Archive for the ‘Philosophical basis’ Category
On being oneself
“One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded by phonies. That’s all. They were coming in the goddam window.”—J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
A recent PBS American Masters documentary on the life and influence of J.D. Salinger reported that in the 1980s there were three assassinations or assassination attempts in which the assassins cited Catcher in the Rye during the trials by way of explaining why they had decided to take, or try to take, someone’s life. Mark David Chapman, the young man who shot and killed former Beatle John Lennon, reportedly said that he thought John Lennon was a phony. Chapman read some of the many quotes from Catcher in the Rye showing contempt for phonies. John Hinkley, Jr, the young man who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan reportedly had a copy of Catcher in the Rye in his hotel room and also cited passages from it at his trial. A third shooting in the late 1980s of a Hollywood actress also reportedly involved a shooter enamored of and perhaps motivated by the book.
Like many young people in the early 1960s, I was fascinated by J.D. Salinger’s writings and read almost everything he published before he stopped submitting his work for public scrutiny. Like most young people of all times, I went through a judgmental phase in my late adolescence and early adulthood, during which I was hypersensitive to people I regarded as phony. One time I made the fortunate mistake of denouncing some acquaintance as a phony in the presence of my mother. In her college years my mother had been active in campus theater productions, and throughout my elementary and high school education she had taken a keen interest in dramatic productions I was involved with at school. When she heard me denounce someone as a phony, she drew upon our shared interest in theater and reminded me that most people put a great deal of effort into creating a character that they wish to present to the world. Rather than denouncing them, she suggested, I might try admiring the results of the efforts to present a persona. Perhaps the character they are pretending to be is not really who they are, but it really is who they are sincerely trying to be, or at least sincerely trying to convince others that they are. A good performance by anyone is nothing to decry, and even a mediocre performance can be entertaining in its own way. A façade is no less who a person is than what is behind the façade. So sit back, my mother suggested, and enjoy the show.
My mother’s advice was one of those parental interventions that had the effect of immediately changing my attitude, and it turns out that the change in attitude has lasted for more than fifty years. What she said had the effect of making me look more deeply into the distinction between authenticity and phoniness. Like a good many distinctions, this one does not stand up very well under close scrutiny. Although human beings are often inclined to see some people as more authentic than others, it is not at all clear what the criteria are by which one can make an informed judgment as to which actions are sincere and which are not, or whose character is genuine and whose is not. It is not even clear what the point is in deciding who is authentic and who is not.
In Jungian psychology, the persona (or ego) is considered to be an archetype of the unconscious. To make that claim is to suggest that few of us are fully aware of all the times we are striving to present ourselves as being a particular kind of person; we do so unconsciously. The Jungian theory also suggests that the persona one is striving to be is only part of the totality of who one actually is. The persona is a selected subset of our entire psychological performance. It is but one character in a complex drama with a good many dramatic personae. When one acts in ways that the persona does not fully approve, the unapproved action is deemed “out of character” and the persona is quick to think “That was not really me.” Others may see what we do as being fully in character and quite predictable, while the persona remains quite sure that the disapproved action was a puzzling aberration and a deviation from one’s true self.
My mother loved to quote the line from Robert Burns’s poem “To a Louse”:
“O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.”
Over the years I have often wondered how much of a gift it would really be to see myself as others see me. Perhaps I am not alone in having been surprised a number of times by how others have characterized me, and when other people’s characterizations take me by surprise, my tendency is regard the characterizations as inaccurate. Surely, I like to think, I am not as mean-spirited and misanthropic as some people seem to think, nor as kind-hearted and accepting as some others seem to think. The truth (if there is such a thing) is probably that I am sometimes mean-spirited and misanthropic and at other times a bit more kind and accepting, sometimes demanding and critical and sometimes permissive and lenient. Given enough time and varying circumstances, I am quite capable of being just about everywhere on the map at one time or another.
