
Such cues also reassure the wearers themselves by giving visual
confirmation of their identity and membership in a group to which
they give their loyalty. If troubled by existential questions like “who
am I?”, they can simply check their name badges and uniforms.
The alternative cues point either to membership in the viewer’s
own group, or to membership in another group with which authorities
have defined and cultivated an innocuous rivalry. The latter step is
necessary because people will always divide themselves into groups.
Divisions can’t be eliminated, but we can trick human nature by substituting less harmful for more harmful ones.
Use the power of distraction
If you’re skeptical about the ability of t-shirts to distract people from
racial differences, here’s a striking example that might convince you.
48
“Japan teen ‘forced to dye hair black’ for school,” BBC News, October 27, 2017.
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The Smithsonian Magazine reports that psychologists have run experiments in which plainly-visible things are “invisible” because people’s attention is focused elsewhere:
"We showed people a video and asked them to count how many
times three basketball players wearing white shirts passed a ball.
After about 30 seconds, a woman in a gorilla suit sauntered into
the scene, faced the camera, thumped her chest and walked away.
Half the viewers missed her. In fact, some people looked right at the
gorilla and did not see it."49
People see what they want to see, expect to see, or are trying to
see. They tend to ignore other things. It’s one reason, as in the title of
this book, why sane people believe “crazy” things. You and other people can look at the same situation -- such a riot on campus, or a police
shooting of a criminal suspect -- but see different things and reach different conclusions. Neither of you is necessarily evil or stupid: You’re
just human.
Evolution has shaped our minds to pay attention to the most important aspects of situations. In the wilderness, facing a hungry pack
of wolves, the choice of what’s most important is simple: run. In a
complex society, with a thousand different facts that might be relevant, what we see as most important is influenced by our emotions,
preconceived ideas, and personal life experience. The surprise is not
that we sometimes disagree; the surprise is that we agree as often as
we do.
Provide less-harmful controlled rivalries
Recall a suggestion from earlier in the chapter: We are not merely
thinking machines, but are full-blooded human beings with energy,
drives, and passions we need to exercise on meeting challenges and
solving problems.
As harmful as it can be, social division also serves a purpose. In
order to have an in-group, people need an out-group. We define ourselves not merely by what we are, but also by what we are not. Socially
49
“Did You See the Gorilla? The Problem with Inattentional Blindness.” Smithsonian
Magazine, September 2012.
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and individually, we need at least some difference and division. The
problem is to find a middle way: enough difference and division for a
healthy society, but not so much that it becomes destructive.
Social and political leaders should identify the separate groups
that already exist, then decide which group divisions cause the most
harm and the least harm. Relatively harmless divisions can be encouraged and remade (imperfectly, but enough) into relatively harmless
rivalries by:
• Visual cues of the kind discussed in the previous section.
•
Persuasion campaigns that encourage each group to take pride
in its own customs, members, and achievements without denigrating those of other groups.
•
Media and entertainment storylines that show constructive,
positive examples of how different groups can compete
peacefully.
If there aren’t enough relatively harmless group divisions, government and social leaders can create them. Such new divisions have the
advantage of not carrying historical animosities. Left to their own devices, without socially-supplied divisions, people will make up their
own. And the divisions they make up might cause much more harm
than those deliberately designed. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson observed in The Social Conquest of Earth (2012) that:
“Experiments conducted over many years by social psychologists revealed how swiftly and decisively people divide into groups, then
discriminate in favor of the one to which they belong. Even when
experimenters created the groups arbitrarily … participants always
ranked the out-group below the in-group. They judged their ‘opponents’ to be less likable, less fair, less trustworthy, less competent.”
The same methods can work to de-emphasize divisions that are
excessively harmful. The key, as always, is to work with nature as
much as possible. Any new divisions should be created as much as
possible along already-existing lines and public preferences. Where
real differences or intractable disagreements exist, leaders should
only try to downplay them instead of eliminating them. Attempted
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changes that clash too starkly with realities “on the ground” are
doomed to fail.
Provide rational leadership
Providing rational leadership is easier to suggest than to accomplish.
It faces a number of hurdles:
• Those who seek high political office are often motivated by a
desire for personal power and enrichment, not by a desire to
serve the public good. That’s always been true. The ancient
Greek philosopher Plato suggested that those most fit to rule
would have to be forced to take the job.
