Wear it as long as thou canst
There is a widely told, entirely apocryphal, story that at one time George Fox and William Penn met. At this meeting William Penn expressed concern over wearing a sword (a standard part of dress for people of Penn’s station), and how this was not in keeping with Quaker beliefs. George Fox responded, “Wear it as long as thou canst.” Later, according to the story, Penn again met Fox, but this time without the sword. Penn then said, “I have taken thy advice; I wore it as long as I could.” Though this story is entirely unfounded, it serves as an instructive parable about Penn’s Quaker beliefs. (From Brief History of William Penn)
Myth is usually more suitable than history at conveying ideals and values. The often-repeated story of George Fox’s advice to William Penn illustrates well the Quaker approach to the Quaker testimonies, for it shows that the testimonies to strive for simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality and stewardship are not approached as absolute commandments but as ideals toward which each individual Friend moves as she is led by her reflections on her own experiences. If one’s experiences have been of the unhappy consequences of violence, and if one reflects on the nature of violence, then one is likely to seek alternatives to the violent solutions to problems that present themselves. At one point in one’s life, one may seek to protect oneself by having a sword (or a pistol or an assault rifle or a strong army or a nuclear arsenal), but if one comes to see the very stockpiling of weapons as a threat to peace, one may follow the example of William Penn in the mythical story and leave one’s sword at home. One may seek to protect oneself by being the kind of person others are unlikely to attack.
Contrary to popular perceptions, Quakers are not invariably pacifists who refuse military service. The peace testimony, like all of the Quaker testimonies, has been formulated in different ways in different times and is always evolving as different communities of Friends discover what the demands of their particular circumstances are. (There is a nice blog posting about the testimonies on The Quaker Ranter). Typically, the testimony is worded in a way that draws upon the words of George Fox, who wrote in his journal that he testified to the Commonwealth Commissioners that he “lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars…”
The occasion, or as we might now say, the causality of all wars is complex. Among the causes are such external factors as social injustices and maldistribution of the world’s resources. More fundamental causes are the internal psychological factors that give rise to social and economic injustices. Xenophobia and other fears of those who act and believe differently give rise to such behaviors as invading the homelands of others, colonizing others, converting others to one’s own religion and marginalizing those who don’t comply. The ancient Hebrews justified their genocidal campaigns in the land of Canaan by portraying the inhabitants of those lands, the Philistines and so on, as godless barbarians and uncultured savages. To this very day, the word “Philistine” is used to describe an uncouth person who has no higher interests; stereotypes die hard if they ever die at all. The reputation of the Philistines has been permanently smeared by the negative stereotyping enshrined in self-congratulatory Hebrew propaganda.
Unfortunately, there is no need to go back to the time of Joshua to find examples of brutality justified. The United States of America has become the land it currently is through several centuries of genocide, enslavement and colonization, most of it justified on the grounds that the victims of European territorial expansion were either benefiting from the largesse and advanced culture of the Europeans or so backwards that they deserved to be killed or banished to nearly uninhabitable lands. The behaviors of the Americans of European descent were rooted primarily in greed, fear of the other, and ignorance.
Buddhists would use the terms greed, hatred and delusion to identify the occasion of war. These psychological traits—not other people—are the occasion of war. Since all human beings have to some extent inherited the characteristics that enabled their ancestors to survive long enough to procreate, and since those survival mechanisms of earlier generations were usually manifestations of greed and fear and benighted thinking, most human beings are genetically predisposed to those traits. The fact that those traits worked in the past, when the human population was very small, is no indication that they will continue to work in the present and the future. We may have come to the point where the very traits that promoted the survival of our ancestors will promote our own demise, perhaps even the guaranteed extinction of our descendants.
