Landon
Webb case: N.S. vows to probe competency act
MARY
ELLEN MacINTYRE STAFF REPORTER
Published December 8, 2015 - 8:49pm
Published December 8, 2015 - 8:49pm
Advocate: ‘Landon’s story sounds like my own’
Justice Minister Diana Whalen committed Tuesday to examining Nova Scotia’s Incompetent Persons Act, and that could mean good things for the rights of disabled people in this province, says a Dalhousie University law professor.
Archie Kaiser, whose areas of expertise include criminal and mental disability law, says Whalen has “a real opportunity to become a leader here.”
Whalen told reporters she just recently heard the story of Landon Webb and intended to look into Kaiser’s suggestion that the act used to give Webb’s parents guardianship over him is antiquated and badly in need of replacement.
Webb, 25, was the subject of a number of missing-person reports after he left the Kings Regional Rehabilitation Centre in Waterville in October.
Under the Incompetent Persons Act, he is unable to live independently without the permission of his parents. He is now living in a locked facility in Lower Sackville.
Webb has told The Chronicle Herald he is capable of looking after himself and wants to live and work in the Pictou County community where he grew up.
Whalen said she would ask the ministers of health and community services to take part in deliberations concerning the act.
“We’re committing to having a closer look and examining and seeing what’s needed,” she said.
Kaiser said Tuesday she doesn’t have to look far.
“In this case, the modernization and improvement that she has said she is interested in will require the repeal of the current Incompetent Persons Act, as recommended 20 years ago by the Nova Scotia Law Reform Commission,” he said.
“Fortunately, their recommendations, legislation from other provinces and the (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities provide a clear sense of the direction that any new law will need to take.”
Earlier in the day, Health Minister Leo Glavine said legislation does become dated. He suggested the time has come for an examination of the act.
“Sometimes it takes one case such as the one we see developing now in the province,” said Glavine.
Moreover, he said, since each person develops at their own pace, no one can make a final determination on anyone until at least the age of 25.
Meanwhile, People First Nova Scotia, a self-advocacy group for people labelled with an intellectual disability, has come out in support of Webb.
During a telephone interview Tuesday, the vice-president of the group said he sees himself in Webb.
“This is what I believe: Landon’s story sounds like my own and now I live out on my own in my own apartment and I have friends and family and lots of support,” said Dave Kent.
“It means the world to me.”
He said it is important for people to understand there are people in this world who might need supports to live independently, but they don’t need to be locked up.
Charlie Lemon, one of the founding members of People First Nova Scotia, took part in the interview with Kent.
“I was locked up in an institution and didn’t have any rights and then I went into a group home and the staff there made the decisions,” Lemon said.
“Then I came to Dartmouth and applied for a job at a pizza shop and I’ve been working over 20 years at the pizza shop.”
He now lives in an apartment above the pizza store and says he wants for nothing.
“There are many success stories and many who are living successfully across the province and others who are in institutions, but they all have different abilities,” said Cindy Carruthers, executive director of the group.
“We have members of People First Nova Scotia who drive their own cars, who are married with children. Everyone must be given a chance to live their lives.”
http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1326565-landon-webb-case-n.s.-vows-to-probe-competency-act
Why we cannot save the world (ORIGINALLY- How to save the world)
This article is an attempt to respond to those who say they see me as a defeatist, a ‘doomer’, a dogmatically negative person. I have described myself of late as a joyful pessimist, and will try to explain why. This article draws on various theories about complexity, and the phenomenological philosophies of several writers, poets, artists and scientists. But it’s not a work of exposition of theory or of philosophy. It is, I guess, a confession.
Hardly a day passes when I don’t hear a cry for us all to work together to do X, because if we do that, everything will change and the world will be saved (or at least be rid of some horrific and intractable problem and hence made immeasurably better). Many variations of X are proposed, and they’re often about (a) comprehensively reforming our political, economic, education or other system, (b) achieving some large-scale behaviour change through mass persuasion or education, or (c) bringing together great minds and volunteer energies to bring ingenuity and innovation to bear collaboratively on some issue or crisis.
It is perfectly reasonable to believe that such change is possible: Look at what we have done in past to eradicate diseases, to institute democracy and ‘free’ enterprise worldwide, to dramatically reduce the prevalence of slavery, to pull the world out of the Great Depression, to produce astonishing technologies and improve the position of women and minorities, we are told. All we need is the same kind of effort dedicated to X. If we work together we can accomplish anything.
It is perfectly reasonable to believe that such change is possible. But such change, I would argue, is not possible. The belief that substantive and sustained change comes about by large-scale concerted efforts, or by the proverbial Margaret Mead “small group of thoughtful, committed citizens” misses a critical point — throughout human history such change efforts have only occurred when there was no choice but to do them, when the alternative of inaction was so obviously and inarguably calamitous that the status quo was out of the question. And even then such efforts usually fail — either they run up against fierce and powerful opposition and are suppressed, or they bring about a new status quo that is arguably worse than what it replaced. Alas, the history books are written and rewritten by the victors, so “what might have been” is invariably portrayed as worse than what is.
I have tried to capture this realization in what I have come to call Pollard’s Laws:
Pollard’s Law of Human Behaviour: We do what we must (our personal, unavoidable imperatives of the moment), then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. There is never time left for things that are merely important.
Pollard’s Law of Complexity: Things are the way they are for a reason. If you want to change something, it helps to know that reason. If that reason is complex, success at changing it is unlikely, and adapting to it is probably a better strategy.
The human mind is astonishingly malleable; that is one of the reasons we have adapted so quickly and effectively to changes that most creatures could never manage. But a consequence of that malleability is that we can be persuaded that things are good, or at least OK (and improving), when they are not. We can even be convinced that the history of human civilization, allegedly from brutish to enslaved to democratic and affluent, is one of “progress”, when there is overwhelming evidence that it is not.
We can be persuaded that our exhaustion, our physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual and imaginative poverty, the debilitating chronic diseases that are now epidemic in our culture, the ghastly suffering to which we subject other animals in the name of food and human safety, the epidemic of physical, sexual and psychological abuse in our homes and institutions, the endemic sense of grief and depression about our lives and our world, the accelerating extinction of all non-human life on Earth except for human parasites, the rapid depletion of cheap energy upon which our whole culture totally depends, the endlessly growing gap between the tiny affluent minority and the massive struggling majority, the runaway climate change that our human pollutants has triggered, the utter impossibility of ever repaying the staggering debts we have dumped on future generations, and the consequences when those debts come due — we can be persuaded that all of these things can be somehow fixed, that all of these unintended consequences of the way we have been living our lives for a thousand generations, can somehow be resolved in one or two, by a concerted effort to do X.
They cannot. That is not how the world, or human civilizations, work, or ever have worked. Our human civilization, like all living systems, is complex, and complex systems do not lend themselves to mechanical ‘fixes’. They evolve, slowly, unpredictably, over millennia. We may be able to change many malleable human minds in a hurry, if we’re motivated, and if we must, at least for a while until we can go back to what we were doing. But we cannot change our bodies, which are still evolving slowly, trying to adapt to our minds’ relatively recent decision to leave the rainforest, to eat meat, to settle in large, crowded, stressful, hierarchical cities, to walk upright. Our weary, pretzel-bent bodies are complaining about the changes we have forced on them over the past million years, and struggling with them. Too much too fast, they say.
And we cannot begin to enable the ecosystems of which we are a part to adapt to these changes, ecosystems now in states of massive collapse, exhaustion, desolation and extinction. We do not know what to do. We are limited to mechanical solutions — technology and engineering — and mechanical solutions cannot ‘solve’ these crises — crises that technology and engineering have themselves substantially caused.
Throughout this article I am going to use the term ‘organic process’ instead of the more abstract term ‘complex system’, and the term ‘construct’ instead of ‘simple system’ or ‘complicated system’. The distinction is important:
| Constructs | Organic Processes | |
| Types | models, tools, theories, inventions | the processes of living creatures, of integrated components of a living creature, and of dynamic groups of living creatures |
| Qualities | finite number of static, enumerated components/elements; relationships between elements, cause and effect of actions and interventions are reasonably determinable and predictable | infinite number of ever-changing components/elements; relationships between elements, cause and effect of actions and interventions are largely unfathomable and unpredictable |
| Contrasting examples | an organization (company, named group, political or social entity) | the processes of people in an organization (a function of their beliefs, motivations and behaviours) |
| a system chart, map, or periodic table | the processes of living entities depicted in a system chart; the processes that occur in the territory described by a map; the processes of the elements listed in a periodic table | |
| a system (political, economic, social, technological, educational, health etc.) | the processes of people, other creatures and living environments subjected to the impacts and constraints imposed by people enforcing the system | |
| scientific ‘laws’, rules and theories | the processes of living organisms that seem to adhere somewhat to these ‘laws’, rules and theories | |
| the sciences, social sciences and humanities, and all ‘-ologies’ and ‘-isms’ | a ‘culture’: the collective behaviours of groups of people and other creatures | |
| the cars on the road | the behaviour of the drivers of the cars on the road (individually and collectively) | |
| agriculture | the processes that occur in a garden or forest | |
| technologies: arrowheads, guns, bombs, prisons, prescribed medicines, GMOs, electricity, engines, phones, laptops, language, ‘clock’ time, money, credit etc. | diseases; food, energy and water eco-cycles; learning, instinct, healing, impulse, communication and decision-making processes | |
| democracy; property; rights and ‘freedoms’ | the process of evolution; humans’ emergent beliefs, motivations and behaviours |
We want to understand things, and we want to be able to control them, so it is not surprising that we’ve become so adept at representing (‘re-presenting’) organic processes through the use of models, theories, ‘laws’ and other human constructs. But these models are absurdly oversimplified representations, and when we mistake the model or theory for reality we do so at our peril. A car is a construct, and it works quite well for awhile, but it is no replacement for the mobility processes of a living creature. Likewise, a computer is a construct, and a very useful one, but it is not a replacement for, or even a facsimile of, the processes of a living brain.
When we look at the operations of an organization — a corporation, association, a governing body, or other group working together to some shared purpose — we tend to conflate the construct of the organization with the organic processes of the people engaged with it (as employees, managers, customers, partners etc.) and the environments in which it operates. “China launches inquiry”, or “Microsoft declined to comment”, or “Sudbury Office celebrates anniversary”, we might say. The executives of organizations often encourage this confusion, since it lets them take credit for successes that usually are the accidental result of a thousand or a million people’s uncoordinated decisions, reported as if they were manageable, predictable and controllable. Consumer tastes shift, markets move, new resources are found, a million other variables factor in in unfathomable ways, and the consequences show up as “success” or “failure” in meeting the organization’s (management’s) objectives, goals and mission.
But I have learned from working with and studying organizations for half a lifetime that executives and their actions have essentially nothing to do with that success or failure. The collective organic processes of all of the people working with the organization have somewhat more to do with success or failure, but even they cannot control or predict customers’ actions and what happens in the rest of the economy, which has a huge impact.