•
Empathy and conscience vary like other human traits. People
who lack empathy and conscience feel no guilt or remorse
about doing “whatever it takes” to win. Therefore, they have
an advantage over competitors whose actions are limited by
moral concerns. People who don’t want power -- like Plato’s
ideal rulers who don’t want the job -- are less likely to get it
than people who do want power and don’t care how they get
it.
•
Politicians and other social leaders can often acquire power
and increase their own influence by vilifying their rivals. That
divides a society into hostile factions between which compromise and cooperation are much more difficult.
•
People disagree about what the public good is and how to
achieve it. Should leaders represent the interests of a country’s majority, or prioritize the welfare of disadvantaged
groups at the expense of the majority? Should they act for the
welfare of “the world,” or just of their own country? Shortterm welfare or long-term? How is welfare defined? Cultural
homogeneity makes it easier to answer such questions, but
doesn’t by itself provide the answers.
To some degree, rational leadership is a matter of luck. We can’t
know in advance who will be the next Marcus Aurelius, George Washington, or Winston Churchill. Nor can most people have much
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influence over who ascends to positions of leadership. However, by
supporting those who act constructively and form coalitions for the
common good, we can do what’s possible.
Minimize interactions between hostile groups
Even more important is the creation of safe spaces for different
groups. When we encounter people whom we perceive as genetic
competitors, biology inclines both them and us to attack or run away.
Such encounters are an obvious aggression trigger.
Human groups that can’t stop killing each other should be physically separated from each other and their interactions carefully controlled. That minimizes both their impulses to harm each other and
their opportunities to do so. In his book The Meaning of Human Existence, E.O. Wilson identifies the problem:
"All things being equal (fortunately things are seldom equal, not exactly), people prefer to be with others who look like them, speak the
same dialect, and hold the same beliefs. An amplification of this evidently inborn predisposition leads with frightening ease to racism
and religious bigotry. Then, also with frightening ease, good people
do bad things."
Create Positive Experiences of Cooperation
A final step is to create positive experiences of cooperation when possible. If social adversaries work together on areas where they agree —
even projects like getting roads repaired — they begin to see each
other less as “the dangerous other” and more as fellow human beings
who have needs, interests, and points of view. That decreases their
aggressive impulses and increases their empathy.
Use the power of beliefs
Most people in Western countries think it’s none of the government’s
business to promote or discourage beliefs, at least in general. When it
comes to beliefs that they support or despise, of course, it’s another
matter. They’re quite happy to have government “on their side” in political, moral, or religious disputes.
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And of course, governments do take sides although we usually
pretend that they don’t. Even in the aggressively secular culture of
2018, American currency still bears the motto “In God we trust.” In
Britain, public criticism of Islam brings a visit from the police, who
even arrested one political candidate for quoting a criticism of Islam
by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.50 In Germany,
Sweden, China, Russia, and other countries that have no historical traditions of free speech, government control is even stricter.
Legal restrictions are only one way that government and institutional leaders shape belief. People tend to believe what they see, or
what they hear repeated over and over by different sources. Those
beliefs can be helpful, harmful, both, or neutral. For example:
• Television commercials for shaving cream always show men
using about 10 times more shaving cream than needed. Many
boys never see their fathers shave, so when they grow up,
they buy much more shaving cream. Nobody needs a pound
of shaving cream to shave, but they absorbed that image as
children and never gave it any thought. It’s a profitable belief
for the sellers and relatively innocuous as beliefs go.
•
A 1990s American television series, “Melrose Place,” had
main characters who were either insane, criminal, or despicable. There was only one exception: Matt Fielding, a gay character, was so sane and saintly that he was almost unlikeable.
That was one step on a path from the 1950s, when gays were
stigmatized as immoral, to our era when gays are celebrated
and almost nobody cares about the issue anymore. Government worked with entertainment and news media to alter belief in a more humane direction.
•
Chinese and Japanese television series, on the other hand,
promote traditional values and behaviors. Patriotism is encouraged. Female characters often have positions of authority
(Mafia boss, executive, etc.) but are sweet and feminine,
while male characters have similarly varied roles but are
50
“Arrested for quoting Winston Churchill,” The Daily Mail, April 28, 2014.
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Building Tolerant Societies
strong and masculine. Dating is chaste and sex is assumed to
be only for marriage. Neither men nor women disparage the
other sex.
