The following is the first in a series of posts on the way religious ideas consciously or unconsciously thread through everyday life. Hope you like them. —Jim
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“Here in this room, we all believe in molecules and the preservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for ‘the doctrine of the immortal Monroe,’ all for no reasons worthy of the name. We see into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much less, than any disbelievers in them might possess.”
—William James, “The Will to Believe” (1896)
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You know what you believe. But how do you decide what you know?
The most immediate answers come from our bodies: We see the clouds; we feel the heat and humidity; we smell impending rain. Of course, our senses are not infallible (it may not be as hot as we think), and we’re not always paying attention (so absorbed in watching a ballgame that we don’t hear a rumble in the distance). But for most of us, the most reliable knowledge is that which we experience first-hand, the very metaphor indicative of a sensory encounter.
But to a great—and, perhaps, surprising—extent, most of what we know comes from other people. We may actually go to the game, and thus witness events that may have affected the outcome (like, say, an argument between the pitcher and catcher that leads to a wild pitch). But we’re likely hear things we previously missed, or see familiar moments from a different angle, when we watch instant replays, read about the game the next morning, or listen to a self-appointed expert at the bar hold forth over a beer at Happy Hour. These are all mediated experiences—experiences that come between our minds and the outside world—that contribute to what we “know” about the game. Only when we pause to consider how we know what we do, and actively weigh the validity of one account against another, are we likely to realize how dependent we are on information from others. (Yes, it rained hard—I got soaked. But was it actually a thunderstorm? I can’t remember.)
That dependency forces us into that most deeply human of experiences: trust. We place our first unthinking trust in our caretakers. As we grow up and develop minds of our own, we begin, to the extent that we’re able, choosing whom we trust. Developing a capacity for reflection, we evaluate the quality of care we received from those caretakers, arriving at a judgment of gratitude, skepticism, or betrayal, and act accordingly. While that’s taking place, we begin to build a wider web of trust with branches consisting of friends, family, teachers, and other people that we encounter in our day-to-day lives. We learn that not everyone can be trusted, that there are lurking threats that other people either intend to inflict upon us or are powerless to prevent. As we become educated and achieve greater powers of abstraction, we necessarily begin to sift impersonal sources of information about the wider world. (Site x tells me I should buy car a; site y tells me I should buy b.) That process becomes more complex; to deal with that complexity we begin to deploy forms of shorthand for whom to trust, which typically include professional expertise, ideological opinion, and peer experience that we use to extrapolate future choices. (My last car was an a, and it was okay. But I really like site y and my sister-in-law loves her b; so I think I’ll go with my gut and take the b.)
All these various sources converge to form what we call a worldview: a set of precepts about the way the world really works. The foundation of a worldview always involves a set of practical realities that you yourself can’t prove, but take for granted, like the law of gravity, for example, or the conservation of energy. (The epigraph above calls it “the preservation of energy.” One of the reasons why I like the quote so much is that it’s like a funhouse mirror of the familiar and the odd: you mean there was actually a time when the Monroe Doctrine was something everyone knew about, much less took as given?) From such empirical foundations, our worldview constructs a more arguable set of precepts—democracy is the best form of government; capitalism can be ruthless but is better than the alternatives; boyfriends, however well-meaning, can never really deliver when you need them—that serve to guide behavior in a person’s everyday life. So it is that a worldview is a de facto view of human behavior. Which, among other things, involves a default setting about how much trust you should place in other people.
A worldview is also necessarily metaphysical: even if you’re uncertain as to what you believe at any given moment, your behavior—especially your most instinctive behavior—is going to be shaped by your perception about whether or not there’s a God (or Gods), what that God does or doesn’t want from you, or, assuming there isn’t one, which rules the rules of the road, rules you didn’t write, apply where you’re figuratively driving. Even if you believe the world is utterly random, you often can’t afford to act that way. You’re going to have to do something at that intersection, and in the absence of a clear cue, you’re going to act on the basis of your deepest beliefs about the way to go.
A worldview, then, is a three-dimensional personal positioning device consisting of assumptions about the nature of physical reality, a working hypothesis about human nature, and a transcendental wager about the nature of the unseen. We move fluidly back and forth across all three as we go about the business of living our lives, which may include wearing a lucky sweater on game day, sticking with a relationship amid doubts that it will work, or voting for this candidate over that one based on facts, yes, but also on a hunch. We reserve the right, consciously or unconsciously, to revise any of the core components of our worldview, though few of us exercise it very much. Indeed, the very stability of these categories lulls us into thinking that our understanding of reality is more solid than it really is. We have a particular propensity for confidence in scientific reasoning, even though such reasoning can be quite fluid: is there a more scientific sentence in the English language than “We used to think x but now we know y?” Moreover, even at its most solid, science is finite in what it will assert as true; there are huge realms of claims that can be neither proven nor disproven and thus remain beyond the borders of the scientific process (Frank Sinatra is the greatest singer of the twentieth century). The fact of the matter is that most of what we “know” is a matter of faith.
Our lingering national myth, the American Dream, is a form of faith, but faith of a distinctive kind. Unlike many kinds of knowledge we take on faith, it’s something we embrace precisely because it appears uncertain, even unlikely, in terms of rational calculation. Long odds fuel the Dream. Of course, there are plenty of examples for such wagers in the history of the world. But what makes the American Dream particularly striking is that other intuitive wagers are usually made in the service of the divine: they involve defiance or rejection of apparent material realities in favor of spiritual ones, whether as a state of mind to be achieved in this world, or an afterlife for the next one. The American Dream, by contrast, endows worldly aspirations with an intensity and fervor that we associate with religion. But not as a crusade that requires mass mobilization, the way evangelical faiths do, or as a portal to a collective consciousness, the way Eastern religions do. It is instead a way of life tailored to individual desires and specific circumstances to be engaged and overcome, not transcended or relinquished. That’s because the Dream is the child of a peculiar, distinctively American, God.
Next: God’s Country