Are there any of the regions of that map that deserve to be called who I really am? Are there any areas on the map that when entered mark me as a phony? To both questions I am inclined to say I think not. But I am so often mistaken about so many things, that I could well be wrong about this as well.
Convinced atheist
The last time I saw my father, just a few days before he died on 30 July 2012, he invited me to look at his bookshelf and take whatever books I wanted. When I was growing up, his library was much larger and contained a good variety of books on geology, ornithology, the environment, American history, anthropology cultural and physical geography and language, along with dozens of dictionaries, almanacs and other reference works. Most of those were given away in the last years of his life. Among the books that remained, the category with the most volumes remaining was books on atheism. Also by his favorite chair was a stack of books on atheism—and some books on birds. He belonged to an atheist book club with whom he met religiously. It was obvious that his atheism was important to him. It struck me as odd that he felt it increasingly important to take a stand on this matter, and I did not quite understand why he was not content to remain an agnostic or to be largely indifferent to religious matters. I still do not fully understand. This blog posting represents a first attempt to explore the issue and to try to understand why my father was an increasingly outspoken atheist. I am not confident I know his reasons, but I am confident I knew him well enough to make a reasonable guess as to what his reasons might have been.
Given that the concept of God is so multifaceted and that the overall idea is therefore vague and nebulous, if one simply claims not to believe in God, one has no clear idea what exactly the person does not believe in. What I shall try to make more clear to myself is what exactly my father rejected, and what he accepted as preferable to what he rejected. As far as I can tell, he rejected the notion of God as a creator, as a higher power, as a source of morality and as a means of salvation.
- Creator. My father was a geologist. From as far back as my memory goes, I heard him talking about geological eras millions of years long that took place over the course of the 4.54 billion year history of the planet earth. The history of the planets was part of the thirteen-billion-year history of the galaxy of which our sun is a part, and so on. Vast time scales and unimaginably large expanses of space were part of the daily conversation in my childhood, as was the reminder than if the history of the earth up to now were twenty-four hours long, then the time that human beings emerged on the planet was just a few minutes before midnight. In this view of the place of the human being in the universe, there was no place for a notion of a creator who had created man in his own image and for whom the human being is the creature of central importance. There was no place for the idea of a single power so great that it knows every detail of creation and controls events.
- Higher power. To say that there is probably not a single power so great that it controls all events in the universe is not to say there is no power greater than human beings. To say there is no intelligence that knows all events in the universe is not to say there is no intelligence greater than one’s own. All of human learning is a collaborative effort that is carried on for countless generations, and the totality of human experience was my father’s higher power. Indeed, the entirety of intelligent life was a higher power from which my atheistic father was constantly willing to learn. What he rejected was the notion that any understanding is infallible and immune from being superseded by a clearer and more comprehensive understanding.
- Source of morality. There was no single claim about God that more rankled my father than the claim that people need to believe in God in order to be moral, altruistic, caring, and decent to one another. He was convinced that people learn the value of honesty by witnessing the consequences of deceit, and they learn the importance of kindness by witnessing the consequences of cruelty. One learns moral integrity by keeping one’s eyes open in this life, not by keeping an eye on the afterlife. The punishment for careless and shoddy behavior is immediate, he believed, and the rewards for attentiveness and generosity are amply doled out in this life. There is no need to wait until death to discover whether one’s life was well lived and whether one fought the good fight.
- Means of salvation. Although descended from a long line of Christian ministers, my father rejected most of the core dogmas of mainline Christianity. He did not believe in original sin and therefore had no need for the doctrine that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was an atonement for original sin. He believed that consciousness is a property that emerges from the enormous complexity of billions of neurons passing electromagnetic and chemical signals to one another and that when the living organism that is host to a central nervous system dies, so does the intelligence that emerged from that particular collection of neurons. The idea of life outside physical life made no sense at all to him, and so he had no use for the Christian dogma that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross brought eternal life to human beings or any other life form. One needs to believe in salvation only when one sees life as a problem. My father never saw life as a problem and therefore had no hankering for salvation.