•
The German television sitcom “Türkisch für Anfänger”
(Turkish for Beginners) promotes German viewers’ acceptance of mass migration from Turkey and other Islamic
countries.
The power to shape beliefs is a dangerous one, used as often to
promote harmful beliefs as helpful ones. In “An Outline of Intellectual
Rubbish,” the British philosopher and two-time Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) explained:
“Give me an adequate army with more pay and better food than the
average man, and I will undertake, within thirty years, to make the
majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that
water freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold, or any
other nonsense that might seem to serve the interest of the State ...
Any verbal denial of the mystic doctrine would be made illegal, and
obstinate heretics would be ‘frozen’ at the stake. No person who did
not accept the official doctrine would be allowed to teach or to have
any position of power. Only the very highest officials, in their cups,
would whisper to each other what rubbish it all is; then they would
laugh and drink again.”
The parallels with contemporary society are obvious. Certain beliefs are grounds for firing, public shaming, harassment, and even arrest. The social function of such beliefs is to show membership in the
society’s in-group for cooperation and trust, just as denying the beliefs
marks people as being members of the out-group to be resisted or destroyed. That applies whether the beliefs are true or false, morally
helpful or harmful, though of course it’s better if they are factually
true and morally helpful. There is no way to guarantee that leaders
will be moral and that they will promote helpful beliefs. The best of
the imperfect remedies is to have democratic and open government if
it’s possible.
Government, institutions, and social leaders should try to reach
informal consensus about the set of helpful beliefs that they will
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promote. They can then work together to promote them and avoid
confusing the population with mixed or inconsistent messages.
Encourage helpful foundation myths
Especially important are “foundation myths” that illustrate morally desirable behavior and confer legitimacy on the social order. Note
that "myths" are not necessarily false. Most foundation myths combine fact with legend. Examples are:
• The story mentioned in Chapter 1 of John Hancock’s signature on the Declaration of Independence. The British had issued a death warrant for Hancock, so he signed extra large to
show his defiance. That demonstrates courage.
•
Saul and David, who were kings of Israel, were chosen by God.
The story implies that the foundation of the nation of Israel
was endorsed by the Creator of the universe, and thereby
adds to its moral and political legitimacy.
At a minimum, foundation myths should teach that:
• The society and its history are basically good even if not completely so.
•
The social order is worthy of support, though any flaws
should be corrected.
•
Members of the society follow (or at least should follow) generally accepted moral principles such as honesty, loyalty, obedience to law, and help to the needy.
•
Members of the society are all partners who cooperate for the
common good while respecting each other’s individual rights
and identities.
Foundation myths are sometimes based in historical events, but
strict historical accuracy is irrelevant to them. Their main job is to encourage moral behavior and to legitimize the social order. Attacks on
the foundation myths are socially harmful, even if motivated by concerns of historical accuracy. Government and social leaders should
discourage such attacks.
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Some intellectuals argue that myths legitimize power relations,
define mores, and suggest social roles. And they usually do. But those
results are only bad if they lead to less happiness and more suffering
than the practical alternatives. Human societies are by nature hierarchical: a ship with 1,000 captains is unlikely to go anywhere. If a hierarchy promotes the welfare of most people without imposing
avoidable and unacceptable suffering on other people, then it’s a good
thing, and so are myths that support it. As always, our only choice is
between the better imperfect and the worse.
Discourage harmful beliefs
The flip side of encouraging helpful beliefs is to discourage beliefs that
are harmful or risky. Even if we decide that it's justified to suppress
such beliefs, it’s a dangerous path to tread. The path is all the more
dangerous because we can’t discuss it openly. If we discuss openly
whether or not we should suppress some beliefs, then we admit
openly that we think the beliefs are -- or might be -- factually true.
Such an admission makes it impossible publicly to condemn them as
false.
Of course, what is helpful or harmful depends on the goals to be
achieved. In warfare, it is sometimes helpful to believe that “the enemy” consists of homicidal monsters with whom reasoning or compromise are impossible, so we must destroy them before they destroy
us. However, warfare is not the model we want for our societies -- or
for our world, given a choice. Reasonable goals are to make our societies peaceful, tolerant, and happy, as well as minimize violent conflict
between societies.
But those goals sometimes have a cost. They must be balanced
against other things that are also valuable, such as truth and freedom
of thought.