People aren’t robots; they don’t do what they’re told while working for the organization, in fact they don’t believe or understand much of what they’re told by anyone. They do what they must, and then they do what’s easy and then they do what’s fun. What they ‘must’ do is utterly personal and ephemeral, and very few people know themselves well enough to know what they ‘must’ do (and these ‘musts’ can change in an instant).
Most people really do want the best for the people with whom they work, and for their customers and loved ones, so what they ‘must’ do most of the time, in my observation, is workarounds. That is, they consider what they think will be best for themselves, their customers, co-workers, and others they care about, and then they figure out how to do that despite what they have been told they are supposed to do. In short, they do their best despite what the ‘organization’ supposedly has them doing. The ‘organization’ is just a construct — it ‘does’ nothing, and the reports of its ‘accomplishments’ are fiction.
As philosopher Alfred Korzybski said, “The map is not the territory”. And certainly the map is not the infinite, unfathomable, dynamic processes that occur continuously on the territory. It is not the effect of the rain on the windblown seeds or the sun on the leaves or the fallen leaves on the soil. The map tells you so little, and captures none of the complexity of the place.
Einstein referred to scientists’ arrogant tendency to place “excessive authority” in their theories, to mistake them for reality. A theory, he said, should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. He realized that human inventions and other constructs, as useful as they may be, are inherently fragile, mechanical, and temporary, no substitute for living processes that have evolved successfully over millions of years. As for technology, he said: “Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.” If you doubt this, consider that the containment of our horrifically toxic nuclear wastes now depends on our constructed cooling and storage systems continuing to function for the next million years.
Einstein asserted: “I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.” This is a more nuanced version of my Law of Human Behaviour, but it says the same thing: We cannot be other than who we are. We are not machines or constructs like the Borg, able to be recruited for single-minded purposes. As I’m trying to convey in the use of the term “organic processes” rather than “organisms” in the chart above, we are not really “things” at all, in the way inanimate matter (perhaps) is. “We” are processes; what makes us us is what we do, what happens inside and through and among us. We are verbs, not nouns.
Einstein also said: “The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew.” This realization was probably behind Einstein’s increasing pessimism as he got older, and his awareness that human “progress” is an illusion. Each of us starts from scratch, each of us is utterly alone, and we muddle through our lives, a complicity of the creatures that comprise us, doing what our bodies and our culture tell us we must, in the moment, until the next moment comes and they tell us to do something else. Our lives and our actions, as ‘individuals’ and collectively are incoherent; they are opportunistic, spontaneous and improvisational. They are responsive to the needs of the moment.
That is who we are, who we have evolved, very successfully, to be, and why we cannot suddenly be something other, capable of the type of concerted and coordinated and informed and sustained effort needed to “save the world”, or, more precisely, save the civilization that has become the world’s undoing. We cannot just agree to start doing X.
So why do we go on clinging to this hopeful, idealistic view that we can? I think it’s because we want to do our best, so we want to believe we have enough control over ourselves and our actions and the world in which we live to be able to “progress”, to solve problems and deal effectively with crises. Life is wonderful and we want it to go on and be wonderful for everyone, now and in the future.
Our models may be fragile and absurdly inadequate and oversimplified, but they are very useful. A computer model can simulate the possible movement of a flock of migrating birds very powerfully, because within the narrow constraints of the migration process, birds temporarily, instinctively and voluntarily limit their flying behaviour to obey three simple, programmable rules. Likewise, workers on an assembly line can be persuaded, at least for a while, to conform their processes to those in the organization’s procedure manuals, to the point we might delude ourselves that the organization was synonymous with the people that work for it, that the organization (the construct) was in fact an organism, rather than what it is in fact — merely a model attempting to describe and direct (or at least influence) a small part of its workers’, customers’ and environment’s complex, unfathomable and unpredictable processes.
And scientific theories and models do appear to represent accurately much of what we observe and care about in organic processes, to the point we can put people in space and build nuclear bombs, cars and computers that employ mechanical processes that mimic certain aspects of organic processes long enough and accurately enough to last until we no longer need them.
But it does not follow, just because it’s possible to convince 70 million Germans that the world would be better if they ruled the world and exterminated non-Aryans, or to convince a billion Chinese that 80 million deaths was an appropriate price to pay for an agrarian revolution, or to convince half of the US population that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago by a human-looking gray-bearded divinity, that we can galvanize the people and energies needed to pull our civilization back from the brink of collapse. Why not?
Because, getting back to my Law of Human Behaviour (or Schopenhauer’s and Einstein’s version if you prefer), this change is not widely perceived as something we must do immediately, and the necessary change will be enormously difficult to achieve. Let’s contrast this change with some other major change events of the past few centuries:
| Inherent, broad-based sense of urgency for the change (“we do what we must”) | Ease of making the change (“then we do what’s easy”) | |
| Civil rights movements (anti-slavery, anti-segregation, women’s rights etc.) | Moderate: Humans have an inherent sense of fairness, and are troubled by discriminatory laws and practices unless they are specifically taught otherwise. | Easy for most: Other than those whose profits or power were diminished by these movements, the success of these movements did not entail a major life-style change. |
| Nazi imperialism | High: Germany was bankrupt, demoralized and angry, its citizens staggered by the Great Depression and extremely destitute. | Very difficult (and probably ultimately doomed to fail) |
| Mao’s revolutionary purge | High: China was hugely overpopulated, economically and technologically backwards, impoverished, ecologically desolated, and isolated from the rest of the world. Most citizens lived desperate, hopeless lives. | Very difficult (and probably ultimately doomed to fail) |
| Eliminating smallpox | High: For centuries was the biggest disease killer of humans by a mile. | Moderate: Tracking down every last case was a challenging but not impossible task, and the vaccine, fortunately, is relatively effective and low-risk. |
| Right-wing extremism in the US (imperialism, economic corporatism, racism, gutting of public services and regulation, elimination of rights and freedoms) | Moderately High: The political and religious right in the US have felt besieged, threatened, disempowered and outnumbered since the 1960s and especially since the events of 2001. | Easy at least on the surface: Getting rid of government (except for security and war departments) is deceptively attractive, and its proponents get healthy bribes from the private sector. |
| Anti-smoking campaign | Moderate: Non-smokers, an increasing majority, feel that their health is threatened by “indirect smoke” | Easy: Unless you’re a smoker or an industry player, banning smoking involves no work or sacrifice. |
| The war on drugs | Moderate: Many people conflate drugs with crime and feel threatened by them. Others know those whose lives have been ruined by certain drugs. | Difficult: The war on drugs has made these drugs extremely lucrative, globally-traded, and almost impossible to stop. |
| Pro-democracy, pro-egalitarian movements (e.g. Arab Spring, Occupy) | Low (Occupy) to High (Arab Spring): Occupy was important, but that’s not the same as urgent. | Moderate: Political and economic ‘regime change’ faces strong opposition from the status quo, but as the Soviet and Egyptian governments showed, power will falter in the face of strong popular opposition. But sometimes the resulting power vacuum produces a state as bad as the old regime. |
| Saving civilization (“the world”) from economic, energy and ecological collapse | Low: Only a minority believe that our civilization is threatened, and most, especially in struggling nations, aspire to consume much more. Those worried about collapse are deeply divided about what and how much needs to be done. | Extremely difficult: Many interrelated crises including overpopulation, resource and soil exhaustion, dysfunctional food systems, growing water scarcity, staggering debt levels, dependence of the economic system on endless growth, extreme climate change and pandemic threats due to human pollution, extreme inequality of wealth and power, etc. |
This explains the steady drift to the right in the US since the Nixon era: Those determined to institute right-wing policies have both a greater sense of urgency (they feel threatened by the complexity and unfamiliarity of the world, especially since 2001) and an easier job than progressives (what could be simpler than shrinking the non-military, non-security components of government until, as right-wing extremist Grover Norquist put it, “we can drown it in the bathtub”)?
This is why things are the way they are, and why some movements try fiercely to bring about change, even in the face of almost certain failure, while others stumble. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy. Important things like the Occupy movement are laudable, but they will not attract our energies until and unless they attain the same level of urgency that the political and religious right brings to their movement.
And this is why we cannot save the world. The challenges we face are overwhelming, and they’ve been accelerating in size and complexity for millennia. The more we learn about them, and their interrelatedness, the more daunting they become.
Many of them are subject to the Jevons Paradox, a quality of organic processes by which attempts to intervene in them to reverse what are called in systems thinking terms “positive feedback loops” (or colloquially, vicious cycles), produce unexpected consequences that more than negate the attempted change. So, for example, increasing the fuel efficiency of automobiles leads to drivers making more trips in their now more-economical vehicles, to the point their fuel consumption actually rises.
We see similar feedback loops accelerating the melting of arctic ice and glaciers so quickly that climate scientists are aghast (one of the qualities of organic systems is their unpredictability). Meanwhile, the epidemic of chronic diseases in affluent nations is creating a runaway toll of lost labour and skyrocketing health management costs, so much that the Davos global risk management experts consistently rate it as one of the top risks to the global economy. This epidemic of hundreds of immune system hyperactivity (“autoimmune”) diseases now appears due to a combination of nutritional deficiencies, food system toxins, and overuse of antibiotics, which together have so damaged our bodies’ ability to recognize and cope with the ingredients of what we eat that our immune systems are indiscriminately attacking nutrients and even our own tissues, essentially making ourselves chronically ill.
This is what happens when we (encouraged by the medical, pharmaceutical and agricultural industries) mess with a complex organism’s evolved processes, utterly ignorant of the consequences. We introduce antibiotics to try to kill some pathogen, and our body, defeated in its attempts to do what a million years of co-evolution with the creatures in our bodies had taught it to do, resigns, or goes haywire. Meanwhile, the pathogen, opportunistic like all organic creatures, quickly evolves immunity to the antibiotics and returns with a vengeance. Yet still we allow the people in these industries to develop new toxins which they test on us, in the hope they might be right, for awhile, this time, and the result is GMOs (construct/organism hybrids, the consequences of which we cannot hope to understand or predict), superbugs, and yet more epidemics of new “civilization diseases”.
Engineers are now working on ways to grow human organs on caged animals, raised for just that purpose, and to fight atmospheric warming by shooting metallic particles into the stratosphere in the hope that this will reflect sunlight before it reaches us (so-called “geo-engineering”). Total madness.
What makes the predicaments in the lower-left square of the above matrix so intractable is that our constructs, our contrivances, our technologies — the only tools we have to deal with “problems” — are useless when dealing with these massively complex organic processes. The only way we can cope with them is by accepting the limitations they impose on our behaviour and adapting ourselves and our behaviour to them.
So if we want to deal with the economic crises we have precipitated, neither austerity nor stimulus will work. We have to reinvent our whole economy as a steady-state one without debt or credit. But we can’t do that, because without growth our economy will collapse and plunge us into the worst depression civilization has ever known. And with growth our resources will run out faster and climate change will accelerate, precipitating both energy and ecological collapse globally. We have created a problem that has no solution, and it’s the same one, as Jared Diamond and Ronald Wright have explained, that led to the downfall of past civilizations. Except this time the problem is global, and we’re all going down.
