Other People's Religion

For quite some time I was baffled by the question, "why do so many people believe, or at least purport to believe, statements which clearly are not supported by the evidence?" The clearest example of this is other people's religions. We may convince ourselves that our own religion is true and clearly so, but given the variety of different beliefs in the world, it is undeniable that the vast majority of them must be wrong. In fact, viewed from the outside, other people's religions often seem not just obviously wrong, but literally laughable.

It turns out the answer is reasonably well known. The beliefs in question serve as group membership markers. Evidence has nothing to do with it. These beliefs are often of matters which are unknowable (what happens after one dies), or at least seemed to be when they were first formulated (where did the world come from). Often compliance with some sort of ritual is required, but I think people comply with the ritual in order to demonstrate their commitment to the group, not because of a genuine belief that violating some taboo will genuinely do harm to the violator or to anyone else.

These beliefs tend to be of little practical significance for those who hold them. It's easy to find people who will tell you this, but it may be difficult to convince yourself this is true, particularly since the significance of the beliefs are if anything more often asserted from the outside than from the inside; atheists often talk as if it's just a baby step from allowing the teaching of creationism as an "alternative theory" to witch burning. Conversely, Christians often talk as if a belief that humans are just another species of animal will lead to people acting like animals; they won't so much behave immorally as behave as if morality isn't even a meaningful concept. In the real world, not only do a majority of Americans believe in some form of creationism already, but most people who "believe in evolution" have some comic-book conception of it that is no closer to the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection than is the Genesis myth, and incidentally is somehow not incompatible with a belief in God.

In any dispute in which people separate into identifiable factions, whether allegedly religious, political, artistic, or even scientific, it is likely that a significant fraction of the adherents of each side have chosen their position not on the evidence of the issue itself but rather on which group they identify with. In principle scientific disputes can be resolved by observation and experiment, but in practice, particularly in the "soft sciences", this is not possible, particularly if one has very demanding standards for the burden of proof.

Unfortunately, none of this actually helps determine truth. As a neutral third party, it is easy to conclude that disputants on both sides are expressing far more confidence in the correctness of their opinions than is reasonable that this is largely based on a feeling of solidarity with those on their side and a dislike of those on the other, particularly since they aren't at all sgy about expressing this dislike, although they will reverse the arrow of causality. And if one is oneself involved in a political or "scientific" dispute in which emotions run strong, the idea that those on the other side genuinely believe that they are "the good guys" seems even more preposterous than the idea that they simply believe that what they say is true. Nonetheless, they do.

The Left

Many years ago on Usenet a remember reading a post by a Muslim who argued that, although the Koran in English may seem unimpressive, if one were to read it in the original Arabic one would be convinced that it must be the direct word of God, that it is such sublime poetry that it could not have been written by a mere man. I wasn't an active participant in that particular thread, just a reader, but the argument made an impression on me because it so clearly illustrated a principle. It seemed absurd that the poster would expect his readers to go to the trouble of learning Arabic just to refute him, and yet in principle there was nothing really wrong with his argument, nor was there any real way he could make it without expecting the other participants to learn Arabic. I had perhaps been somewhat suspicious of the assertion that one should investigate all ideas for one's self rather than merely relying on the judgments of others, but never before had it been so clear what an utter crock it is; there isn't time, wouldn't be sufficient time in a thousand lifetimes, to actually examine all possibilities sufficiently, even if one restricted examination to ideas with a substantial number of adherents.

This post is not about the political left, but rather about the left side of the intelligence curve, and not just the left tail, or even the left half, but more like the bottom 95%, and perhaps in some cases still more. That is, nearly everyone.

I have a pretty high opinion of my own intelligence, but although I'm samrter than the average bear, I know that there are millions of people in the world who are at least approximately as smart as I am, and some of them are substantially smarter. Occasionally I have come across an argument that seemed sufficiently complicated that not only was I unwilling to devote the time and effort to puzzle it through, I thought perhaps it might be beyond my ability to follow (and I'm not counting cases where the author is deliberately being obscure). I can't remember the particular incidence, but I do remember once being shocked by the insight: most people are like that all the fucking time.

There are important implications of this. First, people are generally being sensible when they dismiss unconventional or outlandish ideas as "nonsense". Most such ideas are nonsense, and most people are incapable of distinguishing the occasional profound insight from madness, Either they can't do it all, or they can't do it within the constraints of time and effort the idea seems to deserve. Second, that when new ideas do overtake the old, it happens not so much because everyone is convinced as an individual of the truth of the new idea as that an influential few embrace the new idea and the rest follow "expert" opinion. That's all they can do. Finally, if an idea is popular with the most influential members of a society it is likely to become regarded as "true" regardless of the idea's actual merits. This is, I think, true in all societies, but particularly those like ours which have a reasonably well defined class of professional intellectuals.