Human happiness and social harmony are valuable. So is our freedom to speak the truth, or even to state our sincere opinions whether
or not they’re true. In the real world, we often must give up some of
one good thing in order to get another good thing that we value. It’s a
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Wh y S a n e P e o p l e B e l i e v e C r a z y T h i n g s
judgment that different people and societies will make in different
ways.
Some beliefs are risky or hurtful enough that it’s at least open to
debate that they should be suppressed, preferably by social rather
than legal sanctions. If such beliefs divide society, or cause harm in
spite of having social benefits, then reasonable people will often make
different judgments about them.
One example of a risky belief is eugenics, the idea that the human
race can and should be improved by encouraging “superior” people to
have children and discouraging or preventing “inferior” people from
having children.
Although people in 2018 identify eugenics mainly with the Nazis’
program of genocide against groups they deemed inferior, the Nazis
got a lot of ideas from mainstream science and opinion in the United
States. Former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade observed in his book A Troublesome Inheritance that:
"Many of the elements in the [Nazis’] eugenics program could be
found in the American eugenics program … Nordic supremacy, purity of the blood, condemnation of intermarriage, sterilization of
the unfit—all these were ideas embraced by American eugenicists ...
ideas about race are dangerous when linked to political agendas."
[my emphasis]
As a result, Western scientists and social leaders are now wary of
any beliefs (true or not) that might lead to such horrible results.
Suppressing potentially harmful beliefs is highly debatable but not
obviously crazy. However, it can also backfire, causing even worse results than if the beliefs had not been suppressed. That can happen in
two ways.
First, if the beliefs are factually true, then suppressing them prevents people from basing their actions on truth and forces them to
base their actions on falsehood. The costs might be high or they might
be low.
For example, the Soviet Union (the Russian Empire) of the 20th
century suppressed scientific knowledge of genetics in favor of its
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Building Tolerant Societies
official Marxist theory of Lysenkoism.51 The results were disastrous
for Soviet agriculture. The country also tried to socially engineer its
people so they would have no culture, nationality, or ethnicity except
for the official versions.52 That, too, was a disaster.
Second, as psychologist Steven Pinker observed in a December
11, 2017 forum at Harvard, suppression of true beliefs can cause an
angry backlash when people discover that they have been deceived:
“When they are exposed for the first time to true statements that
have never been voiced on college campuses, in The New York
Times, or in respectable media, it’s like a bacillus to which they
have no immunity. They are infected both with a feeling of outrage
that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them
to rather repellant conclusions.”53
For those reasons, the presumption should always be against suppression of beliefs, especially beliefs for which there is factual evidence. The costs, benefits, and risks must be carefully considered
before attempting such suppression. Two less-risky alternatives are:
• Surround the beliefs with a smokescreen of obfuscation.
•
As U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) once
said prior to a news conference with questions he didn’t want
to answer, “If I can’t dazzle them with brilliance, I’ll baffle
them them with bullfeathers.”
Reformulate the beliefs in terms less likely to cause harm.
This alternative is both more honest and less risky.
For example, discussing genetic contributions to intelligence
is risky because racists might exploit the data to foment hatred and discrimination. Writing in Slate, William Saletan suggested parsing the data in a way that is truthful but safer: “You
can talk about the genetics of race. You can talk about the
51
For information about Lysenkoism, see Martin Gardner’s book Fads & Fallacies in the
Name of Science.
52
They referred to their desired type of person as “the new Soviet man,” if you want to
look it up. The oft-repeated claim that Americans have no nationality or culture of their
own is obviously similar to the Soviet doctrine.
53
“Harvard Professor Steven Pinker Points Out How Political Correctness Drives The
Alt-Right,” The Daily Wire, January 11, 2018.
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genetics of intelligence. But stop implying they’re the same
thing. Connecting intelligence to race adds nothing useful. It
overextends the science you’re defending, and it engulfs the
whole debate in moral flames.” (“Stop Talking About Race
and IQ,” April 27, 2018)54
Require specific assimilations to the dominant culture
The word “culture” comes from the Latin cultus, meaning the shared
religious cult of a society. Culture is a set of shared beliefs, stories,
attitudes, behaviors, and customs. Like law, it helps to make life predictable, sets moral expectations, and supports social peace.
It’s reasonable for a society to require all citizens or permanent
residents to assimilate to the dominant culture in at least some ways.