The same kind of dilemma faces us in trying to cope with peak oil. Research such as George Monbiot’s has demonstrated that there are no renewable or sustainable substitutes for oil (even with the loftiest predictions about human ingenuity and improvements in technology) that can provide anywhere near the power that hydrocarbons do. But our whole civilization, even our food system, is hooked on cheap oil. When it runs out, in a series of crises that will get steadily much worse as the century unfolds, our economy will collapse, all of our technologies will run out of power, and billions will starve. A future world with ten billion people trying to live on a planet that, without the subsidy of cheap, abundant energy, can perhaps support a tenth that number, is almost too ghastly to imagine. And in our desperate effort to forestall that energy and resource collapse, we are likely, just as the Easter Islanders did, to excavate every mountaintop, dig into the seas and the sands and the deepest depths of the planet, and cut down every tree until nothing is left standing.
That is why, when a problem or series of problems or crises appear intractable, extremely difficult if not impossible to resolve, our tendency is to resist dealing with them, to deny the problems, to leave it up to future generations or higher powers to deal with them. We would rather slot these issues into the lower left square of the matrix, than give them power over us by acknowledging their urgency and intractability, in the dreadful upper left square where denial is impossible and success is improbable. We don’t want to know. We don’t want to hear. Give me factory farm meat, we say, and keep it all hidden away and unreported so we don’t have to acknowledge the atrocity of the system that produces it. Keep it in that lower left square. Yes we should probably do something but not now; we’re too busy with urgent matters.
So the die is cast — we cannot save the world. What then are we to do? What is the “joyful pessimist’s” prescription for coping with a world that is coming irrevocably undone? The only honest answer to these questions is: I don’t know.
I can tell you what I think we should not do: Let the hopelessness and helplessness of our situation obscure the fact that our lives are wonderful, miraculous, and worth living and savouring every moment of. Devote our lives to working for others in the hope that will ‘buy’ us retirement time to do what we really want to do, to do what we ‘must’ do and what is easy and fun to do. Get so caught up in the fight to ‘save the world’ by trying to convince people we need to do X, that we forget how to wonder, to play, to really be, here, in the moment. Give up everything — our own dreams, our health, our freedom, our precious time — in the hope that our descendants will be able to do what we cannot. Retreat from the ‘grim’ ‘real’ ‘outside’ world inside our heads where things are safer and simpler.
Once I realized how the world really works a few years ago, and overcame the first denial — that everything is and will be OK, I began to beat myself up for not doing more to make the world a better place, for not having the ‘courage of my convictions’, for not sacrificing myself, my time and my freedom in the fight to prevent or mitigate the collapse of our civilization.
And then more recently I overcame the second denial — that this collapse can, with great effort, be prevented or mitigated, or transitioned around. And it was if a great weight was lifted off my shoulders. We cannot save the world. And suddenly I realized how precious this life and my time was, and how life that is not lived to the full every moment, presently, is no life at all, but rather like a story I’m watching on a screen, as if I were a passive spectator. And that every moment is an eternity and every moment wasted in anxious ‘clock’ time is an eternity lost. That there is only here, and now. And that everything my culture had told me, taught me, was an unintended lie. The wild, feral creature I had always been began to be liberated from civilization’s grasp.
To many of my friends and (dwindling, disappointed) readers, and to some people I dearly love, this is not a revelation but a cop-out, a rationalization for laziness and inaction. Even if it seems impossible, they say, you have to try. You can’t give up. Without hope we can’t go on.
But I’ve tried being the responsible pacifist, and the reformist. I don’t believe this gets us anywhere, for the reasons I’ve tried to explain above. I’ve tried being an activist, a resistance fighter. My heart isn’t in it — I can’t see taking the dreadful risk of being imprisoned or injured to try to stop the Tar Sands or factory farming when Jevons, and everything I have learned, tells me anything I accomplish will be undone, and more. I am beyond hope.
How can you just sit by when our planet is being destroyed, and when so many creatures are suffering, especially when your ability to live so comfortably depends on that destruction and suffering, and when you know you could do something?, I’m asked. Do something, anything.
I could give away all my money to good causes, causes in support of the good, if hopeless, fight. I could move into a tiny cabin and grow all my own food and buy nothing and live naked without electricity or heat or technology and reduce my ecological footprint to almost zero. And someone else would move into the house I rent and probably generate more CO2 from it than I do. And the stuff I don’t buy will depress prices ever so little so that others can, and will, buy a little bit more, more than what I don’t. And the money I gave would temporarily slow down destruction and suffering, and then it would be gone, and the destruction and suffering would resume its normal pace. And the Tar Sands bitumen sludge I went to prison for trying to prevent the mining of would, for a short time, be left in the ground, and after that as the shortage of cheap energy grows, its value would be even higher and the Chinese who are building entire ghost cities just for the sake of accelerating endless growth in the belief this leads to a better life will be eager to buy that sludge at any price. And then what?
What I am doing, instead, is (by writing articles like this one) passing along what I’ve learned about how the world really works, and what I believe we should not be wasting our time doing (trying to reform, or ‘save’, or transition around the collapse of, civilization culture). My hope is that eventually enough people will get past the second denial that we can start to focus attention on adapting to and increasing our resilience in the face of, the cascading crises that will eventually (I think by century’s end) lead to civilizational collapse.
This will be grim work, because these crises are likely to be ghastly, and we are totally unequipped to deal with them. And it will be local work, because centralized ‘organizations’ will be crumbling and unable to provide any ‘top-down’ or coordinated help. We can start now (as soon as each of us ‘must’) to acquire the old and new skills and capacities we will need to cope with collapse — relearning and relocalizing many basic skills of our grandparents, both technical (e.g. permaculture) and soft skills (e.g. facilitation), as we rediscover how to live in community and how to live together self-sufficiently.
With collapse, many of the constructs of civilization (centralized hospitals and expensive medicine, institutional schooling, corporations and the industrial concepts of ‘employment’ and ‘jobs’, processed, monoculture, GMO and ‘fast’ foods, private cars and private homes and private ‘property’, central currencies and credit, marketing, mass ‘information’ and entertainment media, mass production, imported goods, private pensions and savings, prisons, central governments, even computers and the internet — at least in the profligate, throwaway way we now consume them) will gradually disappear, replaced, with great difficulty, by local substitutes. If we are wise (and in this we might instinctively be) we will drastically and voluntarily reduce our human birth rates so that the level of one billion or so people that might be able to live comfortably without subsidized civilization culture will be reached relatively painlessly.
There is much hard work to be done, but it is far too early to expect to be able to do much of it now. It is, after all, in the lower left square of the Urgency/Ease matrix, and most people will wait until they ‘must’ (i.e. until after several cascading crises convince them that this is a permanent, not a temporary change), before they will see the need to start.
Until the old systems die, we won’t be able to see what, and how much, really needs to be done anyway, and the remains of the old systems will struggle defiantly to resist new experiments (this is already happening). We can do some advance learning, and practice dealing with crises in a personal, proactive way (i.e. rather than expecting the government to fix each crisis as it occurs, and to tell us what to do).
We can get to know our neighbours, including the ones who are annoying and ignorant and unable to self-manage, and what we can do with and for each other, and lay the foundations for true, local communities. We can get to know the place we live, the organic process of which we are most immediately a part, and what else lives and can naturally thrive there. We can experiment with new models and constructs of how to live sustainably and joyfully, provided we recognize they are just experiments and are unlikely to flourish until the old systems crumble.
Much of this early preparation can be easy, and fun, if we choose to make space for it. And this still leaves us time, time saved by not trying to hold on desperately to our dying civilization culture, to just be, to play, to do things that are easy and fun, to live each moment of this amazing life at this amazing time to the fullest. To free ourselves, and be wild again, welcomed back into the organic process that is all-life-on-Earth, where we always belonged.
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Quote:
For a start, there are bad lives in all sides or
parts of our existence. Further, if you suppose that a morality needs to have
in it particular sections concerned with private life, relations between people
with good lives and so on -- rules or ideals or whatever having to do with
these -- that does not go against the Principle of Humanity. What it requires
is that whatever is said and done about these things is to be consistent with
the principle itself, serve its end.
THE PRINCIPLE OF HUMANITY STATED AND DEFENDED
by Ted Honderich
THE PRINCIPLE OF HUMANITY STATED AND DEFENDED
by Ted
Honderich
This
is a recent statement of what is taken to be the fundamental principle of right
and wrong, the Principle of Humanity. It is preceded in the book from which it
comes by a consideration of other ways of answering the question of right and
wrong -- negotation and international law, UN resolutions, human rights, just
war theory, the politics of reality, conservatism and liberalism, and
democracy. All of these answers, it is argued, fail to supply a general
principle of right and wrong, an absolutely necessary part of a defensible
decision-procedure in morality. The statement of the Principle of Humanity given below is
followed in the book by a consideration of its consequences with respect mainly to
judgements on terrorism and the American and British war in Iraq. The book is the one titled in the United States Right and Wrong and Palestine,
9/11, Iraq, 7/7... and elsewhere titled
Humanity,Terrorism, Terrorist War: Palestine, 9/11, Iraq, 7/7... You can also
turn now to the original statement of the Principle of Humanity, first published in
the philosophical journal Mind and then revised in the book On Political Means
and Social Ends.
There is a
morality to which we are all committed, by two things. The first is the great
goods of our lives, the objects of our great desires -- which great goods issue
in each of us making and being certain of moral judgements about our having
them ourselves. The other thing is our minimal rationality, just the fact of
our having reasons, including moral reasons, necessarily as general as any
other reasons. In short we are committed to a morality of good consequences by
our human nature.
We all desire the great good
of going on existing, where that does not mean a lot more than just being
conscious, being in the world. As you can also say, to the same effect, we want
a personal world to go on longer. We have the same desire for those close to
us, our children first. This desire can sometimes be defeated by others. It
comes to mind that a lot of American men and women would have ended their own
worlds, carried out suicide missions, to prevent the 2,800 deaths on 9/11.
Nonetheless, despite exceptions, this existence is something almost all of us
crave. We crave a decent length of life.
Say 75 years rather than 35.
A second desire we all have is
for a quality of life in a certain sense. This is a kind of existence that has
a lot to do with our bodies. We want not to be in pain, to have satisfactions
of food, drink, shelter, safety, sleep, maybe sex. As that implies, and as is
also the case with the first desire, we also want the material means to the end
in question, the material means to this bodily
quality of life. Some of the means are some of the consumer-goods,
so-called, easier to be superior about if you have them. You are likely to lack
these means if you are in poverty.
A third thing we all want is freedom and power. We do not want to be
coerced by personal circumstances arranged by others, bullied, subjected to
compulsion, unable to run our own lives, weakened. We want this voluntariness
and strength in a range of settings, from a house, neighbourhood and place of
work to the greatest and maybe most important setting, a society in a homeland.
It is no oddity that freedom from something is what is promised by every political or national tradition or
movement without exception -- and secured to some extent if it is in control.