During the past year I have been reading the Bible every day. I have been following a lectionary that assigns passages to read every day. There are many kinds of lectionary, but the one I am following now is one that begins with the book of genesis and reads straight through to the book of revelations; by following it one can read the entire Bible in 365 days. I have to say that most of the reading has been unpleasant and disturbing. There is so much warfare, so much rationalized cruelty, so many prayers for the destruction of one’s enemies. Who can read a passage such as “Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, he will be happy who rewards you, as you have served us. Happy shall he be, who takes and dashes your little ones against the rock” without wincing at the cry for bloody revenge against those who have treated the Hebrews in Jerusalem as the Hebrews under Joshua treated the inhabitants of Jericho? So much of the sacred writings of the Hebrews—then the Christians who had inherited much of the mentality and many of the enemies of the Hebrews, and then the Muslims whose sacred revelations continue in the same general spirit—focuses on external enemies. The message repeated constantly is that the world would be peaceful if only other people were not evildoers bent on tormenting the lovers of God.
There are alternatives to the war whoops found in so much of the sacred literature of the world. There have always been people who have realized that our greatest enemies are not the evildoers from other lands but rather our own minds and the habits we have acquired through the indoctrination of mainstream society provided by war-mongering governments. Most of the Stoic philosophers of the Hellenistic world realized that. With only a few scattered exceptions, almost all the literature of Buddhism and Vedānta and Daoism is an invitation to find the true enemies that disturb the peace, namely, the acquisitiveness, the fear and suspicion of others, the anger that arises when things don’t go as one had hoped, and the hasty conclusions that are formed through lazy and self-centered thinking.
Although Quakerism was originally a form of Christianity based on a deep familiarity with the sacred texts of the Jews and the Christians, many modern Quakers find more inspiration in the inner-enemy theme of Asian religious literature than in the outer-enemy preoccupations of so much of the literature of the Abrahamic religions. The writings and sayings of Hindus, Buddhists and Daoists often require less hermeneutical manipulation to bring them in line with the inward leadings to peace and simplicity of life and thought that seems obviously called for as we emerge from one of the most destructive and soul-destroying centuries in human history.
Is the story of William Penn and George Fox historically accurate? Probably not, but that is not the best question to ask anyway. The better question might be “Is that the right story to tell in our times?” By my lights, it is.
How to feed an ego
For the past few weeks the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio program called Ideas ran a three-part series of programs entitled “Have Your Meat and Eat It Too.” Themes that run through all three installments are the methods of so-called factory farming and all the distortions that large scale agricultural operations feed into the economy, the environment and the political climate of the countries in which it is practiced. There are examinations of the influence of pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies that produce artificial fertilizers and pesticides, and giant low-price retailers such as Wal-Mart and large fast-food chains such as McDonalds that force prices paid to farmers to such low levels that hardly anyone in small-scale agriculture can make a livelihood any more. Rarely have I heard the word ”unsustainable“ used so many times in a span of three hours.
Episodes two and three both have discussions of the ethical and environmental and health implications of a vegetarian diet. Suffice it to say that it is not obvious that a vegetarian diet is unambiguously indicated as the best way to stay healthy and preserve the environment, although everyone agrees that the current dietary proclivities of Americans are both unhealthy and environmentally disastrous. Unfortunately, American dietary habits are finding their ways to other parts of the world as well, making obesity one of America’s principal exports.
One of the observations that most caught my attention in these discussions was made by a woman who was a vegan for 20–30 years and eventually changed her diet to include some animal products. She observed that being a vegan is much more than deciding what to eat and what not to eat. It is also taking on an identity. It is carrying all the baggage of a persona that must be defended almost every time one picks up a fork. It is, in other words, to take on a practice that has exactly the opposite effect of what most Buddhist (and other spiritual) practices are designed to do, namely, to reduce one’s attachment to a particular identity.
And, said this former vegan, whenever one takes on an identity, one loses perspective and enters into a mentality that warps almost everything one sees, systematically refuses to look at evidence impartially, and enters into the epistemological vices of believing things for which one has insufficient evidence and not believing things despite having plenty of evidence.
Buddhists called these epistemological vices by the simple term moha, which means the state of being perplexed, confused, infatuated or fooled.
Needless to say, there is no invariable causal relationship between deciding to be a vegan and becoming incapable of thinking carefully and impartially. As long as one makes such decisions whimsically and realizes that the decision is a manifestation of sentimentality, everything is fine. It is only when one begins to think that there is something rational and righteous about the decision that one begins to get into spiritual (and philosophical) trouble.