As a scientist and a humanist, my father simply had no need for a belief in an omniscient, benevolent and omnipotent creator and savior. But having no need for something would most naturally lead simply to being indifferent to it and taking no interest in it. My father was not indifferent to religion. He was hostile toward it. He was not disinterested in it. He was scornful of it. Where did that come from?
Probably the greatest single factor in my father’s moving from agnosticism to atheism was his alarm at the increasing influence of organized religion in American politics. He was born in 1923 and therefore lived for thirty-one years before “under God” was inserted into the pledge of allegiance, and thirty-four years before “in God we trust” was printed on paper money. (That slogan began appearing on some coins, of course, shortly after the Civil War, even though there were many coins that escaped having that pious motto inscribed on them until just before the Second World War.) My father was still a child when religious fanaticism led to the Prohibition and its many unfortunate consequences. He lived to see white ministers in the American southeast proclaiming that racial segregation was part of God’s plan. He saw appeals to dubious interpretations of scripture trump reason in almost every domain of American life, from the teaching of science in American classrooms to the way that pointless and unnecessary wars were justified in the name of protecting America from godless or anti-Christian enemies.
In the final analysis, I think my father’s atheism was made staunch not so much by reflection on theology as by the outrageous conduct of human beings who claimed to be righteous believers in the one true God. I sometimes tried, without much success, to convince him that not all believers are narrow-minded fanatics bent on imposing their wills on others. It often troubled me that the man who had taught me from earliest childhood to question all my prejudices was himself prejudiced against almost all organized religion. Having said that, I must admit that there are few of the beliefs he instilled in me as a child that I have rejected—even though I have certainly questioned them. What appalled him about much of organized religion also appalls me, and what he cherished in the natural world I also cherish. Who knows but that when I am nearing the end of my days, I will have given away all my books except for a few well-chosen volumes on atheism—and some books on birds.
Varieties of religious pluralism
Do you work gladly with other religious groups in the pursuit of common goals? While remaining faithful to Quaker insights, try to enter imaginatively into the life and witness of other communities of faith, creating together the bonds of friendship. (Advices and Queries, paragraph 6.)
The late Prof. Willard Oxtoby of the Center for Religious Studies at the University of Toronto said that religious pluralism is not merely the acceptance of the fact that there are different beliefs and practices among human beings, but the celebration of that fact. If one has the conviction that the world would be impoverished if there were fewer ways of being religious, then one is a religious pluralist. That said, there are many ways of being a pluralist. (How much sense would it make if there were only one way of being pluralistic?) In what follows, I shall talk about some of the approaches I have followed, with more or less success. Please forgive me for describing them using culinary analogies. Prof. Harvey Cox, among others, has used the metaphor of the cafeteria or the food mall to talk about an approach to religiosity. One can imagine a person going to a food mall in a modern shopping center in which there are cuisines from many countries available. There are several ways of dealing with the wide array of choices. Let me mention three.
- The spiritual mixer. A person might feel like having a little bit of everything at the same meal. So he might order sushi at the Japanese stand, a feta cheese salad at the Greek booth, a side dish of refried beans at the Mexican American stall and a gulab jamun for dessert at the Indian food vendor. Not everyone would find that combination a satisfactory meal, but the beauty of a food mall is that one can find almost anything one likes and put it all together in whatever combination strikes one’s fancy. A person pursuing a religious practice in a similar spirit to our imaginary diner might don his tefillin, light some candles and incense at a home altar on which a crucifix, an Amitābha Buddha image and a statue of Ganesh are all enshrined and earnestly chant some verses from the Navajo Yei bichai. If the person in question finds aspects of Judaism, Christianity, Mahāyāna Buddhism, Hinduism and Navajo chanting all personally meaningful in some way, this mixture of elements, which might seem odd to some, might be uplifting and transformative.