Another of our shared desires
is for goods of relationship to those
around us. We want kinds of connections with these other people. Each of us
wants the unique loyalty and if possible the love of one other person, maybe
two or three. We also want to be members of larger groups. No one wants to be
cut off by his or her own feelings from the surrounding society or cut off from
it by others' feelings. This was a considerable part of why it was no good
being a nigger or a Jew or a Paki in places where those words were spoken as they were.
A fifth desire, not far away
from the one for relationship, is for respect
and self-respect. No one wants to feel worthless. No one is untouched by
disdain, even stupid disdain. No one wants humiliation. Persons kill
themselves, and others, because of it. We do not want humiliation for our
people either. As in the case of all these great desires, this one for respect
and self-respect extends to others close to us, and in ways to other people,
and it goes with desires for the means to the ends.
Finally, we want the goods of culture. All of us want at
least some of them. Many of us want the practice and reassurance of a religion,
or the custom of a people, or indeed a kind of society. We may want not to live
in what we take to be a degraded society, maybe one that gives an ascendancy to
buying and selling in its social policies and has a public preoccupation with
sex. All of us with a glimmer of knowledge want the good of knowledge and thus
of education. All with a glimmer of what is written down want to be able to
read. We also want diversion if not art.
These, by one way of counting
them, are our fundamental desires for the great goods. Certainly they are
interrelated goods. If the first is necessary to all the others, and several
are in other relations of necessity, there is no great point in trying to rank
them. You may if you want speak of these fundamental desires as needs. But the
usage obscures a little the plain fact of them. The desires are a premise of
fact for other things, a premise in which no disputable moral standard has a
part, or such an uncertain idea as what is called flourishing, the result of
having needs satisfied.
A bad life, we take it, is to be defined
in terms of the deprivation of some or all of these goods, the frustration of
some or all of these desires. A good life
is defined in terms of satisfaction of them. There is a need for decision here
as to bad lives and good lives, as well as the registering of facts. That is
what you would expect in the formulation or stating of a moral principle, which
is what we are now engaged in. A bad life, we will take it, quickly here, is
one that lacks one or more of the first three goods -- subsistence, a bodily
quality of life, all freedom and power -- or a life of subsistence that is only
minimally satisfied with respect to the other five goods. Good lives are had by
all other persons.
The Principle of Humanity has
to do with bad lives. It is not well-expressed, indeed not expressed at all, as
the truistic principle that we should rescue those with bad lives, those who
are badly off. It is the principle that we
must actually take rational steps to the end of getting and keeping people out
of bad lives.
That is, we
should take steps that are rational in the ordinary sense of actually having a
good probability of securing the consequence. These are not steps that are
pieces of self-deception, pretence or speechifying, but steps that you can
actually reasonably believe will be effective, will serve the end. In being
rational in the ordinary way, of course, they will also be something else in
addition to being effective, quite as important. They will have to be
well-judged, sensible or economical in terms of well-being, not be likely to
cause more distress than they prevent, not be self-defeating in that way.
The Principle of Humanity, to state it
a bit more fully, is that the right or
justified thing as distinct from others -- the right action, practice,
institution, government, society or possible world -- is the one that according
to the best judgement and information is the rational one in the sense of being
effective and not self-defeating with respect to the end of getting and keeping
people out of bad lives.
The
principle covers positive acts or commissions and the like -- detonating the
bomb, firing the missile from the helicopter gunship, financing ethnic
cleansing, taking over the airliner, hunting killers, starting a war, lying
about it, fighting back against occupiers, blowing up yourself and the people
in the subway train, guarding the city against more attacks. The principle also
covers those other actions that are omissions -- not stopping the bomber you
can stop, not stopping the helicopter pilot, not doing what could be done to
make a world not so unjust or vicious that it provides a context for such
horrific acts as the flying of airliners into towers, not being vigilant, not
doing what would make war less likely, not trying to improve your democracy,
not calling the police or saying something about racism.
That is to say that the principle is about actions or conduct
in general and the things into which they enter. It is about our behaviour that
is intentional in some way and degree. Acts and omissions, which shade into one
another rather than fall into two categories, are distinguished by their
intentions. Acts are likely to be fully intentional -- they are behaviour whose
natures and consequences are represented and desired in the intentions of the
agents. What we call omissions, in contrast, may be actions that are partly
intentional -- actions whose natures and consequences are not pictured and
desired by the person acting, but as a result of earlier intentions and actions
of the person.
For example, I do not
contribute to a famine charity by using the money in another way, going on a
holiday. What the omission comes to is not attending to the action in its
nature and consequences as an omission, not attending as a result of earlier
intentions and actions. For another example, a leader or an electorate does
something that is also failing to stop genoicide because the leader or the electorate
have earlier done something like resolve to give their awareness to other
things.
There are also unintentional
omissions. Here the fact that the nature and effects of an action are not in
the agent's intention is not the result of his or her earlier activity. They
are of importance, and should claim attention. But we do not need to dwell on
them now.
There have been attempts to
find a difference of fact between acts and omissions such that there is a
general difference between them in terms of rightness and wrongness. The
attempts have never come near to succeeding. There have been attempts to show
that any act whose probable consequences are identical with those of an
omission can be wrong while the omission is right. No attempt has succeeded.
The most important attempt, having to do
with intentions, fails for the reason accepted in ways by all of us, that what
makes actions right is not intentions of agents. It is clear indeed that two
actions can both be wrong, one of which is done out of the best of intentions
and the other the worst. The simplest case is where the best intention is
conjoined with a terrible but not a culpable mistake in belief. Very commonly,
as well, people do the right thing out of a low intention. That I get no moral credit
at all for the action does not make the action wrong. Nor does integrity or
character help any more than intentions with right actions. Hitler's actions
would not become more right by way of an absolute proof of his integrity, his
having remained true to his deepest principle.
The
Principle of Humanity does give an importance to intentions, however, and to
the moral responsibility of people for their actions, and to the standing or
decency or humanity of people over time. It gives these things importance in
relation to what is fundamentally important -- securing the right action,
practice, institution, foreign policy, contribution to a kind of world. And
with these actions and the like, to repeat, it does not make any general
difference in rightness between acts and at least partly intentional omissions.
The principle is not unusual in this.
Who thinks, or who says when they are thinking, that it is all right for you to
let someone or half of a people starve to death if you have arranged to have your
mind on something else? Who thinks it is all right to carry on your life, maybe
your political life, while the large-eyed children in those photographs fade
away into their deaths? If conservative philosophers of property can be found
to excuse and justify us, morality and moral philosophy in general are in this
respect not so brazen in their exonerations as they used to be.
There is a somewhat related and smaller matter
that needs to be noticed here. You will of course have understood that the
Principle of Humanity is to the effect that we are to consider all the foreseeable consequences of an
action in terms of bad lives. To act on the idea of considering only bad lives
of Muslims, or bad lives of Jews, or of any other group, would be to go against
the principle absolutely. It is the preventing of bad lives that is
fundamental. Relatedly, there will be no possibility at all of saying that
firing a missile or setting a bomb is to be considered only in terms of deaths
that are in some sense or other intended, as distinct from other deaths
foreseen but in some sense not intended, deaths of innocents somehow
understood. This matter, which arises with more moralities than that of the
Principle of Humanity is one we will be coming back to.
To leave the attitude of the
Principle of Humanity to acts and omissions, another large truth about it is
its end or goal. If it is the fundamental principle of justice or decency, its
end or goal is not equality. It is not the end of getting everybody on a level,
let alone making everybody the same. The end is not a relational one at all,
not what has been objected to in egalitarianism. It is not open to the question
'What is so good about making people equal if they could all be unequally
better off?' The end, as stated, is the end of saving people from bad lives. It
would demand urgent action, exactly as urgent, in a world where everyone had
perfectly equal lives, all equally bad. So it is a principle of humanity,
fellow-feeling or generosity rather than of equality -- despite the great
importance of certain equalities,
notably in freedoms. These equalities are greatly important as means to the end
of the principle.
The Principle of Humanity is
indeed fundamental to the morality of humanity. It is a summary of a kind that
is necessary to any morality. It is its basis and rationale. That is not to say
that it is anything like the complete morality in itself. A further and
necessary understanding of the morality of humanity is to be had first by way
of a number of policies and practices that give further content to the
principle, and then by way of an account of its character.
The first policy is to transfer
certain means to well-being, material and also other means, from the better-off
to the badly-off. These are means whose transfer would in fact not
significantly affect the well-being of the better-off. An immense amount of
these means exist. They are now wasted. Remember what we throw out, and, more
importantly, what our businesses and corporations discard, leave to decay or
ruin. Think about the industry of packaging things, of the costs in commercial
competitition that are of no benefit at all to most of us.
The second policy is
means-transfer that that would reduce
the well-being of the better-off, but without increasing the number of bad
lives. The people from whom the means would be taken would still have good
lives. An immense amount of these means exist. As in the case of the first
policy, some consist in land, and land of a people. For this reason among
others, what you are hearing about is not Rawls's theory of justice or a
variant of it.
The third policy, of great
importance, is about material incentive-rewards. It would reduce them to those
that are actually necessary, and
actually necessary in terms of the goal of the Principle of Humanity. They will
not be the rewards now demanded. They
will not be the incentive-rewards that issue in the best-off tenth of Americans
having 30% of the income and 70% of the wealth while the bottom tenth has 2%
and none. They will not be the rewards called for by the most absurd of
propositions in our lives, that the rich have to be just as rich as they are in
order for the wretched not to be more wretched. They will not be the rewards
and lack of them suddenly visible to all in New Orleans after the hurricane in
2005.
You will naturally take
these three policies to exclude something else. But this exclusion had better
be stated explicitly as a fourth policy. It is that in general means to
well-being are not to be redirected to the well-off unnecessarily, as supposed
incentives or as anything else, say proper taxation policies, so as to improve
their already satisfied lives. This fattening is excluded.
The fifth policy, also implicit in the
others, is against violence and near-violence. Therefore it is against
terrorism and war. But like all such policies rightly called realistic, it
cannot be an absolute or completely general prohibition. Like all of them, it
accommodates some possibility of justified war. Like fewer alternative
policies, including one to be taken from the U.N. Declaration of Rights, it can
contemplate the possibility of justified action that falls under the name of
terrorism. If it may give some limited role to a distinction between official
and non-official killing, it does not immediately exclude some things mentioned
earlier, including violence by victims whose oppressors leave them no other
option and then sanctimoniously condemn the violence. Also, the policy sees the
need for police forces, some punishment by the state, some self-defence, and so
on.
A further understanding of
the Principle of Humanity, as necessary, comes from what can be distinguished
from policies, which is practices.
You
have heard that the end or goal of the principle is getting people out of bad
lives, not getting them into equal lives -- whatever large side-effects of
equality there may be of progress towards the end or goal. The end is not at
all open to the objection to egalitarianism that it does not matter in itself
if someone has more or less or the same as someone else, but how much they
have. But the end of humanity is consistent with something else. It is that we
are to use the means of certain practices of equality to get people out of bad
lives. Practices of equality are not the only but they are the most important
of the practices serving the end of saving men, women and children from
deprivation, distress and wretchedness.
