Last time we saw how morality is everywhere in our lives and how it affects us. Today we will look at how belief fills out morality and makes life possible.
The enlightenment quest for a firm foundation for all knowledge failed. Every field of knowledge including mathematics has discovered that there are problems whose answer cannot be known with certainty. A corollary is that there are always at least some true statements outside of any definition making all systems of knowledge incompetent to know everything or always necessarily incomplete. “There is no secular, universal, indubitable foundation of knowledge available to us humans….What we have come to see is that, at bottom, we are all really believers.” Since we cannot be certain of anything but because we still need to live, we believe that some beliefs can be trusted to work out for us. We build our lives around these core beliefs. To change a core belief is a very scary and labour-intensive process that most do not engage in. The deeper the core belief the harder it is to change. Often people and societies need a cataclysmic event to consider changing a deep core belief. Even then a change of mind about a core belief is more like a religious conversion – everything changes. Yet people can change their minds and the more trivial the issue, the easier it is to change one’s mind. The beliefs that we trust will work for us are most often passed down through various cultural channels and are therefore not universal among all people. But “sustaining such sets of assumptions and beliefs requires a community, a ‘plausibility structure’ to suppose, affirm, and communicate them.” These plausibility structures are stronger than any logic and reason – as any devoted cult follower can exemplify in the extreme. But cult like belief is not really extreme – they are only extreme in the sense of very different core beliefs in a very different plausibility structure; not in degree of intensity. Strong beliefs in core beliefs and membership in a plausibility structure are as close to universal as can be imagined in humans. We, “moderns are every bit the believers our premodern ancestors were …[take the two sides of any contentious issue] … these view are essentially faith commitments to deep beliefs that turn out to be ‘true’ only within larger frameworks of belief and practice built up themselves on deeper sets of unverifiable assumptions and beliefs. The only evidence that can ‘verify’ either view proves to have already been constituted and framed by the deeper belief commitments from which the view itself is derived.” In other words all our reasoning is circular. People who agree with us stop before making it explicit and we love to point out circular reasoning in others’ views. Faith based deep beliefs always sound legitimate and even self-evident to the community of believers – no amount of mere evidence will compel a change by itself. There is likewise no objective truth open or available to us that can decide between competing deep beliefs. If it appears that some beliefs are better, more true, more factual more scientific this is only a symptom of how close your deep beliefs are. “[B]oth what are taken to be ‘the facts’ and our experiences are themselves significantly determined and made salient by the elemental assumptions and beliefs that function presuppositionally to constitute them. The ability of data to prove or disprove a theory…is problematic when the data themselves are always and profoundly theory-laden.” Our beliefs (theories) tell us what are the important data to consider and the data thus derived confirms our beliefs – prefect circular reasoning every time. Consider the Ptolemaic and the Copernican world view: the math can be made to fit both systems, both agree on what we should see from our spot on planet earth yet one is believed today because it was easier to calculate without a computer.
Smith makes and analogy to a raft made of flotsam: “all of our knowledge and life practices—however obvious and well-founded they may seem to us—are built like large rafts of beams of particular trusted assumptions and beliefs that themselves float freely in the shifty seas of culture and history. And all of us, in our particular, historical communities of believers float together on those rafts, typically unable to see beyond our rafts to the open sea on which we float and thus accustomed to assuming our raft to be all that exists and is true.” We are relatively safe on the raft because the particular and trusted assumptions give us “grounding” and everyone on the raft understands this in a least an unconscious way. We cannot survive without the raft on the open sea. Likewise, we cannot survive without our beliefs – they ground us. “Only by believing in, committing to, placing faith in certain suppositions and propositions can we human animals ever be able to perceive, think, know, feel, will, choose, and act.”