All these observations of the vegan in recovery intrigued me, because they spoke to my own experience. In the early 1990s I became convinced that veganism was the only morally defensible diet for an environmentalist and a Buddhist dedicated to the project of reducing the suffering of the world. I entered into a year of living fanatically. I found myself welling up with disgust when I saw people put a few dribbles of milk into their afternoon tea. As for people who put a spoonful of honey on their yeast-leavened bread, I regarded them as morally equivalent to genocidal maniacs. I exaggerate for effect, of course, but I really did find myself hating the kind of self-righteous judgmentalism that entered my mentality shortly after I began to eschew all animal products from my pantry and my wardrobe. It was as though I had suddenly become a patriot or the member of some marginalized tribe fighting for ethnic survival. It was as though I had become the follower of a quaint religion that forbids marrying outside the faith and associating with out-group folk for fear of ideological contamination. (My readings of the history of Quakerism have informed me that the Society of Friends went through a long period of avoiding, as much as practicality would allow, contact with non-Friends—a decidedly unfriendly attitude.)
To some extent even insistent ideologically driven vegetarianism promotes epistemological warping, but not, in my personal experience, to the extent that ideologically driven veganism does.
One of my cultural heroes was Bhimrao Ambedkar, one of the principal architects of the constitution of India, the world’s largest democracy. Amdbedkar was born into an Indian caste that was regarded as untouchable. Despite having earned two PhD degrees from universities outside India (London School of Economics and Columbia University), Ambedkar was still treated for much of his life as a person whose presence would contaminate the purity of high-caste Hindus. Eventually attitudes changed somewhat, and Ambedkar got at least some of the recognition he deserved. One of his writings was a monograph in which he tried to discover the history of the institution of untouchability in India. His thesis is complex, but an oversimplified version of it is that Hindus and Buddhists became involved in a protracted rivalry of self-righteousness in which each religion tried to depict itself as more concerned with ethical purity than the other. One of the many foci of attention, said Ambedkar, was diet. Over the centuries, Hindus and Buddhists tried to outdo one another by excluding more and more from their diets. The logical conclusion of this was what we now call veganism, a diet in which no animal products whatsoever are eaten, worn or used. The Untouchables, said Ambedkar, were descended from Buddhists who did not participate in the extreme Buddhist practice of veganism. In fact, they were cattle ranchers. When Buddhism disappeared from India, said Ambedkar, the formerly Buddhist cowboys were rejected by Hindu society and, unlike more educated Buddhists, were never reabsorbed into Hinduism.
Ambedkar’s theory of the history of the Untouchables is highly speculative and, like all speculative theories, questionable. That notwithstanding, the literary record of Buddhism clearly supports his claim that there were Buddhists who advocated a vegan diet so adamantly that they claimed all self-proclaimed Buddhists who did not follow a vegan diet would go to hell for aeons because of their hypocrisy. The argument was that no one who claims to be compassionate would ever eat meat, or consume milk or honey (since both of these products are stolen from the species that produce them) or wear wool (stolen from sheep) or silk (which requires the killing of silkworms). Few tracts in the history of religious literature are as fanatical as Mahāyāna Buddhist writings that insist on total avoidance of all animal products. The tone of those texts is self-righteous and contemptuous of all who make choices other than the ones advocated by the texts. That they had the potential to marginalize and denigrate meat-eating and wool-wearing people is undeniable. It is not at all a pretty picture and hardly lives up to the reputation for tolerance that Buddhists have often had in modern times.
In the early 1990s at a Canadian academic conference on Buddhist philosophy, I wrote a scathing denunciation of the fallacious argumentation found in the vegan sections of various Buddhist texts. Because I was then climbing out of my own descent into a fanatical form of veganism, I no doubt was as offensive to reason as the texts I was denouncing. I recall the moderator of the panel I was on offering an embarrassed apology to the audience for my performance. At the time, I laughed it off, but now I look back on that panel with chagrin. In trying to recover from the fanaticism of my dietary ideology, I was still participating in the very tone of intolerance that I found so objectionable.
What is especially embarrassing to me is that I became so defensive of a persona—of an ego—in the name of Buddhism, a tradition that had always made as its cardinal teaching that all we do to maintain our personas causes pain, conflict and discomfort to self and others. It is small comfort to realize that I am probably not unique in having become so zealous that I ended up exemplifying exactly the antithesis of the path I was so zealously striving to follow.