- The serial taster. Another person might go to the same food court, look around and conclude that all offerings look appetizing. But instead of having a little of everything at the same meal, this diner make a resolve to have an Italian meal today, a South Indian course tomorrow, a Chinese feast the day after tomorrow and a combination of Thai foods the day after that. This person might recognize that the elements of any given tradition of cuisine complement each other nicely and that combinations of taste have been put together over the course of centuries of culinary experimentation. While not wanting to restrict herself to one kind of food forever, she nevertheless sees an advantage in savoring each tradition separately and spreading her experience of variety over the course of a week or perhaps over the course of a month or longer. The spiritual counterpart of the serial taster might be someone who goes to Quaker meeting for worship on Sunday, vipassanā meditation on Monday, Hindu bhajans on Tuesday, a Greek orthodox mass on Wednesday, a Course in Miracles discussion group on Thursday, a mosque on Friday and a synagogue on Saturday. She might fully relish each religious event during the week but feel incorporating elements of all of them in a single hour of practice might lead to spiritual indigestion.
- The consistent diner. Some people find that they get the greatest satisfaction from eating the same type of food, perhaps even exactly the same dish, every day. Personal satisfaction for this diner might come in consistency, but while having a preference for maintaining habitual consistency, he may derive vicarious satisfaction by being in the company of others who have different diets. So this person might seek out friends who have different tastes from his own. He goes predictably every time to the organic fruit vendor and comes back with a fresh fruit du jour salad topped with yogurt and granola, which he enjoys as his friends enjoy their lasagna, enchiladas, kota riganati or shawarma. He eats the same thing not because of a disdain or fear of other diets, but because he has found a diet that works well and need not be tampered with. The spiritual counterpart of this diner might be the observant Jew who has plenty of Buddhist, Catholic, Muslim and secular friends whom he admires precisely because they are who they are.
At various times in my life I have tried each one of these approaches. In the 1980s I was part of a Zen community in which we were encouraged to be informed about other forms of Buddhism and about religions other than Buddhism and to attend the interfaith events that were fashionable in those days. While I thoroughly enjoyed the company of practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism or Catholicism or cabalistic Judaism or Wicca and approved of them wholeheartedly for following practices that they found meaningful, my own path was Zen, and I was reluctant, because I saw no need, to mix it with anything else—until I eventually discovered that the culture of Zen did not suit my temperament at all and left me deeply unfulfilled.
My dissatisfaction with “pure” Zen left me for a while with a suspicion of all claims of purity, real or imagined. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I came to feel for a while that all claims to purity were the product of imagination and that real purity simply does not exist.) Despite the fact that no religion other than Buddhism appealed to me very much at all on a personal level, I still rejoiced that there was a varied menu of religious practices for people to choose from and that if a person sought long enough she could surely find something meaningful and uplifting. As for me, what I found fulfilling was a sort of generic Buddhism that contained elements of Theravāda, bits and pieces of Mahāyāna, a smidgeon of Vajrayāna; the mixture could perhaps be characterized as ABZ (Anything But Zen) Buddhism. That phase eventually gave way to a succession of other phases.
The teachings and contemplative practices of Buddhism have appealed to me for my entire adult life, but I never really found a Buddhist community with a structure in which I felt fully at home. My childhood upbringing left me with an unshakable conviction in the fundamental equality of all people, as a result of which I found the hierarchical, and mostly patriarchal, structure of all the Buddhist communities I encountered off-putting. Equally off-putting was a subtle smugness among many Buddhists—admittedly mostly among converts—whereby Buddhism was assumed to be the standard against which all things spiritual were to be measured. I remember getting into several rather heated discussions with fellow Buddhists who insisted that to be a truly committed Buddhist was to wish that eventually everyone would be a Buddhist. Their reasoning was that to be a Buddhist is to strive to be compassionate, and to be compassionate entails wishing the very best for everyone, and since Buddhism is the very best, one naturally wishes it for everyone. Such people often seemed shocked that I wished for everyone to find whatever form of Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, humanism, tribalism or atheism that suited their needs the best. Such people were puzzled that I assumed most people will find different things suitable to them at different stages of their life, for to be alive is to change.