A
main point here was in view in connection with the argument for a good
democracy. The first way to secure the moral rights of those with bad lives is
to give them equal voices. Another way is for them to claim their moral rights
by themselves making their voices heard. What they must have is the same
hearing as the rest of us, or rather some of the rest of us. Any practice of
equality that serves that intermediate or instrumental goal, an advance in
democracy, must be something that serves humanity.
There are other practices of equality as important. One
is a true equality of opportunity. It will certainly include special
opportunity for those who have been deprived of the means of developing and
displaying their abilities. Other practices have to do with the fact of our
common membership of a species. We must, despite all differences between us, have
common needs. That fact brings with it a truth to the effect that to seek to
make bad lives good must be to proceed on the basis of an assumption of
equality about, first of all, food.
To
which needs to be added a large proposition that no doubt you will remember.
Freedom, a great part of a good life, is one with equality, or at least
dependent on it. How much you have of freedom depends on how much I have. The
means to freedom is equalities. That does not make equality, a relative good,
the end of a struggle for freedom. It leaves freedom as the end of the
struggle, something that is a place on a scale, a fact of voluntariness or
non-compulsion, not itself a relationship to other places on the scale.
All of this statement of the Principle of
Humanity, anyway most of it, might suggest that it is a principle for one large
side of life but not a complete principle. You might get the idea from its
focus and concentration, and in particular the public policies, that it does
not cover private life, or relations between people all of whom have good
lives, or relations between men and women, or matters of religion, or contracts
between individuals, and the like. That is not true, for several reasons.
For a start, there are bad lives in
all sides or parts of our existence. Further, if you suppose that a morality
needs to have in it particular sections concerned with private life, relations
between people with good lives and so on -- rules or ideals or whatever having
to do with these -- that does not go against the Principle of Humanity. What it
requires is that whatever is said and done about these things is to be
consistent with the principle itself, serve its end.
The Character of the
Principle
There is something as
important to the morality of humanity as what we have -- the principle about
bad lives that summarizes it, its view of omissions, its policies and its
practices. There is what can be called the character or nature of the principle
and the morality. That character or nature, as with other principles and
moralities, has a good deal in it.
It
is not unreflective about morality or about itself. It is, to speak plainly,
not ignorant, naive, simple, self-serving or political about the nature of all
moral principles, judgements and the like. It is saved from unreflectiveness by
knowing a little philosophy.
If it sees that a decent moral
principle is rightly called that, exactly a decent moral principle, and that
some such thing is as important as truth itself, it also sees any such
principle is an attitude -- an
attitude capable of being supported by facts and by a general logic. It takes
any attitude whatever to be a valuing of something and hence to involve desire,
which valuing may or may not conceive of the thing clearly and entirely.
Thus the Principle of Humanity does
not begin to suppose that alternative or competing moralities and politics, of
any kind, can be different or have any other standing or be in less need of the
support of facts and logic. It does not at all contemplate that it faces
alternatives or competitors that have any sort of higher or deeper authority,
certification or imprimatur. It does not half-respect the ordinary stuff of
most politicians, their self-defensive argot for a time, maybe that this or
that is unacceptable. In general the
principle does not pretend a piety about morality that no one who is reflective
can sustain.
Morality is not
something given by God, or ancient texts, or any religion high or low. It is
not given to persons of special perception and sensitivity of whatever kind.
Nor is morality something given to a social class or a tradition of one people,
or proved by their special success, least of all their material success or
vulgarity. It is not owed to any other special fact about a people, such as
their power or weakness. As you have heard, morality is not the property of a
political tradition or inclination, or of a commitment to democracy, let alone
democratic politicians.
Do you recall my remarking in connection with
the politics of reality that there have long been denigrating utterances about
morality as consisting in mere value judgements, subjectivity, emotive meaning
and the like? There is a distinction between all that and what has just been
said. It is that morality is no more than and no less than attitudes capable of
being supported by facts and logic.
A
second point about the Principle of Humanity is that is in a way a literal one.
It is not the sort of thing uttered in much the same words by the estimable
Bill Clinton, as indeed it was, or conceivably by Brown of the New Labour
Party, he of whom some have hopes despite the fact that he has not yet by any
public action distinguished himself from his leader Blair. You can say the
principle is a different speech-act than theirs.
It does imply, for a start, that we are to hold our
leaders and those around them morally responsible when they violate it in the
way that we have feeling against lesser wrongdoers in our jails. The principle
does not presuppose a difference in kind in this respect, whatever else can be
said, between a prime minister and a pornographer, or a prime minister and a
child-molester, rapist or murdered.
Nor
is the principle meant to be an exhortation already understood as not likely to
be acted on in fact, let alone understood as something that cannot be acted on
in fact. We are actually to do what is actually rational to get and keep people
out of bad lives, not engage in substitute-behaviour, maybe giving undertakings
to estimable rock stars arranging concerts about African poverty, just in time
for the world's richest nations to meet again and do nothing much about it.
The principle, as you will have
taken in, is not that of conservatism or liberalism. Something close to the
principle or very like it has been the source and inspiration of the U.N.
Declaration of Human Rights, many U.N. resolutions, and a clear and essential
part of the rest on international law. Also, I think, the doctrine of the just
war. The principle has indeed been the guide or ideal of the Left in politics
so long as the Left has been true to itself.
That
is not to say, you will gather, that it sanctions all the theory, commitments,
practices and other means of all the traditions, parties and persons within the
history or the present of the Left in politics. The principle it itself and not
another thing. Its explanation depends on no other ideology. It is not
vulnerable to objections owed to mistakes made about it or in trying to act on
it. It would be absurd to suppose it is so much as touched by the fact that a
Wall fell down as an empire ended.
The
principle, as you will also have taken in, has the fourth distinction of not
operating with a merely generic notion, say happiness, well-being, deprivation,
justice, fairness or the like, let alone the common good or community. It is
not theoretical in a way that lets the world slip out of view or out of focus.
So it is not like utilitarianism or some
morality of economists, which by going on about general happiness or
satisfaction or whatever makes it more possible, even with good will, to slide
by individual costs of a general happiness, to overlook victimization if not
actually justify it. Rather, the Principle of Humanity fixes attention on
realities that do not so easily allow us to overlook the lives of others, rise
above or disregard them. It is in its character closer to life, closer to other
lives than our own.
The
principle is also clear. It does not have the hopeless indeterminacy of Kant's
celebrated injunction that was also called the Principle of Humanity. That was
the injunction that we are to treat each person as an end and not only as a
means. It can be understood to mean almost anything, down to a mild piece of
advice to respect everyone, a piece of advice consistent with leaving them in
misery. Nor does our principle have what is effectively the vapidity of 'Love
your neighbour', however related it may be in spirit. It has more in it than
the well-meant help of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Principle of Humanity, sixthly, to come on to something
still larger, is a principle of truth, in several ways. In fact, a commitment
to truth is just about the bottom of it.
As
you will anticipate, it is not respectful of any orthodoxies of opinion and
reaction that have been put in place or at any rate come to be in place, many
about supposed facts, in particular supposed necessities. It does not always
call terrorism something else, such as resistance, thereby tending to leave out
the killing and maiming. Nor does it fail to see that terrorism can also be something else, say resistance to
ethnic cleansing. It does not leave out half the facts in looking at any
matter. It does not look at things from your local point of view. It disdains
the denials, evasions and forgettings of truth that go with taking only some
lives really to matter. It is the very contradiction of what it regards as the
viciousness of what certainly is no mere statement of a right of
self-preservation, the declaration on behalf of a people that 'our lives comes
first'.
The principle is not
deferential to any of the kinds of our societies' convention. If its commitment
to reflection and argument, and of course to rationality, and in particular to
argued endorsements, stands in the way of engaging in direct or indirect
incitement, it is not deferential to the fact that some answers to questions
have been proscribed as terrible. It is not respectful of the powers that be,
including the democratic powers, but cynical at least about their
self-deception. It does not accept a
politician's edict with respect to certain moral judgements, say about killing,
sometimes to the effect the that we are all to eschew them, sometimes to the
effect that we leave to the politician a monopoly on engaging in them however evasively.
It is prepared to think about atrocities, if not on the day 9/11 or the day 7/7
then sometime after. If not on a day in the refugee camps of Sabra or Shatila,
or on a day in Bagdad, then sometime after.
The
principle, as you will expect, is for public inquiry that issues in relevant
truth, for public conduct of public business that issues in relevant truth. The
principle is an attitude antithetical to to the inanely resolute one of the
Blair government on television in 2006 and before then. That is the attitude,
in opposition to the whole history of intelligence, that the response to a
question is a speech of diversion.
The
principle, less importantly, can tell the difference between proper
philosophical civility and sucking-up. Also the difference between considering
other views and pretending that all of them are worth respect. It asserts that
Nozick's picture of the perfectly just society is to be thought about with
contempt.
Does the principle
not only engage in and recommend truth but also rest on a foundation of it?
The Strength of the Principle
Life
would be easier if morality were simpler. But the conclusions to which we are
already well on the way, about the horrors of Palestine, 9/11, Iraq and 7/7 and
the rest, and the light thrown on the later by the earlier events, will not
depend just on the foundation of the Principle of Humanity as stated. In fact
there are things that are clearer and stronger than any general principle,
necessary though a general principle may be. That a man's torturing a child for
the purpose of sexual excitement is monstrous in its wrong is evidently a kind
of truth, somehow as strong as a plain truth of fact. It is more the case that
the Principle of Humanity depends on such a moral truth than that the moral
truth depends on the principle.
The
morality of humanity, like any morality, has as its content and recommendation
the sum of the propositions in it including its principle, and also its nature
or character. Its policies and practices are part of its content. So too are
the specified consequences of the principle, some being consequences that are
only such in a formal sense, and stand on their own as moral truths.
Some consequences, whether or not they have
that strength, are about terrorism and war. Another is the wrong of our
hierarchic democracy. It is not only dim, but also a violation of the Principle
of Humanity in its inequality and unfreedom, and yet more so in its products,
the human facts owed to or recorded by the distributions of wealth and income.
There is also the moral responsibility of its beneficiaries, those who propose
to maintain it in perpetuity. You learn more of the morality of humanity by
learning of such consequences. Its content is to some considerable extent given
by them.
Still, for all of
that, it is the Principle of Humanity that sums up the rest and offers the
possibility of consistency among all certainties and judgements in the
morality. Such a general principle, as you have heard, is essential. It is
essential for other cases than those of absolute certainty, which is to say
most cases.
Is there a general
argument for the Principle of Humanity? Could there be what can have the name
of being a proof, as has sometimes seemed to me possible? You heard at the
start that we are all somehow committed to the Principle of Humanity. There is
an argument from our human nature. It has to do with our fundamental desires,
our desires for the great goods, and also with our being rational in the
minimal sense of our having reasons for things, sometimes moral reasons.