Different societies make different decisions about which ways, how
many ways, and how intrusive the ways are going to be. Those decisions will usually be made by social and political leaders in concert
with the democratic process. Two principles should guide assimilation
requirements:
• Only public appearance and behavior affect society, so assimilation should be required only in public aspects of life. What
people do in their homes or private group spaces, as long as it
is not criminal, should be left to their own beliefs, preferences, and identities.
•
Assimilation requirements should be limited to those that are
clearly helpful, should be small in number, and should be as
unintrusive as possible. They limit people’s freedom to engage in non-aggressive activities of their choice. We want to
minimize such limitations and maximize the sphere of individual freedom.
Examples of such requirements are to use an official national language for government and business, celebrate national holidays, and
54
See also my article about “Genetic Explanations of Poverty” in The Encyclopedia of
World Poverty, Sage Publications, 2006.
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Building Tolerant Societies
show respect for national symbols such as the flag. Depending on the
case, sanctions might be legal or only social.
For example, in Iran, laws prohibit undesirable speech (mofsede-filarz, “spreading corruption on the earth”) whose penalties range
from imprisonment to torture and execution.55
Western countries walk a murkier line between legal and social
punishments, often calling undesirable speech “hate speech” to suggest it lacks the legal protection given to “free speech” that doesn’t
offend anyone considered important.56 Spain has gone so far as to jail
people for a puppet show.57 Anyone employed by a large corporation
knows that even mildly dissenting beliefs can get them fired, as in the
case of former Google software engineer James Damore.58
In all such cases, the good of society must be balanced against the
harm of coercing people to act in ways they do not want. Different
people and societies will balance them differently.
55
“National Laws on Blasphemy: Iran,” Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World
Affairs, Georgetown University.
56
“Europe’s Free-Speech Apocalypse is Already Here,” Foreign Policy, March 17, 2016.
57
“Two jailed over ‘terrorist’ glove puppet show at Madrid Carnival,” The Telegraph,
February 9, 2016.
58
“Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Diversity Problem is Ideological,” Reason.com, March 29,
2018.
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It all begins with you ...
There's an old saying:
"Pressure makes diamonds."
It's meant as encouragement, but it doubles as a warning. Pressure
makes diamonds, but it can also make dust.
What tips the scale between diamonds and dust? Heat. For diamonds, at least 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Adding intense heat to immense pressure gives you one of earth's most beautiful and valuable
stones.
You, too, are under pressure. You have limited abilities, limited
resources, and limited time to make a difference with your life:
"Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return." (Genesis 3:19)
If you let it, the weight of that pressure will crush you to dust long
before you take your final breath. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Your life can matter. As a thinking being, you can bring the heat that
transforms your life from dust into diamond.
This book gave you some of that heat, as knowledge and understanding. But what happens between the dust of dawn and the dust of
dusk is up to you.
If you falter, if you give in to fear or indifference, you’re already
dust.
If you bring the heat of your own courage, compassion, and clarity, you can be a diamond that shines light through the darkness.
Then at the end, when you finally return to the dust, you can do
it with no regrets.
Make the world better.
Be a diamond.
280
Appendix A:
Why “Modest
Foundationalism” is
Circular Reasoning
THIS APPENDIX IS FOR READERS interested in details about one of foundationalism’s problems. The material is not required for understanding the rest of the book.
Foundationalism divides beliefs into two groups:
•
Foundational beliefs that are self-justifying.
•
Non-foundational beliefs that are justified by reference to
foundational beliefs.
Non-foundational beliefs can get extra justification from other nonfoundational beliefs, but the latter get their justification from
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foundational beliefs. Therefore, all the justification ultimately comes
from foundational beliefs. There is no other source.
Though terminology varies, traditional theories assert that foundational beliefs are completely certain. No additional evidence can
make them more certain or more justified. In his article “The Foundation of Knowledge,” Moritz Schlick gives the principle with unusual
clarity and frankness. Foundational beliefs are:
“… statements which express the facts with absolute simplicity,
without any moulding, alteration, or addition, in whose elaboration
every science consists, and which precede all knowing, every judgment regarding the world.”
Since Schlick’s time, much of the writing about foundationalism
has served to obfuscate that basic idea, but the problem remains: No
such foundational statements exist, or can exist.
