Belief and Certainty

“Belief is the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case, with or without there being empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty.”

Or so says Wikipedia.org.

DEFINITIONS, DEFINITONS, DEFINITIONS

As definitions go, it is a deft one:

If a belief is a state of mind, it is therefore entirely subjective, and any consideration of objective reality or absolute truth are coolly avoided. Truth and Reality are replaced with the oblique “factual certainty”.

Deft it may be, but it gives no sense of how and why humans have evolved to create such a “state of mind”. Nor does it even hint at why, in some cases and circumstances, people will lay down their lives for a belief. Or why they get so emotional when their beliefs are challenged.

Worse still, however, is that Wikipedia.org’s definition gives no sense that beliefs do not exist in isolation, in the mind of an individual. To have any broader meaning, a belief must be contained within a system of beliefs as part of a culture (otherwise it is called delusion by everyone else). Much as no culture exists without a community that lives by its rules.

Belief is therefore a social construct. This takes us beyond Wikipedia's definition. 

What validates your beliefs is that other people believe them too. Belief is, in other words, as much a state of belonging as a state of mind. Believing makes you part of a community of believers, whilst disbelieving will identify you in the community’s eyes as the mad and bad ‘other’, a valid target to be overwhelmed, repressed or even destroyed.

What is common to most definitions of belief, including Wikipedia.org’s, is that empirical evidence is surplus to requirement. Beliefs are just stories that we tell ourselves, myths and narratives that become the building blocks, the basic assumptions of our thoughts and identity. Taken literally, this means that if you change your beliefs, you would not survive the experience: you might not die, but you would definitely become a different person. This explains, to some degree, why literal minded people get so aggressive when their beliefs are challenged. It might also explain the death of saints, as well as some aspects of their lives.

Of course, the validity of all these definitions (including Wikipedia's) depends on people being willing to see their beliefs as a psychological device, a mere function, be that a state of mind or a state of loyalty and belonging to a community. But this is precisely the opposite of how most people view their beliefs. Instead, they “believe” their beliefs to be incontestable, absolute Truths.

Put another way, “true” believers believe they are Right. This contains the rather unliberal implication that unbelievers must therefore be Absolutely Wrong. In the absence of arbitration by empirical evidence, this definition of the believer becomes the definition of a bigot. What is more, the “true” believer believes in a stunted, excluding reality, one in which there is only one possible Truth, instead of a richer version where truth is not so much absolute as dependent on the believer and the available evidence that each one chooses to ignore.

So, scratching a bit deeper than Wikipedia.org’s definition of belief, we find the concepts of Truth and Reality goose-stepping back into focus. It also reveals that beliefs are social constructs, enforced by the community via bonds of loyalty and belonging that accredit the believer with a membership card that be verified or rejected, based on an individual’s overt behaviour. 

Beliefs, from this viewpoint, are therefore the social glue, pointless in isolation, that bind people into communities.

The benefit this provides is a simple, yet invaluable, commodity: trust. 

Shared beliefs create in humans a state of social trust (ask any conman), and mutual aspirations, that are vital for the overall community’s survival in the face of a harsh, uncompromising and unpredictable Reality. In turn, belief gives an emotional, if false, substance to safety in numbers. Ask any economist and they will say that a lack of trust in a society is expensive and inefficient to everyone except advocates. This explains why treason is such a heinous crime: it violates trust and reduces the chance of success of the community. So, more than just a binding agent, this sharing of beliefs is nothing short of a foundation stone of society.

So what about taboos, those mummified beliefs of our ancestors, such as the avoidance of incest or eating rats?

Taboos encapsulate tried and tested wisdom in a narrative format (rather than a scientific one) that is hard to dispute: they spare a community the Russian Roulette of an ongoing process of trial and error.

Taboos are a “compilation” of acquired knowledge into the socially enforced bans of certain practices. In other words, they conveniently reduce the amount of thinking that an individual must perform to survive. Apply the taboo, and you can delegate the act of thinking onto the institutions of the community, the only cost to the individual being the social requirement to comply with and police enforcement of the taboo. The downside to taboos is that they cannot be questioned and so, if circumstances change, they can prove to be an inflexible burden. I’m not advocating that brothers should marry their sisters – the realities of genetics are unyielding - but if properly cooked, there is nothing wrong with eating rats and it may well become one way of feeding a growing population, as rats breed and grow faster than rabbits. They also love eating rubbish, one of the big problems of our age. Indeed, it was alleged a few decades ago that a lot of Chinese restaurants in Buenos Aires fed rats instead of chicken to their unsuspecting patrons, who quite happily gobbled them down with no discernible ill effect.