Fundamentally it is an argument from
consistency resting on strong premises. It cannot actually stop people from
being inconsistent. No argument for anything, however good, can in itself be
anything like a necessitating cause. But there is a price to be paid for
inconsistency that few want and are able to pay. It is that if you say
something is right, and then you also somehow say a thing of that same kind is
wrong, you say nothing. A contradiction asserts nothing, gives no reason
whatever for anything. And a reason is what you want to have, what you are
claiming to have. That is true of all of us.
The
argument from consistency for the Principle of Humanity has a number of
premises in it. They can be put in terms of certain situations of choice.
Your human nature is such, you will
agree, that if there is a choice between (1) your being got out of a bad life
into a good one, and (2) somebody else having an good life made still better,
you want the first thing to be done. Further, you give the reason that this is
right. It is right that your being helped out of deprivation, misery or agony
comes ahead of someone else's still fuller satisfaction in the great goods of
life. This reason for having help for yourself is of its nature general. All
reasons are. From your conviction about yourself, your rightful claim, arguably
you are on the way to the Principle of Humanity, or at least faced in that
direction.
By way of a fast example, you
believe it is wrong for you to be slowly starved for a month, put in danger of
your life, in order that I have my own car rather than have to go on getting to
work by bus. Let alone that you be starved in order for my family to have two
cars. By way of another example, you believe it would be wrong for you to be
sexually degraded by Americans in a prison in Bagdad if what is gained is just
my adding to the satisfactions of my good life in Washington.
Your reason for what you desire, not
to be starved or put on a leash naked, because of that reason's general
character, commits you to other propositions about other people with respect to
additions to bad lives and good lives.That there is room for argument here does
not much affect things.
But, it
may be said, there is a difficulty. Something else is also true. If there is a
choice between your already good life
being improved, and somebody else being got out of a bad life, maybe nearly a
good one, you may want the first, and argue that there is some moral reason for
this. You may talk of desert, or family lineage, or race, or ethnic group, or
democracy, or even a piece of ancient history. You will be very far from alone.
You can be faced with an objection. It will be
to the effect that in what are argued to be relevantly identical situations,
but where you happen to be in the bad position rather than the good one, you
would judge differently. That is, you can be reminded of the first choice
situation. But it will not be easy for the objector or you to succeed in this
dispute, which will become one about whether the two situations are relevantly
identical or close enough. Let us leave this difficulty unresolved and consider
some other situations.
Suppose you
contemplate two other people to whom you are not at all connected in terms of
particular sympathy or degree of identification. If your choice is between an
escape from a bad life for one, and an improvement of an already good life for
the other, you will want the first to happen and take it to be right. That will
be your tendency despite ideas of desert or whatever. Few of us talk about
private property in connection with the children with the large eyes.
Consider a third situation. If your
choice is between possibilities having to do only with yourself, a possibility
where you escape from a bad life and a possibility where your already good life
is improved, you will opt for and justify the first. If there are some
exceptions to this policy of what is called maximinning, exceptions having to
do with the attraction of taking a chance or gambling, they can surely be set
aside as not of great consequence. Think of a choice between escaping river
blindness and getting a faster car.
It is not perfectly clear how to use these
situations in order to try to construct an argument for the Principle of
Humanity. There is no neat proof. The argument will be to the effect that our
natures are such that we give a
precedence, if not a complete one, to reducing bad lives rather than improving
good ones. The argument will not make the principle into an ordinary truth
entailed by premises shown to be ordinarily true. But the argument may
establish the principle as what is most consistent with judgements about
ourselves that are, so to speak, the stuff of our humanity. They are real
foundations, premises of ordinary truth. No other principle of morality, you
can think, has such foundations.
Are
they enough to allow us to speak of the principle's moral truth? How good does
a general argument for a principle have to be? That is not obvious. It does
seem that these considerations of our human nature do better to support the
Principle of Humanity than any other considerations, of human nature or
anything else, support any other principle.
There
is one more thing. We all do accept the Principle of Humanity in another way,
one that is less theoretical and perhaps is more telling. We accept it in
actual lived disputes as distinct from reflection about imagined disputes. If
you are engaged in real-life argument with somebody about right and wrong with respect
to large questions, and you announce yourself as proceeding from or basing
yourself on something like the Principle of Humanity, you are very likely
indeed to hear from the other side, at any rate in the end, that the very same
is true of it.
What neo-Zionist
who is a serious adversary in argument depends on an ancient piece of religion
about a people chosen by God? Or a proposition about a ancient Jewish kingdom
easily met by other historical propositions? What neo-Zionist who is a serious
adversary, in order to establish a right centuries later to disperse further
another people and do worse than that, claims that right on the basis of a
divine ordinance accepted by no one else, or half of a declaration by the
British foreign secretary Balfour, or because of a fact of democracy? Does he
say that it is because somebody paid money to an absenteee landlord in Paris
that a peasant family is driven out and has to die in a refugee camp?
You will hear from such an adversary,
rather, about many lives of his own people taken in the recent past, about
danger and safety now, about freedom, respect and being unhumiliated, about his
people being together, their having their culture. You will hear about things
that matter.
So with those who
defend Islamic terrorism, and those who justify the war in Iraq. They show by
their recourse to argument from the great human goods that other
considerations, say international law or religion or whatever in themselves,
are not taken by them to be true foundations of argument. With the war in Iraq
and international law, does Blair serve as a stark example? Having started with
the justification of international law, he got around to justification of
humanitarianism.
The Principle of
Humanity is not itself a general truth of fact. Like all other such things, it
is an attitude, as you have heard. But it is a unique one. It would indeed be
entirely misleading to dismiss it as just another value judgements, subjective,
a matter of relativity in morals, or emotive meaning.
The Ends and the Means
Justify the Means
A grand
division used to be made or anyway attempted among various moralities and moral
philosophies. Sometimes it still is. Deontological moralities and moral
philosophies are said to assert duties, obligations and principles that do not
have anything to do with the foreseeable consequences or results of actions.
They have to do with values entirely different from the great human goods and
lesser such goods.
The clearest of
these may be duties or more likely rights that are said to exist just on
account of our relationships to others, say our children. Other principles may
seem to make sense in asserting that good intentions, maybe the pure good will,
or integrity, or moral intuition, or a hold on the virtues, are fundamental to
how we ought to live our lives. Or we may hear of the value of justice, where
that has to do with the law rather than the good of the law, or rights, where
those are taken seriously without being given a basis that explains why by
recourse to something like the Principle of Humanity.
Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, asserted that the pure
good will is the only thing that matters. Also that promises should be kept
despite bad effects of doing so, even catastrophic effects. He asserted too
that all criminals are to be punished to the full extent of the law even if, as
would ordinarily be said, no good whatever comes of this. Desert or
retribution, and not anything like the prevention of offences, is the only
justification of punishment in a society. If an island people decide to bring
their society to an end, scatter themselves through the whole world, so that
they no longer have any social purpose at all, it is their obligation to
execute the last murderer in prison before getting into the boats.
In contrast with all this, we hear, are what
used to be called teleological and now are called consequentialist moralities
and moral philosophies. They assert principles, duties and so on that do have
to do with foreseeable good results. The theories that try to justify
punishment by its prevention of offences are plain examples. The English moral
philosophy of utilitarianism, disaster though it was, is a large example. It
still influences a certain amount of political, bureaucratic and like thinking.
For several reasons the division between the
two things has become at least uncertain. One plain reason is that
deontological moralities were dragged into the 20th Century. They had to admit
that it cannot be right simply to ignore
the coming bad or appalling effects of
actions in considering whether they are right or wrong. So promises can
sometimes be broken, and punishment has to do some good as well as be deserved in order to be justified. But to
my mind, the deontological parts of the updated moralities do not fare at all
well. Let us consider the matter.
What
is it to give as a reason, for the rightness of someone's getting or having
something, that he deserves it? No
satisfactory answer, necessarily an answer that does not beg the question by
understanding a deserved thing to be right by definition, has ever been given.
As for reasons for doing a thing because of your relation to someone else or
others, your child or your people, it is perfectly possible to accomodate these
to a considerable extent in the moralities concerned with good effects. And, as
can certainly be argued, to go beyond this extent of accomodation is not to do
something that can be defended morally.
That
is, the morality of humanity allows and enjoins me to look after my children in
particular, partly by way of its practice of equality. But it does not allow me
to make them fatter while other children starve. A deontological morality may
say in effect that I can make them
fatter while other children starve. It may do so by way of the intoned or
declarative reason 'They are my children'. What can that be but a selfishness?
Is it made less so by feeling or pompousness?
It
is possible to suspect, as indeed I do, that all deontological morality is in
fact lower stuff, dishonourable stuff, an abandoning of humanity, of the decent
part of our nature, and an attempt to make that abandoning respectable to
oneself and others. It is possible to think that what all of us are moved by is
the great goods and the means to them, and related lesser goods, and that these
give us our only reasons for actions, moral and other reasons. So when a
deontological morality purports to give some entirely different reason for
action, something else is going on under the words.
If, with punishment by the state, no worthwhile analysis can be
given of the reason 'It is right to punish him because he deserves it', who can
escape a certain thought? It is that what is going on is punishing in order to
give satisfaction to ourselves, satisfaction in the distress of another.
As for promise-keeping, Kant's supposed
proof that all promise-breaking is self-contradictory and that promise-keeping
has nothing to do with good effects has convinced no one. And who would choose
a world full of good intentions but also full of agony, distress and other
deprivation against a world of bad intentions where things never the less work
out very well in terms of the great goods? It would be just mad to do so,
wouldn't it?
The morality of humanity is
indeed a consequentialist morality. It does indeed judge the rightness of
things by certain anticipated consequences. It judges the rightness of actions,
policies, practices, societies, and possible worlds by certain anticipated
consequences of those things, and, as it may be worth adding, in those things. What makes a thing
worthwhile may be the doing of it, where that is of course not the intention
with which it is done, or just its being in accordance with a duty or principle
or relationship, but the great good of doing it -- where real good is
understood as the sort of thing exemplified by the great goods of the Principle
of Humanity.
You have heard some
objection to what is opposed to consequentialism, deontology. It is a good
idea, too, to spend some time on what is said against consequentialism. It has
been supposed to be at least suspect, not the kind of thing to be tolerated in
higher philosophical, ethical or religious company. There are books that report
on its rejection, supposedly by a significant number of moral philosophers.
There are several familiar lines of resistance to particular consequentialisms,
or, more likely, consequentialisms in general, bundled together and not
distinguished.
The most common line of
resistance is in the utterance that consequentialism as understood takes the end to justify the means. In
one way this is plainly true. Any consequentialism takes some end to make some
price paid for it worthwhile. A satisfaction or achievement makes a cost,
dissatisfaction or pain worth putting up with or enduring. But what is the
objection to this? The common line of resistance sounds as if there is some
quite general objection to consequentialism. It has to be to that effect. Is
there?
There just can't be a general
objection to consequentialism since innumerable cases of it are accepted by
everybody all the time. Going to the dentist is the usual example. Others are
using forceful action to stop a man lying on the ground being kicked in the
head, or saying something rough and tough to stop some bullying of a child. Or
having a police force. It cannot be that there is a general objection to all consequentialism.