Unlike my own previous discourses on veganism (both for and then against), which were polemical diatribes, the Ideas program on meat-production and meat-eating is admirably balanced and offers the best arguments both for and against vegetarianism. The programs are exemplars of careful research and dispassionate exploration. My guess is that most listeners would emerge from them with a recognition that many of the opinions they have held on the topic before were overly simple and insufficiently nuanced.
The Ideas program chased up a rabbit in the labyrinth of my memory. In my grandparent’s sparsely outfitted apartment, the dining room walls were bare except for a framed exemplar of the Selkirk Grace:
Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.
When my grandfather died, my mother gave me that framed exemplar and apologized profusely for giving me something that might offend my vegetarian sensibilities. I explained to her that the prayer was written in the 17th century, when the word “meat” was metonymic for food, in much the same way that “meal” is in current English, or “go-han” (rice) is in Japanese. So when a 17th century family sat down to have their meat, they often ate bread and ale and perhaps a piece of cheese. But that is really beside the point. The point, which I acknowledge with shame, is that my mother recognized in me the stink of possible intolerance toward those who did not follow my chosen diet.
Machine-minded man
Where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. Within a machine heart in your breast, you’ve spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest. (from Zhuangzi, chapter 12, translated by Burton Watson)
In Zhuangzi’s story, these words are spoken by an old farmer who is seen carrying water in a gourd and watering his garden with it, making trip after trip. A passing city clicker sees the old man laboring to carry small amounts of water and tells him he could irrigate the entire field using a mechanical pump.
As I was sitting in silence in the Quaker meeting for worship yesterday, this story and those farmer’s words came to mind. As I thought of putting them aside, a mental image arose of the words appearing on a computer screen in the context of a word-processing program. In my imagination, I closed the file and stored it in a folder. What came to mind when I thought of clearing my mind was the image of shutting down a computer. As I tried to turn my thoughts to other things, all I could visualize was a computer monitor on which I was clicking on concrete thoughts with a mouse, dragging files into folders, deleting unwanted files by dragging their icons to the icon of the trash basket. Even when I tried to put machines out of my mind and to visualize a beautiful meadow in the mountains, it was as though I was looking at the scene through the lens of a digital camera, or seeing it on a television. I could visualize nothing directly. Everything was mediated by machines. A mild panic began to arise in my breast. For a good half hour, I found myself almost completely incapable of having thoughts of anything that was not somehow connected to a computer, or an iPod, or a mobile telephone. When I tried to listen, the only ambient sounds I could hear were the sounds of passing traffic, air conditioners, electrical fans, machines that neighbors were using to do yard work. No sounds of birds, no sounds of insects, no sounds of thunder or rain. For the remainder of the meeting, I felt completely hemmed in by machines, and machine worries. I was imprisoned by conTRAPtions. And indeed, while that lasted, my spirit knew no rest.
There has been a growing literature on the subject of how computers and other electronic devices affect our brains. One recent contribution to that literature is an article called Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price. Science programs on NPR and CBC radio have chronicled studies showing that multi-tasking actually takes more time than doing a series of tasks in tandem. (Contrary to what may people in our post-literary society seem to believe, “in tandem” means lined up one after another rather than linked together side by side.) Not only does it take more time to try to do several things at once, but the risk of error increases. Trying to do several things at once not only wastes time, but it makes people more careless. And the more habituated one becomes to trying to work that way, the more one deteriorates into conditions very much like attention deficiency disorder (which most people lack the patience to say in full, preferring to call it by the abbreviation ADD).
As inefficient and careless as multitasking makes those who try to do it, most of us are in one way or another seduced into doing what computers and other electronic devices make it possible to do. Many people admit to interrupting their writing of an article by checking their e-mail quickly, clicking on a link to check out a website, downloading a song they have just heard on Pandora.com while doing all the above, and quickly doing a chat with a cousin while checking to see whether there are any voice messages on their mobile telephone, which reminds them that it is time to call their mother-in-law on Skype. And if any of these tasks takes a microsecond or two longer than usual, impatience boils over into keyboard rage. I don’t have to report that people I know have learned to work that way. I myself have begun to work that way, with bad, if not disastrous, consequences.