Human knowledge having no indubitable foundation is “built up from sets of starting-point assumptions and beliefs…humans are in a situation of tremendous world-defining openness that leads to a diversity of outcomes.” One merely has to look at the diversity of believe and value systems in the world to see the diversity of belief and value systems. As we look closely at the diversity another observation presents itself: Our belief and value systems are not just practical or functional there seems to be everywhere and at very time “systems of knowledge and practice that involve sacreds and profanes.” These can of course be religious but Smith claims that secular people hold them too. Some examples of secular sacred principles are “the autonomy of the individual, the rights of private property, and the equality of all people.” Profaning the sacred creates a very negative response from people secular or religious. "We are highly sensitive about what is sacred to us, fervent, impassioned, and defensive if necessary. We are prepared to sacrifice for the sacred, in some cases to die and perhaps to kill for it." A suicide bomber is not doing it for ideology, even if it looks from the outside as ideology. He is doing it to protect what he feels is sacred. The same is true of a soldier who sacrifices himself on the battlefield for his comrades-in-arms – it is a part of sacred duty as a soldier. A massive change in lifestyle during a midlife crisis is often an attempt to reconnect with a lost sense of the sacred. On a less serious level most common arguments are driven by some connection to the sacred, usually an attempt to protect the sacred from a mildly detected nascent initially low impact threat. The argument becomes more of a conflict if the mildly detected threat is not quashed. We are all very sensitive to any threats to what we consider sacred and are willing to make big changes or escalate to conflict when we perceive them to be under threat.
Smith criticizes every theory of human motivation and action before his as reductionary when they try to explain motivation and action as at root based on one, two, or a few causes. The notion that economics rules our lives or that biology does, or that it is the quest for pleasure and avoidance of pain, all these miss the point of human motivation and action. They are equivalent to saying that the meaning of language is determined by its alphabet – Smith is saying that the limited alphabet is not the place to found an understanding of language. We are fundamentally moral believing animals and where all other theories have limited humanity in what is possible to do or think, Smith’s theory opens up what is possible to the human imagination. “What all of these theories badly miss, however, is the variable, world-open, creative, trusting, and believing condition at the core of human animals that generates a variety of socially constructed realities in diverse human communities, which constitute, mediate, and govern human consciousness, action, and institutions. In short, what they badly miss is the necessity for any good sociology to be a deeply and thoroughly cultural sociology”. Humans cannot really be understood without understanding their beliefs and their beliefs are wide and diverse – potentially limitless in their possibilities and the consequences that come from those beliefs are too. No theory that dictates a universal cause of action or motivation can be serious because human action and motivation is uniquely particular. It is the particular contents of the beliefs that generate the actions and motivations. Unlike the laws and process of biology or economics which are limited and countable, possible belief systems are unlimited – each belief system may create a set of limited laws and process which can be understood (we do this to the greatest extent in our own culture and society – but even here we can make social mistakes and experience misunderstanding of our laws) but the range of possible laws and processes possible is limited only by our imagination – making the possibilities essentially unlimited.
The starting point of understanding differences is not in economics or biology anymore than an understanding of the differences of French and English Canadian culture is in the alphabet. “[T]he starting-point presuppositions, assumptions, beliefs, and commitments of human communities actually have enormous ramifications for the character of those communities’ practices, perceptions, and institutions. In simple terms, basic beliefs have consequences.” Two examples Smith gives that matter to behaviour and motivation are: belief in an eternal afterlife versus belief in cyclical reincarnation; the cyclical nature of history versus the Whig interpretation of history. The consequential differences in these two examples are some of the source that colour vast differences in all aspects of the societies of India and the West and between indigenous and western culture. For these difference can and do influence the values, motivations, actions, and institutions of a society.
If we westerners have difficulty imagining that there are an unlimited number of possible working societies it is for two reasons. First, we have been on our “raft beyond which we cannot see” for our whole life and it gives us comfort and reassurance. Secondly, “modern liberal democratic capitalism, and the cultural ontology that floats it, is now, through the process of globalization and marketing, colonizing most regions of the world and most aspects of our lives.
Next time we will look at particular narratives.