Article: The Gospel According to Dixon #6: Truth Seeking and Faith Keeping

[Dixon]

by Dixon Wragg
WaccoBB.net

Much unpleasant friction in human discourse comes from conflict between opposing strategies: truth-seeking versus faith-keeping. To counter our tendency toward self-righteousness about the superiority of whichever side we identify with, it behooves us to remind ourselves that both strategies exist for good evolutionary reasons, and we all have some of each hard-wired in us.

Truth-seeking, i.e., learning accurate representations of reality and correcting them as needed, is essential to survival. Our ancestors’ viability was directly dependent upon their accurate knowledge of pragmatic truths: which animals may kill me, which plants are poisonous, which ones are edible, which areas are dangerous, which behaviors may get me banished from the tribe.

The skills and traits that optimized such learning conveyed a survival advantage and therefore have been passed down to us through natural selection. You are alive to read these words because you have natural truth-seeking skills.

But alas, it’s not that simple. Learning implies that we’re not constantly reconstructing understandings from the whole cloth of our immediate perceptions, restarting from square one each time. Instead, we’re abstracting general concepts from specific situations, and carrying those concepts around in our heads, applying them to similar situations wherever we encounter them so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel in each new circumstance. Those concepts we carry around in our heads like a sort of intangible toolkit are called beliefs.

Without this capacity to form and maintain abstract beliefs, we would be operating on the level of “lower” animals. Our survival would be in near-constant jeopardy and our lives desperate and short. Beliefs are essential to our survival, so we are hard-wired to be attached to them and to experience considerable distress when they are threatened. This defensiveness around our beliefs is commonly referred to as “keeping the faith”¹. On an emotional level, a threat to our most cherished beliefs feels like a threat to our lives. This natural belief-defensiveness countervails our natural truth-seeking correctability in a dance of strong, contradictory traits which creates tension, both internal and social.

I often get very frustrated with people’s closed-mindedness. I have to remind myself that no one, including me, is perfectly open-minded and rational, and realizing that there are good evolutionary reasons for that helps me forgive myself and everyone. Especially helpful has been Gregory Lester’s article “Why Bad Beliefs Don’t Die”, which shows that maintaining beliefs of some sort is so vital to our survival that having our most cherished beliefs shaken triggers powerful instinctive defense mechanisms. Also, some degree of conservatism, of reluctance to change our basic beliefs, so we’re not immediately jumping onto every bandwagon that comes through town only to change again next week, is a good thing.

I’ve been through major belief system changes, from being a Mormon to a Christian fundamentalist to something of a New Ager to a skeptical, atheistic rationalist. I know from experience how painful and difficult it is to let go of cherished beliefs which have provided emotional security, social belonging and a framework for making some kind of sense of the world. I’m trying to learn to be more gentle and empathic with those who stubbornly resist my reasoning, even when their defense mechanisms are insulting, frustrating or dishonest; that will maximize my chances to get through to them anyway. (Besides—they may be the ones who are right!)

Commonly-held belief is one of the strongest social glues; without shared beliefs, community is nearly impossible. This fact alone strongly enforces faith-keeping over correctability. If I change my beliefs, will my friends and family still love me? They may, in fact, ostracize you or worse. Similarly, there are often historical, political, geographical and economic forces keeping us stuck in our beliefs, resistant to correction².

In the churches I used to attend, closed-mindedness, at least around the main tenets of our religion, was a highly-valued quality. We referred to it by the more positively connoted term “faith”, and in the context of church it meant believing something tenaciously, uncorrectably, regardless of evidence or logic. Expressing open-mindedness about our articles of faith, questioning them, or worse yet, demanding good evidence for them, was seen as weak, even sinful, possibly evidence of Satanic influence.

Virtually all social groups, whether or not they express their faith-keeping defensiveness as explicitly as religions, are less open-minded than they’d like to think. Even those that explicitly embrace correctability, such as the scientific, skeptical and critical thinking communities, are subject to social pressure, conformity, and our universal human faith-keeping tendency.

Often, regardless of the secularity or religiosity of the discussants, ostensibly truth-seeking discourse is really faith-keeping in disguise, as one of the best ways to keep a belief is to kid ourselves that we reached it through open-minded reasoning when in fact we’ve only rationalized it through sophistry and fallacy. In practice, this means that the first step to truth-seeking is to see through our own bullshit. In the words of the late Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Truth-seeking and faith-keeping are, like any traits, unevenly distributed. Some folks will be naturally more inclined to truth-seeking, thus being more correctable, more open-minded, while in others faith-keeping will prevail; they will be more armored, more rigidly defended around their beliefs. Some people can even be very much one way in general and the opposite way in certain circumstances, as when rigorous scientists allow themselves religious beliefs which would wither up and blow away under the scrutiny they employ in their science.

The good news is that, since we’re all naturally capable of both truth-seeking and faith-keeping, we can choose to develop whichever one we may be deficient in, improving our thinking and, by extension, the world. My bias is that, with few if any exceptions, we need to be better truth-seekers (focusing on correctability, thus open-mindedness), not so much faith-keepers (focusing on maintaining our current beliefs, thus closed-mindedness). I’ve rarely if ever encountered anyone who seemed deficient in closed-mindedness; we seem to have mastered that skill! On the other hand, correctability is something we can all use more of.

I say this partly because the world we live in is so radically different from the one in which our basic truth-seeking and faith-keeping strategies evolved. It’s almost infinitely more complex, so there are many, many more ways to be mistaken, and more things to be mistaken about, than ever before. The world is also changing exponentially faster than ever, necessitating constant adaptations, and then adaptations to our adaptations! On top of all that, we now have the power to substantially destroy the livability of our planet, so mistaken beliefs carry the possibility of unprecedented consequences. Clearly, improving our capacity for truth-seeking through correctability is more urgent than ever before!

My next column will proceed logically from this one, looking at how we can recognize open- and closed-mindedness in ourselves, toward the goal of improving our truth-seeking skills. But first, to get the juices flowing, some questions:

* Have you ever experienced a major change in your world-view?

* Do you have any beliefs about which you feel absolutely certain, without the possibility of being mistaken?

* Are you open to the possibility that you may be mistaken, even about your most cherished beliefs?

* To you, is a truth something you’ve discovered about the world, or something you’ve decided to believe because it works for you?

* If your most cherished beliefs are mistaken, do you want to know it, or would you rather keep them even if they’re illusory?

* If you want to be corrected when mistaken, what are you doing to seek correction of your main beliefs, just in case they’re wrong?

NOTES
1. In this essay, we will only be using the term “faith” in this sense. A more complete discussion of its different meanings in different contexts awaits a future essay.

2. More on these various determinants of belief in a future essay.