It has been shown that when one multi-tasks on computers, dopamine levels rise for a moment, followed by a crash into mini-depression as one has to face a few moments in a normal mental state rather than in a dopamine-adrenalin high. From the point of view of brain chemistry, the effect is close to the mental state of a person with mental illness.
Machines are not only giving most of us restless spirits through an abundance of mechanical worries, they are also numbing our awareness of the fact that the manufacturing, transporting, fueling and using of machines is making human beings act collectively in ways that are destroying the planet on which we live. As I write this, oil is gushing into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico as a result of one company’s bid to maximize profits by cutting corners in the enterprise of producing petroleum to be captured and transformed at enormously high cost to fuel and lubricate machines, or to make plastic products that are to be used for a short time and then thrown away to produce garbage that will pollute the land and the waterways for centuries. There is deep and serious madness in this way of living. We have arrived at the state where the majority of the more than six billion inhabitants of the earth should be in mental hospitals. But when the majority of the population has gone insane through their restless spirits and machine-worried minds, those few whose spirits are still intact are the ones who seem mad. Something seems uncanny about sane people. They disturb the rest of us.
Zhuangzi finishes his dialogue in these words:
Where the life of the spirit knows no rest, the Way will cease to buoy you up. It’s not that I do not know about your machine—I would be ashamed to use it.
I am ashamed to have written this on a computer, and to be publishing it on the Internet. If you have had the patience to read it all the way to the end, rejoice that you have not succumbed to machine-induced ADD. And then feel ashamed for have read it on the Internet. May your shame lead you into the garden to listen to the bees buzzing among the petals.
Why is migration made illegal?
There is a term in Buddhism, yoniśo manaskāra, which is translated in various ways, such as “principled thinking.” What the term refers to is focusing one’s attentions on the roots of a situation rather than on the superficial aspects. When one is trying to solve a problem or to heal an illness, then the expression means getting to the root causes of the problem and tending to those rather than trying to alleviate the symptoms. The opposite is ayoniśo manaskāra, which, of course, means thinking superficially, that is, dealing only with the symptoms and failing to tend to the root cause of a malady. Most of the avoidable forms of distress in human life, according to most Buddhist analysis, stems from the persistent tendency that human beings have of reacting to unpleasant effects rather than at eliminating causes.
One of the many examples of reactive, superficial thinking in the United States these days is the way many people are dealing with the fact of people crossing the southern border of the United States from Mexico into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona or California to seek employment. On one level, this is not a problem at all. Mexicans and Central Americans need work, and plenty of American business enterprises need workers. Mexicans, as a rule, work hard and amply repay those who hire them. Mexicans who work for wages in the United States pay taxes and make social security contributions. Their overall contribution to the economy of the United States is substantial. By working in the United States at wages that are low by American standards but high by Mexican standards, Mexicans can send enough money back to their dependents and relatives to support them. There are many winners and few losers in this system. So what is the problem?
One problem is that the United States gives work permits to far fewer migrant workers than are required to maintain the work force that businesses in the United States need to supply their goods and services at affordable prices. This means that many workers are working without the necessary paperwork and are therefore technically not conforming to the law. When hundreds of people are not living in conformity with a law, then the community has a crime problem. When many millions of people do not operate within the requirements of the law, the community probably has poorly designed laws. If, for example, a law were passed making it illegal to brush one’s teeth before noon, millions of people would ignore the law. The law would be difficult to enforce, for many reasons, not the least of which being that it is a pointless law that serves no obvious purpose. Similar observations can be made about current laws governing the citizenship of those who work in the United States. The laws cannot be enforced for a variety of reasons, one primary reason being that there is no good purpose served by restricting who can work in the United States.