The only communal structure that ever felt like home to me was that of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Making me feel profoundly at home were the Quaker manner of tending to communal concerns, the fact that they had no distinction between clergy and laity but considered everyone clergy, the conviction that everyone is a seeker and everyone has something to learn from everyone else and the conviction that no authority is unimpeachable and no attempt to articulate the truth is absolute.
My project for many years has been to learn how to be part of a community of Quakers while drawing most of my nourishment from the teachings of the Buddha and their associated practices. It did not take very long at all to discover that a Quaker meeting for worship is no place to try to do my Buddhist meditation. A Quaker meeting for worship, I came to be convinced through experience, is a Quaker meeting for worship and is most fulfilling to me when I enter fully into that almost indefinable and indescribable mode of worship that occasionally gives rise to what Quakers call a covered meeting—a gathering at which everyone is fully centered and attendant upon something that feels very much as if it participates in divinity—whatever that may mean. To be the only one in the meeting doing vipassanā is to rupture the unity of the gathered meeting. So eventually I abandoned the practice of the spiritual mixer and took up something more like the practice of the serial taster. In the course of a week, or even a day, I am likely to read an epistle of George Fox, a lecture by Swami Vivekananda, a chapter of a book by Paul Tillich, an essay by Dōgen, a few pages of Carl Jung, and a writing by Karl Marx or Leon Trotsky. I have given up trying to arrive at an intellectual synthesis of all these diverse thinkers, but I never fail to learn from them and be inspired by them, each being motivational in its own way. If someone were to demand that I give one of them up, I would have to say “Please give me another commandment, for I cannot follow the one thee has given me.”
Needless to say, at any given moment it would be nearly impossible for me to say whether I was acting out of my Quaker habits or my Buddhist habits. In 99% of daily life, the habits of one are fully compatible with the habits of the other. The differences are, to me at least, trivial. When among Buddhists I use a different vocabulary than when among Quakers, because speaking to the natives in their own language slightly raises the odds of being superficially understood. To be understood more deeply, however, kindness will suffice. And kindness is most likely to emerge when all one’s labels have slipped off.
Ramakrishna and religious pluralism
But never get into your head that your faith alone is true and every other is false. (Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa)
In the month of March 2011, the 176th anniversary of the birth of Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa (Ramakrishna) is celebrated. During his lifetime Ramakrishna experimented with the devotional practices of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity and was convinced that the source of all the world’s religions is the same. Ignorance, he said, is the belief that God is outside oneself and far away. True knowledge is realizing that God is within oneself. When one has that true knowledge, and realizes also that God is within all living beings, then there is no longer any place for such concepts as “infidel,” “heretic” and “apostate.” There are no foreigners and no aliens; there are none who do not belong, none who cannot be forgiven, none who cannot be unconditionally loved.
On January 13, 2011, in Toronto, Shāh Karīm al-Ḥussaynī, the fourth Āgā Khān, the current imām of the Shia Imami Nizari Ismailis, delivered the Lafontaine-Baldwin lecture at University of Toronto. The lecture was broadcast on CBC Radio. In that lecture, His Highness made the observation that all the great empires in the world have thrived during the times when they have embraced what we now call multiculturalism and religious pluralism, and they have fallen when the inclusive attitudes of embracing all ethnic groups, all linguistic groups and all religions has given way to xenophobia and religious intolerance. Just one of the examples he gave was that of the Islamic empire of al-Andalus in what is now southern Spain. This nation lasted for more than 700 years, from 711 until 1492, and was a vibrant center of Muslim, Jewish and Christian cross-fertilization and exchange. In 1492, when the intolerant Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabel I of Castile recaptured Granada and began the reconquest of Spain, one of the most brutal and ugly episodes in human history took place. The Spanish Inquisition was a time when Jews and Muslims were required to convert to Catholicism or be expelled from Spain, and many of those who chose to convert were there examined by the Inquisition and found to be heretical. They were then handed over to the state and subjected to punishment, often in the form of being burned alive in public squares. The intolerance and brutality of the Spanish Inquisition set the tone for the treatment of native peoples in lands colonized by the Spanish in the Americas and Africa. Most of the shameful European conquest of the Americas can be seen as an aftermath of the collapse of morality in the wake of the descent from the spirit of multiculturalism and religious pluralism that began in 1492 and then gained momentum for several centuries afterward.