As we’ve discussed earlier in the book, bare sensations are not beliefs. A sensation of redness that is not even identified as redness or
as a color is not a statement, cannot be mistaken, and is not true or
false. As soon as we associate the sensation with something else, then
compare the association with others, we introduce the possibility of
conflict between them. That is what becomes true or false, but it is not
foundational in the sense that foundationalism requires.
Those problems led to the idea of “modest foundationalism.” It
claims not that foundational beliefs are completely certain, only that
they are justified. It says that non-foundational beliefs can contribute
to their certainty and justification. Non-foundational beliefs can also
contribute to each other’s certainty.
On the left, the diagram shows the original idea of foundationalism. Foundational beliefs are self-justifying and neither get nor need
any justification beyond that. Non-foundational beliefs are justified
entirely by their reliance on foundational beliefs.
In the middle, the diagram shows modest foundationalism. Foundational beliefs are still self-justifying, but they can receive additional
justification from non-foundational beliefs. Belief B provides additional support to foundational belief F1, while Belief A provides additional support to Belief B.
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Building Tolerant Societies
On the right, the diagram shows the flaw in modest foundationalism. Belief B gets direct support from foundational beliefs F2 and F3,
as well as from Belief A. It then provides additional support for foundational belief F1. But Belief A also gets support from F1, which it then
provides to Belief B. The support from F1 to B is hidden because it
passes through Belief A.
You can call it “justification laundering,” after the organized crime
practice of laundering money through legal businesses to hide its
origin. Hidden or not, it’s still circular reasoning. F1 is partly justified
by B, which is partly justified by F1.
Note that the problem arises because foundationalism says foundational beliefs are ultimately the only source of belief justification.
Unless they can be traced back to foundational beliefs, any non-foundational beliefs have no justification.
This book advocates a non-foundationalist theory of knowledge.
Every belief has some initial presumption in its favor: not enough to
justify it, but enough to be considered as possibly true. Justification
comes from the network of support between multiple beliefs. If A supports B and B supports A, that strengthens the claim of both, but it’s
still not by itself enough to justify A or B. Additional supporting connections to other things are needed to justify both. Justification grows
as the network grows, with more support between different kinds of
beliefs.
283
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289
Index
Documentary hypothesis, 68
Dualism, 29
Edwards, Jonathan, 127
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 277
Eliade, Mircea, 169, 177
Empathy, 255, 270
Essenes, 123
Essentialism, 218
Explanations, 1, 3, 4, 5, 278
First-person, 42
Explanatory power, 11, 43
Exploitation, 219, 221, 222
Fallacy
Existentialist, 226
Moralistic, 226
Naturalistic, 226
Of the beard, 219
Rationalistic, 226
Falsafa, 50
Federalism, 246, 259
Federalist Papers, 245
Flew, Antony, 53
Ford, Henry, 134
Foundational
descriptions,
184, 185, 187, 191, 192, 241
Foundationalism, 185, 187,
188, 189, 281, 282, 283
Franklin, Benjamin, 81, 114,
254
Frege, Gottlob, 156
Functionalism, 20
Germain, Sophie, 264
Global warming, 2
Guide of the Perplexed, The,
13, 60, 61, 288
HALEVI, JUDAH, 13, 14, 15, 82
Homogeneous societies, 231
Implicit Association Test, 121
Adams, Douglas, 147, 148
Allegory of the cave, 139, 142,
143
Anthropomorphic
substitution, 167, 169
Aquinas, Thomas, 65, 197, 285
Area of a circle
Ancient Egyptian method to
calculate, 201
Aristotle, 17, 50, 54, 60, 66,
185, 197, 243
Assimilation, 278
Bacon, Francis, 202
Belief
Mental-state theory, 20, 21,
26, 27, 51
Necessary, 112, 130
Benhabib, Seyla, 211
Biological niche, 100, 123
Blanshard, Brand, v, 200, 205,
212, 285, 288
Braino machine, 142, 143, 144,