The taboo is, by this description, ultimately a blunt instrument of social organization, that doubles as a primitive form of health care. By violating a taboo, you put your own health at risk as well as the health of others. You cease to belong to your group because you are a disgusting person who eats rats, for example. By breaking the ban, you become an “other”, just as if you did not share the defining beliefs of your community. In that role, at least, taboos are indistinguishable from beliefs.

It would be nice if we could generalize what we have learnt about taboos to other categories of belief. Specifically, that they contain compiled wisdom, involve a delegation of the act of thinking, and are social norms that accredit your belonging in the social life of the group. 

It is easy to discard the first, i.e., that all beliefs contain compiled wisdom: clearly, not every belief is wise. For example, God does not always provide, so if you don't get off your arse you will go down the throat of whatever is threatening to consume you. However, the other two notions, that beliefs allow individuals to delegate the act of thinking onto the institutions of the community and that they provide a form of social accreditation to those communities do seem, to me at least, reasonable propositions.

A belief in climate change, for example, delegates thinking onto scientists and experts, and results in useful social behaviour such as recycling your rubbish (or breeding rats?). A disbelief in climate change, on the other hand, delegates thought on the likes of Donald Trump, encourages people to thunder around town in a gas guzzling Humvee, and ends up as a vote for changing the rules of social organisation, such as liberal values, thereby reintroducing the perils of trial and error.

So much for all that. But what is behind beliefs, what gives them their potency, their energy, their relevance in our mental life.

To a true believer, a truth that is not absolute cannot be a truth at all, which is what makes them such bigots. However, if you are an even minded sort of person, and accept that there are no absolute Truths, then our world becomes tainted with uncertainty. 

This is quite terrifying to most people, so what to do?

We all crave Certainty. We want to be told that we are loved, we want to be told that we are right. We don’t need these things validated by facts, we just want them validated by fellow believers. We want to be part of the herd, the pack. The tribe.

But above all else, we want to be Certain.

Sadly, certainty is precisely what NO ONE can deliver because, like True Happiness and Enduring Love, there exists no such objective state of grace (other than as a highly subjective state of mind, the very definition of belief that we have found so bland and disappointing).

What exists, at best, in the face of all this overwhelming uncertainty, is a fragile form of stability. 

Belief systems only survive if they afford some stability to the believers. Safety in numbers, for example. Only when there is stability can you safely delegate thought on someone else. In other words, society will only function properly when there is this elusive stability. When that happens, we get Nirvana on Earth, allowing everyone to get on with procreation, attending truck rallies, paying the mortgage and all the other things that give meaning to life.

A SPECULATIVE SUMMARY

So now, at long last, we come to some sort of summary, albeit with the caveat that where definitions end speculation begins.

Leaving aside taboos, we have shown that there is a large class of beliefs that are little more than a denial of the fact that we live in an uncertain world. A world that one day will roll on without us, quite unperturbed by our discontinued existence.

Let's call this particular class "Denial Beliefs". The question that goes begging a speculation is this:

What proportion of our beliefs are just denial beliefs?

The answer seems to be "one large chunk", and all too many of them are central to our very identity and opinion of ourselves. For example, life after death, socialism, capitalism, the importance of football, the belief in the goodness of the human spirit, to mention but a few that are, in my opinion, just a reaction to an intense horror of insignificance.

So, is this intense horror of Insignificance, the primary emotional energy behind our most cherished beliefs? It would certainly, pun intended, appear so. To me at least.

Put another way:

If we are so insignificant, then what is the bloody point of the self reflecting yet ever credulous apes that we are? Is this, really, the driving force in a majority of our beliefs, that in turn are the core of our identities and our cultures? If so, we have more in common than many of us would like to think.

To give Kant a twist:

I am insignificant, therefore I believe that I am not.