It follows that it's generally a waste of time trying to persuade the masses of anything new by argument. The following one can get will depend more on one's skill as a persuader than on the quality of one's ides, and in any case that following will remain small unless one has the support of the influential ones.

But where argument fails, demonstration may succeed. Technology advances because the new methods can be directly observed to be better at accomplishing desired aims than were the old methods, or even are capable of accomplishing that which could not be done before.

Magic, Mysticism, and Science

The magical and scientific viewpoints toward the world are fundamentally different. The scientific viewpoint asserts that the universe behaves according to fixed mechanical principles. The magical viewpoint is that what happens is fundamentally determined by the wills of concious entities (gods, spirits, whatever). The magical viewpoint is consistent with, but does not necessarily imply, the idea that some or all human beings can effect changes in physical reality through acts of will alone. The scientific viewpoint is not. I fully subscribe to the scientific viewpoint. I cannot prove it is correct, I very much doubt that it can be proven, even in principle. Disputing the scientific viewpoint goes outside the scope of this blog.

It is, of course, possible for a scientist to believe in the existence of some sort of deity. He could, for example, believe in a deistic god which created the universe and its physical laws, and afterwards refrained from interfering. Or he could believe in a more personal God which normally allows the universe to proceed according to physical laws, but who can and does sometimes cause miracles, events which are impossible according to normal law. But in order to do science, one must for all practical purposes rule out the possibility of a miracle occurring in the course of one's experiments.

The key element of the scientific viewpoint is that matter, at least at its most fundamental level, lacks any sort of purpose or goal or morality. Water doesn't seek its proper level, it merely follows the grade; it can't spontaneously flow uphill in order to later flow farther downhill. Of course, human beings do exhibit goal-oriented behavior, but our constituent elements do not.

Mystical beliefs (astrology, alchemy, etc.) are often thought of as being part of magic, but actually they were essentially scientific, but they were bad science. Their practitioners believed in universal rules, but their rules didn't work. The alchemists were bad enough chemists to realize that their attempts to transmute lead into gold were futile, but good enough economists to realize that in order to achieve the vast riches they coveted they needed not only to learn the process, but to keep it secret from others. Secrecy is the essence of mysticism, and thus mysticism is almost invariably bad science. It is nearly impossible to keep a principle of nature secret while making use of it for some practical effect.

Since the "Age of Reason", calling an idea "scientific" has been a way to imbue it with credit, but the fact that something is called scientific doesn't mean that it truly is. Not only can it be bad science, it can be an appeal to magic disguised with scientific terminology or rationale. Scientific vocabulary or equations notwithstanding, an attempt toc cause physical results via will alone without a physical causal mechanism is magic, not science.

There is, however, one area in which something much like magic might plausibly be expected to work: when the desired effect is to change human behavior. Because people act on the basis of their beliefs, it stands to reason that changing people's beliefs will change their actions. Also, because most people crave approval, if one could be control what gains social approval, behavior would adjust accordingly. This type of thought is central to the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century.

Dichotomies

In high school I was presented with two allegedly opposite viewpoints. One side, championed by Hobbes, asserted that people were naturally wicked, and needed to be made virtuous by society (by which was meant the state). The other, championed by Rousseau, held that people were naturally good, but were corrupted by society (and in this case society really means society, that is the more or less voluntary mutual associations people enter into). Although I felt there was something wrong with "both" at the time, it didn't occur to me until much later that, far from being opposites, they were fundamentally saying the same thing. That is, that although they both claimed to describe human nature, essentially they were saying that there is no such thing, that whether people behave well or badly depends almost entirely on social structures, and that clever people like themselves should be placed in charge of structuring society so as to maximize human virtue and happiness. Of course, for people with strong preferences one way or the other the distinction between those favoring a "back to nature" vs a "fool for the city" approach, but to many of us the question of whether choices are made voluntarily by individuals or mandated by some central authority is much more important than what that authority will decide if given the power to do so. Particularly since the policy is likely to change, even completely reverse itself, when the central decision makers see that things are not going as planned.

One is frequently confronted with this kind of false dichotomy, especially in politics, but also in science and philosophy. The trouble is not just that the list of choices presented fails to consider all possible options, but that the way the problem is framed distorts the way it is thought about.