A law that cannot be enforced is a danger to a society, because it lays down the conditions for people having contempt for the law as a whole, and contempt for a government that would pass a foolish law in the first place. Much of the contempt that one finds for the Congress of the United States stems from the passage of laws that are not enforced, or are not enforced even-handedly, or are not enforced simply because they are impossible to enforce. The current immigration laws are so far out of line with reality that their inevitable non-enforcement makes people angry, disrespectful of the law as a whole, and contemptuous of legislators who, for whatever reason, fail to replace unworkable laws and regulations with viable counterparts. That America’s immigration laws are unworkable is made abundantly clear by the fact that thousands of people per day cross the borders without the legally required work permits and find gainful employment that is technically not legal for them to do. As the National Rifle Association has reminded Americans repeatedly during the past several decades, if guns are outlawed, then only outlaws have guns. Similarly, if working is outlawed, then outlaws will find work. As Americans should have learned when the constitution was amended to make drinking alcohol illegal, professional crime syndicates thrived by making alcohol available to those who wanted it. Nowadays, professional crime syndicates are thriving by smuggling people from Mexico into the United States, then prospering by blackmailing the very people whom they have smuggled into the country. People who want nothing but to earn an honest livelihood are forced by circumstances into dealing with gangsters, who then put their victims into a situation remarkably similar to slavery. Much of that criminality, and the violence that accompanies it, could be eliminated with the stroke of a pen signing into existence a well-considered and realistic law allowing the number of workers who cross into the United States to seek employment to come closer to the number of jobs there are to fill.
Having more workable immigration regulations would, however, still be addressing symptoms rather than underlying causes. A deeper solution to the pseudo-problem of workers working without proper documentation would require looking more carefully into the question of why people migrate in the first place. Even without doing any investigation at all, one can know that people migrate from places where no work is available to places were work is available. When life becomes difficult or impossible in one place, people move to places where life is possible. Mexico’s economy has traditionally been a labor-intensive agricultural economy. As a result of many factors, one of them being the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ratified in 1994, it is much easier for commodities to cross the borders that separate the United States from Mexico and Canada than it is for people. It is easier for corporations to set up operations in a foreign country than it is for workers to sell their labor in a country other than the one in which they have status as a legal resident. The impact of the agreement on Mexican workers has been harsh. In some cases, multinational corporations have acquired lands that were once agricultural and put them into other uses; in other cases, lands have been acquired by agricultural operations that are highly mechanized and require less human labor. The result has been that agricultural workers no longer have as much agricultural work to do in Mexico. Some displaced agricultural workers manage to find low-paid employment in the industrial sector producing goods, most of which are exported to more affluent nations. Others become street vendors or temporary workers. Still others end up working for organized crime syndicates. An increasing number are simply unemployed; according to a Reuters news report, the unemployment rate in Mexico hit a fourteen-year high in October 2009. The government-sponsored unemployment insurance plan is unable to compensate all unemployed workers at a level that sustains life, so workers have few options available to them. Fortunately, there are employment opportunities in the United States and Canada, but unfortunately the bureaucracies in both countries pose formidable obstacles to Mexican workers seeking work in any North American country other than Mexico.
The plight of Mexicans and Central Americans is not simply an economic and political problem. It is also a moral problem, and a spiritual problem. It is worth asking whether the NAFTA treaty serves human beings as well as it serves corporations—whether it serves peasants as well as it serves stockholders. If it does not, it is not a moral document by the moral guidelines of any of the world’s religions. Economic injustice is never moral. Any form of spirituality that does not work to address immoral situations is unworthy of being called spiritual. Any solution to a problem that involves punishing the victims of injustice by presenting them with even more hardships than they already have as a result of being victims of injustice is immoral and offensive. That so many people are deprived of the conditions that make honest and dignified work possible for them is in itself shameful enough. That shame is compounded by the superficial pseudo-solutions of sending more guards to the border to keep migrants from crossing to areas where work is available to them, or by building walls and fences, or by empowering local police authorities to inquire into whether foreign citizens are legally in the United States. The president of the United States, the United States Congress, the governor of Arizona, and the state legislature of Arizona have all done their part to compound the injustice and to increase the shamefulness of allowing a tragic situation to continue.
It is time to stop manufacturing ineffectual superficial solutions to a problem that exists in the first place because of short-sighted policies. It is time to look beneath the surface to the roots and to have the spiritual courage to act accordingly. Meanwhile, all you who have supported policies that compound the suffering of others, be ashamed.
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 