The consequentialism of the Principle of Humanity, as hardly
needs to be made more explicit, is in fact not
safely expressed as being that the end justifies the means. Rather, it is that the ends and the means justify the means.
You have heard enough about the necessity of having means that are not
self-defeating, not themselves useless makers of bad lives. That was in there
from the start.
An objector to any
decent consequentialism must then have in mind that some particular end does not justify some particular means, or some particular group of means. He will have
to show this particular want of justification, provide an argument. As the thinking
and conduct of everybody shows, he cannot take his proposition to follow from
some general truth. There is no such thing.
Does
the objector perhaps suppose instead that some means are so terrible that no possible end could justify them?
Well, he will have to show that. He may well be right. But he will face the
difficulty that whatever he takes to be unthinkable about a means, say torture,
may be avoided to a greater extent in the end in question than in any other
end. In any case, he has no general argument against consequentialism.
There is also a greater difficulty for
him if he is indeed questioning consequentialism in general. In any particular
case he only has the hope of an objection to that particular consequentialism
-- and out of that objection a different consequentialism is certain to emerge.
If he objects to slavery as a contemplated means to an end, he will hear in a
minute about a consequentialism that excludes as wrong any actions and policies
whose means include those of slavery. It will exclude the slavery, of course,
on consequentialist grounds.
Another
objection or resistance to consequentialism is that it does not really ask what
is right, engage in proper moral thinking. Rather, as some say, it turns to calculating what can be gained by doing
something. It looks to profit and loss. It engages in cost-benefit analysis or
social engineering or collateral damage discounting or whatever.
A consequentialist can best ask what
these pieces of jargon come to, what objection they are supposed to contain. Or
he can make a jibe in reply, perhaps that his opponent does not look at human
facts, but allows himself to be distracted. Maybe distracted by the past, as in
talk of desert, or ties of relationship, as in the case of a certain extent of
loyalty to one's own child or one's own people. The consequentialist can insist
that he never turns away from the question of what is right, the moral question, but answers it in
what is the human way. Clearly this kind of exchange of jibes settles nothing.
You can suppose that something lies behind or in the jibe that consequentialism does not ask what is right but calculates what can be gained. One thing is the idea that all consequentialism is or anyway is something like something already mentioned, utilitarianism. That was and remains a disaster, despite a clarity and an estimable human feeling in it.
You can suppose that something lies behind or in the jibe that consequentialism does not ask what is right but calculates what can be gained. One thing is the idea that all consequentialism is or anyway is something like something already mentioned, utilitarianism. That was and remains a disaster, despite a clarity and an estimable human feeling in it.
The principle of utilitarianism or
greatest happiness principle is roughly that the right thing is what is likely
to produce the greatest total or maximum of satisfaction taking into account
everybody affected -- usually the greatest balance of satisfaction over
dissatisfaction. This it may do and be committed to doing, as is well known, in
an intolerable way, an unfair or unjust way, perhaps by itself making or
producing bad lives. What is called punishing the innocent is one way of doing
so. In recent philosophical jargon, what we need to do instead is protect
certain rights, put what are called side-constraints on the aim of maximizing
satisfaction. More plainly, we cannot have as our end the mere maximization of
satisfaction.
This response to
consequentialism, confusing it with utilitarianism, is baffling at best.
Consequentialism as we have been understanding it, and presumably as it is
usually understood, is not utilitarianism. As you heard, consequentialism is
taken to be judging the rightness of actions and the like by probable
consequences. Consequentialism is the genus or family of which utilitarianism
is a species. Nor are many of the other species close to or like
utilitarianism. Almost all are against it.
Certainly
the Principle of Humanity is against it. In any situation, the Principle of
Humanity asks the following question of fact, of ordinary truth or falsehood:
what action or the like will be best in terms of effectiveness and costliness
in serving the principle's own end, getting or keeping people out of bad lives?
That is not at all the question of whether or not an action maximizes the total
of satisfaction or happiness. You could sometimes do that maximizing by making
good lives still better, perhaps by accepting a means that actually makes for
wretchedness.
Another nearby
resistance to consequentialism must call up a very firm reply. It is that of course the Principle of Humanity
takes more bad lives as worse than fewer bad lives. Of course the Principle of Humanity takes an appalling massacre of
hundreds to be worse than a single killing. Of
course the Principle of Humanity takes a stupifying number of deaths by
famine to be worse than a few such deaths. Of
course it takes us to be obliged to choose the least bad upshot.
Is there really anybody, whatever
they take to be bad, who doesn't take such a view? Well, some delicate and some
tough philosophers have tried to pretend otherwise. They speak in a suspicious
way of any maximizing principle, as
if any such thing had a character repugnant to decent persons. But in fact
maximizing, so called, enters into and is the rule in almost all ordinary moral
thinking and feeling. It is barely separable from the rationality of taking
effective and economical means to an end. If you think abortion is wrong in
itself, presumably you want fewer abortions.
Perhaps
the real resistance to consequentialism is just a confusion that has to do with
that very name given to it, and a description of it that we have gone along
with. The name suggests that certain moralities fix their attention on
consequences or ends to the exclusion of means, or at least fix their attention
more on ends than on means. And if you describe consequentialism as morality that judges the rightness of things
by their anticipated consequences, you also allow the idea that attention
is given to ends rather than means or that too much attention is given to ends.
No doubt there have been some
moralities that do this. Mistake and blunder turn up everywhere. But in fact it
is absurd to suppose that the Principle of Humanity, for example, does not give
full attention to means. On the contrary, full attention to means is explicitly
written into it. It specifies from the start what means are all right and what
means are not. Means must not be ineffective or self-defeating. In fact the
principle is as much concerned with means as end -- both are considered in
terms of getting or keeping people out of bad lives.
What the principle does is indeed to take the end and the means to justify the means. It
requires that the end and the means together do that.
Could it be that if a philosopher had not attached a name to some
moralities, various objections and confusions would have been left behind
sooner?
There
are some further thoughts on the principle in an interview of Ted
Honderich by Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, editors of the book U.S. State Terrorism, Morality, Justification and Responsibility (Pluto Press)
HOME to T.H. website front page
------------------
The problems with beliefs
by Jim Walker
- originated: 29 March 1997
- additions: 12 March 2012
Introduction
People have slaughtered each other in wars, pogroms, genocides, inquisitions, crusades, and political actions for centuries and still kill each other over beliefs in ideologies, politics, philosophies, and religion (and usually a combination of several reasons). These belief-systems, when stated as propositions, may appear mystical or genuine to the naive, but when confronted with a testable bases from reason and experiment, they fail miserably. I maintain that faiths (types of beliefs) create more social problems than they solve and the potential dangers from them could threaten the future of humankind.
Throughout history, humankind has paid reverence to beliefs and mystical thinking. Organized religion has played the most significant role in the support and propagation of beliefs and faith. This has resulted in an acceptance of beliefs in general. Regardless of how one may reject religion, religious support of supernatural events gives credence to other superstitions in general and the support of faith (belief without evidence), mysticism, and miracles. Most scientists, politicians, philosophers, and even atheists support the notion that some forms of belief provide a valuable means to establish "truth" as long as it contains the backing of data and facts. Belief has long become a socially acceptable form of thinking in science as well as religion. Indeed, once a proposition turns to belief, it automatically undermines opposition to itself. Dostoyevsky warned us that those who reject religion "will end by drenching the earth in blood." But this represents a belief in-itself. Our history has shown that the majority of mass killings (regardless of how they got started), get justified by the religious beliefs of the leaders who started them, not from the rejection of religion.
However, does rational thinking require the adherence to beliefs at all? Does productive science, ethics, or a satisfied life require any attachment to a belief of any kind? Can we predict future events, act on data, theories, and facts without resorting to the ownership of belief? This paper attempts to show that, indeed, one need not own beliefs of any kind to establish scientific facts, observe and enjoy nature, or live a productive, moral, and useful life.
Relative to the history of life, human languages have existed on the earth for only a few thousand years, a flash of an instant compared to the millions of years of evolution. (Estimates for the beginnings of language range from 40,000 to 200,000 years ago). It should come to no surprise that language takes time to develop into a useful means of communication. As in all information systems, errors can easily creep into the system, especially at the beginning of its development. It should not come to any surprise that our language and thought processes may contain errors, delusions and beliefs. It would behoove us to find and attempt to deal with these errors and become aware of their dangers.
The ability to predict the future successfully provides humans with the means to survive. No other animal species has a capacity to think, remember, imagine, and forecast to the degree of Homo sapiens. To replace our thoughts with intransigent beliefs belies the very nature of the very creative thinking process which keeps us alive.
Before I go on, I'd like to apologize for the sloppy writing style of this article. I intend this as a work in progress as this reflects my thoughts about the subject of belief along with what science has discovered about it. As new information arrives, I either make changes or add information on the fly, so some things may seem out of order, anachronistic or repeated.
I learned how to disown beliefs even before I had any scientific understanding on the subject. Many people do not understand how a person can do this so I hope to explain that one can indeed live without beliefs, or at least give them a better understanding about the subject. I also hope to explain what belief means and what it doesn't mean and the problems they can cause. If my experience only applies to me and no one else, then I probably have an abnormal brain. Fortunately the scientific information that has arrived has tended to support my case and diminished the argument against it. Nor do I intend to proselytize or try to convince you that you should abandon your beliefs. Perhaps some people can't disown beliefs, even in principle, because of some unknown reason that I have no awareness of.
Origins of belief
Very little evidence has yet appeared about how belief arose in humans. As social animals, we probably have always held beliefs to some degree. Studies of our closest DNA relatives, the apes, have suggested that primate social animals require both followers and leaders. The followers must assume the codes of conduct of their leaders if they wish to live without social conflict. Since there always occurs more followers than leaders, the property of accepting the leaders without challenge and the introduction of language may have led human primates towards the expression of beliefs.
- "The closest relative of the chimp is the human. Not orangs, but people. Us. Chimps and humans are nearer kin than are chimps and gorillas or any other kinds of apes not of the same species."
- -Carl Sagan
As one possibility, perhaps the human animal believes because of an inherent result from expressed genes (phenotypes). Interestingly, some animals have in their DNA a predisposition for imprinted programming. [1] One extreme example of maturation imprinting occurs with newborn greylag geese where they regard the first suitable animal that it sees as its parent and follows it around. In nature geese usually see their natural mother when born, but if humankind interrupts the natural process and a newborn goose first sees a human, then it comes to regard itself, in some sense, as a human, thus compromising its natural life as a goose. Some young animals have a kind of "eidetic" memory; they will believe whatever gets taught to them. Do humans exhibit a similar kind imprinting while young as do many other animals? Or do we learn how to believe from our parents, expressed from memetic inheritance? Most people accept, without question, the religion of their youth. The degree that humans have imprinted or learned belief memories, or the ability to control their beliefs, or reduce them remains open for further investigation. Learning about the mechanism of beliefs at this early stage may help us understand the consequences of impressionable teaching and may lead us to modify the strategy of early learning so as to avoid the debilitating effects of unexamined beliefs.