Intolerance of all kinds is contagious. Some have argued that it is innately human and that people are naturally disposed to be suspicious of outsiders and to blame them for nearly everything that has gone wrong in the world. Indeed, it is difficult to find any part of the world that has not at one time or another see manifestations of xenophobia. It does not follow from that, however, that people must be driven by suspicion and hatred. Nor does it follow that to be driven by forces other than suspicion, fear and hatred is to be somehow inhuman. Throughout history there have been people who have dedicated their lives to overcoming aggression, and the fearful mentality that gives rise to it. The Jina and the Buddha of ancient India, Laozi and Mozi and Mengzi of ancient China, Socrates and Aristotle and the Stoics and Skeptics of ancient Greece, and countless prophets and priests and philosophers and mystics since then have tirelessly articulated and lived the message of universal love—of loving one’s neighbor and loving the stranger just as one loves oneself and one’s own family.
In his address in Toronto, the Aga Khan observed that the world has become so interconnected through communication networks that whatever happens anywhere is soon known—and often imitated— everywhere, and social and political movements spread like wildfire. At the time of his talk, the protests in Tunisia were just beginning to be widely known, and the unrest in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen had not yet unfolded, nor had the massive protests in Wisconsin—the largest since the protests against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and ’70s. Given how rapidly cataclysmic change can take place around the world, he said, we human beings do not have much time to learn the important message that love is a much better strategy for survival and well-being than animosity. Given the efficiency of the technology of destruction now distributed around the world, failure to find our way back to civilization could quickly bring our unruly species to an end.
As the celebration of the birth of Ramakrishna takes place in Vedanta centers around the world, it is a time to reflect on his words and deeds, and on the words and example of the Aga Khan, and on the words and teachings of all men and women who have lived and died to establish peace and harmony and justice for all living beings on this earth. In the spirit of Ramakrishna, I personally find myself reflecting on the words of George Fox, written in a letter from prison in England in 1656, a time when men and women lost their lives or, like Fox, were imprisoned for following the “wrong” sort of Christianity:
…be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come; that your life and conduct may preach among all sorts of people, and to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one; whereby in them ye may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you: then to the Lord God you shall be a sweet savour, and a blessing.
The will not to believe
William James observed that people tend to hold on to the beliefs they had while young and to make only minor repairs along the way, unless an experience comes along that just cannot be accommodated within the old framework. That seems about right; at least, it corresponds well to my own experiences. For as long as I can recall, I have had the belief that beliefs are best kept to a minimum. It is sufficient to have a few beliefs that get one successfully through the day, such as the belief that when an elevator stops and opens its doors at a floor well above the ground floor, it is most probably safe to step out onto what looks like a solid floor. Even if one keeps one’s beliefs down to those that are helpful to make it from the ringing of the alarm clock in the morning back to the safety of the bedroom at night, the portfolio is bulging. Loading it with more produces an unwieldy encumbrance.
Carrying around beliefs, and especially about things that cannot possibly be proven to be either true or false, is not only cumbersome. It can be dangerous to health—one’s own as well as others’. Beliefs tend to lead people into temptation to have a degree of contempt or suspicion for those who do not share them. Some of my earliest memories come from the time of the McCarthy era in American politics, a time when holding unapproved beliefs could lead to prison or at least to the end of a career. While still much too young to comprehend what the stories really meant, I heard stories of friends of the family whose careers had been undermined because they had dared to express beliefs that were labelled by some as seditious and anti-American. Where there is a clash of beliefs of that kind, it is difficult to determine what is more dangerous—is it the putatively un-American belief, or is it the belief that some beliefs are un-American that is more disruptive, or is it both taken together?