185, 198, 199, 204, 208
Bridging beliefs, 176, 177
Brownson, Orestes, 134
Carnegie, Dale, 228
Clifford, W.K., 125, 127
Damore, James, 279
Dead Sea Scrolls, 123, 289
Declaration of Independence,
7, 186, 248, 274
Definitions, 8, 9, 10, 49, 73, 75
Della Mirandola, Pico, 247
Descartes, René, 58, 74, 139,
140, 141, 142, 145, 211, 248,
285, 286
Dispositional theory, 26, 27
Dispositions, 26, 27, 28, 29
291
Wh y S a n e P e o p l e B e l i e v e C r a z y T h i n g s
Mendelssohn, Moses, 16, 59,
74, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87,
88, 126, 286
Mill, John Stuart, 129, 135,
148, 233
Monolatry, 18
Monotheism, 18
Muffs, Yochanan, 17, 18, 287
Napier, Sir Charles, 232
Neuroscientific theories, 20,
29, 31, 32, 196
Oakeshott, Michael, 253
Orwell, George, 216
Peterson, Jordan, 216
Physicalism, 29
Pinker, Steven, 209, 277
Pirke Avot, 66
Plantinga, Alvin, 52, 53, 65,
205, 288
Plato, 17, 50, 81, 103, 130, 138,
139, 142, 144, 145, 270
Pope, Alexander, 250
Postmodernism, 209, 210, 212,
213, 217, 225
Prager, Dennis, 113
Putnam, Hilary, 48, 142, 210
Rand, Ayn, 207, 235
Rawls, John, 257
Reid, Thomas, 141, 197, 210,
286
Representationalism, 20
Russell, Bertrand, 66, 184, 227,
273, 288
Saadia Gaon, 13, 14, 15, 16, 49,
50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58,
59, 60, 65, 73, 75, 126, 162,
163, 288
Sacred belief, 3
Saletan, William, 277
Samson, 32, 286
Sanders, Bernie, 244
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 215,
216, 217
Incompatible cultures, 257
Intolerance as the least evil
alternative, 234
James, William, 229, 251
Job, Book of, 112
Kalam, 50
Karaites, 55
Kierkegaard, Soren, 119
Kinds of stories, 6
Moral stories, 6
National-origin stories, 7
Philosophical stories, 6
Practical stories, 6
Kurzban, Robert, 266
Kuzari, The, 13
Leap of faith, 170
Lewis, C.I., 188
Lincoln, Abraham, 184, 200,
201, 214
Linguistic meaning, 36
Lucretius, 31, 287
Lyotard, Jean-Francis, 220
Lysenkoism, 277
Madison, James, 245
Maimonides, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18,
19, 20, 21, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54,
59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66,
67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75, 80,
82, 83, 92, 112, 130, 162,
163, 164, 165, 168, 179, 184,
197, 285, 286, 287, 289
Malaria, 116, 117
Marx, Groucho, 54
Masoretes, 68
Meaning
Definition, 153
Different kinds of, 153
For groups of people, 159
General
words
and
concepts, 157
Meaning of life, the, 147, 148,
149, 150, 152, 183
292
Building Tolerant Societies
Tradition, 14, 15, 16, 50, 51,
57, 59, 71, 75, 82, 88, 126,
246
Trolley car dilemma, 132
Truth
Absolute, 222
Objective, 222
One truth, 224
Theories of, 197
Twain, Mark, 247, 265
Utilitarianism
Act, 236
Rule, 236
Verbal behavior, 26, 44, 45, 46,
70, 87, 120, 128, 157, 240
Voltaire, 235
Welcoming disagreement, 242
Whig history, 243
Wilson, E.O., 269, 271
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 39, 119,
285
Zeno's paradox, 219
Second
Law
of
Thermodynamics, 253
Slone, Jason, 113, 167
Social roles, 262, 263, 264, 275
Socrates, 81, 82, 134, 135, 153
Solar system
Copernican model, 91, 192,
193, 194, 209, 213, 285
Ptolemaic model, 192, 193,
194, 209, 213
Spinoza, Baruch, 58, 59, 65, 73,
74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81,
82, 83, 86, 88, 163, 287, 288
Stare decisis
Legal doctrine of, 260, 261
Sunstein, Cass, 263
Take-away test, the, 151, 189
Tarski, Alfred, 197
The Matrix, 137, 138, 142, 143,
145
The Princess Bride, 147
Theories of belief, 19
To thine own self be true, 183
293
About the Author
N.S. Palmer is an American mathematician. He worked as an
economic policy analyst on Capitol Hill, has contributed articles to
five encyclopedias, and has written for numerous publications
including The Jerusalem Post and The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles.
295
Wh y S a n e P e o p l e B e l i e v e C r a z y T h i n g s
296
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Selami Varlik
Istanbul 29 Mayis University
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SUNY: Stony Brook University
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Osman Murat Deniz
Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University