The world that has evolved during my lifetime seems to have become paralyzed by conflicts in belief. Unfortunately, the paralysis is only partial; it only prevents the human race from moving forward in constructive ways toward peace and harmony. What is not paralyzed is the musculature that enables people to carry out destructive actions such as wars, gueriilla actions such as bombings, assassinations and massacres.
When people have conflicting beliefs about things that are too complex to enable the gathering of evidence that decides the matter definitively, what tends to happen is that the strong and powerful succeed in putting their beliefs into practice. The nations with the most economic and military might, for example, determine the agenda at the United Nations. The irony is that the most war-making nation, the United States, dominates an organization that was created to ensure world peace. Within that most powerful of nations, the corporations with the most economic clout set the agenda for internal policies. The powerful have the ability to act on their beliefs, even when their beliefs are either highly questionable or, in extreme cases, even demonstrably false. They determine what it is possible to do, and what therefore is practically true. Those who do not share those beliefs face nothing but frustration and despair. One might well believe that there is an injustice in such an arrangement, but the belief will do little good, for it will turn out to be all but impossible to act on it.
William James, in his lectures on Pragmatism, explained that the pragmatic method of examining beliefs consists in asking oneself how one might act differently if one believed something to be true than if one believed it to be false or than if one believed something else to be true instead. If I believe there is a shop that sells peanuts one mile west of my house, and if I desire to buy some peanuts, I am very likely to set out in the westerly direction on foot. If I believe the nearest peanut vendor is five miles from my house, I am likely to decide to take a bicycle instead of walking, or I might very well conclude that my craving for peanuts can go unsatisfied. There is a practical difference in the belief that the store is one mile and the belief that it is five miles away. On the other hand, there is (for me at least) no practical difference between the belief that the peanut vendor was descended from Adam, who got thrown out of the Garden of Eden for eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the belief that the peanut vendor evolved from simpler life forms through random genetic mutations over the course of millions of years. That pair of beliefs does not make any difference whatsoever in anything I might do or decide not to do. Nothing turns on which of those beliefs is the right one. Following the Jamesian principle that there can be no difference that does not make a difference can be an effective method of eliminating a good many unnecessary beliefs from my kitbag and lightening my load. Why carry a trunk-load of beliefs when a briefcase-load will do?
Yesterday I heard someone speaking who was very much opposed to the government being involved in any way in health care. He said “I don’t want some bureaucrat in Washington deciding whether I em entitled to the cost of a life-saving medical intervention.” Stated in just that way, his concern seemed legitimate enough. But what is the practical alternative? Having a clerk in a for-profit insurance company decide that his policy does not cover the life-saving intervention? Between the two scenarios there is no practical difference, for in either case needed health care is inaccessible to someone who lacks the funding to pay for it. And yet to the person expressing that fear, the worry about government interference is legitimate. He believes it in part because so many people can be heard expressing the same fear. And so many people are expressing the same fear, because there are people who are very well paid to come up with ways of saying things that will persuade people to believe that some products are necessary to happiness, that some policies will lead to disaster while others will lead to success, that one political party is more inclined to listen to “the people” as opposed to billionaires (who are also people, but people who have far more votes than the rest of us, because they can buy them in various legal and illegal ways). There are, in other words, people whose livelihood depends on making other people believe things that are at best questionable and at worst downright false.
The best antidote against questionable beliefs is the habit of asking questions. And the habit of asking questions depends on cultivating the will to question. Being willing to question depends on being willing not to believe. I have found that being willing not to believe works well for me. Indeed, I have found it serves well as the cornerstone of a spiritual practice. Whether willing oneself not to believe will also work for others is something that only others can decide by trying it.
Out of a living silence 