Some evolutionary biologists think that beliefs require an evolutionary explanation because every known culture through history has had beliefs. And if beliefs have an evolutionary survival advantage, how can they serve that advantage? Of course no one knows how for sure because beliefs do not leave behind fossil evidence. Nevertheless one can still propose a hypothesis and the best one I've heard comes from Richard Dawkins. In his book, "The God Delusion," he explains this on pages 172-179. I'll give you a brief section from this chapter. Although he writes about religion, it also applies to beliefs in general:
"My specific hypothesis is about children. More than any other species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations, and that experience needs to be passed on to children for their protection and well-being. Theoretically, children might learn from personal experience not to go too near a cliff edge, not to eat untried red berries, not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But, to say the least, there will be selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule of thumb: believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you. Obey your parents; obey the tribal elders without question. This is a generally valuable rule of thumb to believe." [Dawkins] (also watch a video of his explanation)
[Humans also communicate these belief rules through spoken or symbolic language. Since other animals do not have the language ability to the degree of humans, that explains why animals do not have religions.]
However, as children grow up, they no longer need to listen to their parents because their brains have now fully developed and they can think for themselves. Unfortunately, evolution has no way to clean up these evolutionary belief traits while in adulthood so the beliefs they inherited from their parents remain.
The evolutionary advantage of utilizing beliefs while young, although they help the survival of our species, can also lead to bad consequences later in adult life but not so severe as to prevent the survival of our species. These bad consequences of beliefs may have led early humans toward violence against members of their own. As early Homo sapiens collected beliefs, some of them must surely have contained beliefs of violence, possibly to protect them from other tribes who might harm them or who they believed might harm them.
The earliest evidence of human culture from Paleolithic and Mesolithic societies show that humans practiced some form of violence against fellow humans. These violent actions appear similar to the brutality of other primate species (chimpanzees, our closest primate relative, for example, reveals they engage in chimpanzee warfare). Later, the skills of human weaponry increased during the Neolithic period, and archeologists have uncovered evidence for executions and sacrifices. Although no one has direct evidence for languages spoked in the Neolithic period, violence of this kind, no doubt requires commination so they probably had language along with beliefs to justify their executions and sacrifices.
Many early societies believed in spirits and animism, the belief that animals and inanimate objects possess a spirit. Indeed, the Latin word, anima, means soul. The word "spirit" also derives from the Latin word for breath. No doubt ignorance about the nature of wind, breath and movement of animals led them to construct an "explanation" about things in their world. How could they possibly know the difference between beliefs, facts, and evidence? These early societies hardly had anything that we would call multiculturalism, and this alone would isolate their belief systems from other belief systems. Imagine, for example, that you lived in a tribe that held strong beliefs and you came across another tribe that held an entirely different set of beliefs. Without an understanding of cultural diversity, or even the difference between beliefs and facts, how could they not feel threatened by another tribe that held beliefs that conflicted with their beliefs?
With language came the contemplation and study of thoughtful systems. Socrates and Plato introduced beliefs of "forms" of things existing independently of their physical examples. These philosophical beliefs represented superficial representations of an underlying and absolute "reality." Aristotle carried the concept further but placed these forms to physical objects as "essences." He posited the existence of a soul and introduced the concept of an immovable mover (God) to justify matter which moves through the "heavens." These ghostly concepts live today, not only in religion, but in our language. Many times we express essence ideas without thinking about them because they exist in the very structure of common communication derived from ancient philosophers. Since no one can see or measure these essences, the only way to comprehend them comes in the form of belief. Sadly, people still accept these essences as "real" based on nothing but faith without ever investigating whether they exist or not.
Orthodox religionists hinged their "sacred" philosophies upon the shoulders of ancient philosophers. Plotinus reorganized Plato's work as the bases for Platonism which lasted for many centuries. Thomas Aquinas became the foremost disseminator of Aristotle's thought. Aristotelianism and its limited logic still holds the minds of many believers. Today people still believe in inanimate objects, spirits, gods, angels, ghosts, alien UFOs, without ever questioning the reliability of their sources. Belief and faith can overpower the mind of a person to such an extent that even in the teeth of contrary evidence, he will continue to believe in it for no other reason than others around him believe in it or that people have believed in it for centuries.
- "Religion. n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to ignorance the nature of the Unknowable."
- -A. Bierce
The meaning of belief
To establish a common ground for the general concept of belief, I hold to the common usage of the term from the American Heritage dictionary:
Belief: 1. The mental act, condition, or habit of placing trust or confidence in a person or thing; faith. 2. Mental acceptance or conviction in the truth or actuality of something. 3. Something believed or accepted as true; especially, a particular tenet, or a body of tenets, accepted by a group of persons.In its simplest form, belief occurs as a mental act, a thinking process in the brain that requires two things: a feeling and a logical statement. To "believe" requires a conscious feeling of truth. To communicate what this feeling refers to requires some form of logical structure such as spoken or written language. Thus a belief requires a thought and a conscious feeling of "truth" which, according to neurological brain research, stems from the limbic part of the brain (discussed in the mechanism of belief, below). Thus, belief occurs as a thought with a feeling or emotion "attached." In other words: Belief= emotion + logic. Because belief requires emotion, it also represents a psychological state, not simply a mechanical thinking state.
Believe: 1 To accept as true or real. 2. To credit with veracity; have confidence in; trust.
In all cases, I refer to beliefs as occurring in an aware state of consciousness. Beliefs here do not refer to subconscious thoughts, or any mental activity occurring below the threshold of consciousness. Nor do beliefs apply to sleeping and dream states, or to unconscious habits, or instincts. When a person owns a belief, s/he consciously accepts their own belief. The degree of feeling to which one accepts their own beliefs, as valid, can vary from mild acceptance to certain absoluteness. Thus it would prove meaningless to say that a person has beliefs without them knowing it or for them to deny their own beliefs. Obviously, a person who does not believe in something, does not believe in that something; a person who believes in something, does believe in that something. Belief requires conscious acceptance.
How belief confuses arguments
In the mildest form of belief, that of acceptance without absoluteness, a speaker or writer could simply replace belief words with more descriptive words to avoid confusion.
Note that in most instances, one can replace the word "believe" with the word "think" or "use". For example:
"I believe it will rain tonight."can transpose into:
"I think it will rain tonight."can transpose into:
"We should believe a theory as long as the evidence supports a proposition."
"We should use a theory as long as the evidence supports a proposition."
Most simple beliefs come from the expression of the experience of external events. From past experience, for example, people believe that dark clouds can produce rain, therefore, we attempt to predict the weather by forecasting from past events. However, to believe that an event will occur can produce disappointment if the prediction never happens. To make a prediction based on past events alone does not require believing in the future event, but rather, a good guess as to what may or may not happen. We can eliminate many of these simple beliefs by replacing the word "believe" with a word that directly addresses the object of our knowlege rather than the feelings or emotions of personal belief. The word "think" describes the mental process of predicting instead of relying on the abstraction of belief which reflects a hope which may not happen. And if we replaced Aristotelian either-or beliefs with statistical thinking we would reflect probable events instead of believed events.
Belief represents a type of conscious mental thought, a subclass of many kinds of mental activity. Thinking may or may not include beliefs or faiths. Therefore, when I use the word "think" I mean it to represent thought absent of emotional belief.
Because belief statements contain logical propositions, one should consider if emotions and feelings have anything to do at all with our logic. The anecdote about Archimedes running through the streets crying, "Eureka!" after discovering the relationship between mass and volume describe his emotion after making his discovery. This could have led him to believe that density equals mass divided by volume, but do feelings and emotions add anything at all useful to his logical statement? If feelings really do add to our logical structures then why not add them to our mathematical statements? One could, for example, make up a table of ordinal words to express the intensity of the feelings such as "eureka!" (for the highest emotion), "good!" (for a lesser emotion), "meh" (an ambivalent emotion), etc. We can then plug our emotions into our logical statement:
Now we have an attempt to use mathematical statements that describe beliefs. Belief = emotion + logic.
D[eureka!] = M/V
As you should see by this silly example, the variable of emotion, not only does nothing to help the equation, the belief could vary from person to person. And if the holder of that belief dies, so goes their belief. Archimedes died with his beliefs but mathematicians today might think of his equation as: D[meh] = M/V, yet the truth value still holds even if no one believes it.
The example above appears silly when you attach an emotion to a mathematical statement, but the very same thing happens when you use beliefs in your language. Once you take out the emotional aspect of your belief from your statement, it would not, by definition, equal a belief. You would simply have a propositional statement. "I believe that it will rain," would turn into, "It will rain." Now if that seems too certain an expression, simply describe your uncertainty such as: "It probably will rain tonight", or "It may rain tonight." In a mathematical statement you might include a probability number.
Belief words can have many meanings. They can range from a guess (I believe so) to absolute certainty (I BELIEVE in God). So when a person uses a belief word in a sentence, the reader might get an entirely different meaning than you intend. It could mean just opposite of what you mean to your audience. For example, If you say to religious people that "I believe in science," they might think you mean it as an absolute in the way they believe in god. It comes from this very kind of misinterpretation that can lead a religious person to think that science represents a religion. Realize that some religious people quote-mine popular scientific literature just to prove what some scientist believes or has faith in. Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Danniel Dennet, for example, have all used "belief " in their books and speeches but with the intention of justifying their belief with evidence and logic. The reader, however, might think of it as the strong version of the word. So why use belief at all? To avoid this problem, simply don't use belief and faith and substitute it with a more descriptive word. Of course if you do have beliefs stronger than mild forms of belief, for example, if you hold supernatural beliefs, then of course, you should use the word belief or faith.
Many kinds of concepts occur without the need for belief. People can invent rules, maps, games, social laws, and models without requiring a belief or absolute trust in them. For example, a map may prove useful to get from point A to point B, but to believe that the map equals the territory would produce a falsehood. Humans invented the game of baseball, but it requires no need to believe in the game, or to attach some kind of "truth" to it. People can enjoy baseball, simply for the game itself. Technological societies invent "rules of the road" and construct traffic lights, signs and warnings. We do not take these rules as absolute but realize that they form a system of conduct that allow mass transit to exist. If any confidence results from the use of models and rules, it should come from experience of past events predicted by the models rather than from the emotions connected to beliefs.
Examples of non-beliefs
Many people misunderstand what constitutes belief and what does not. For many, belief has so infiltrated their minds, that everything perceived or thought incorporates a belief for them, including all of their knowledge and experience. This hierarchical, top-down, approach, in effect, puts such a person entirely within a world of solipsistic reasoning. Why? Because all thoughts describe a belief for them and since beliefs only occur within the mind, every belief refers to the self.
However, beliefs have no bilateral symmetry requirements; although one can believe in knowledge, one can obtain knowledge without owning beliefs; although one certainly accepts their own beliefs, not all things accepted require beliefs.
Consider that if one defined belief to incorporate all forms of thought, then the word belief would become tautological and meaningless, not to mention that knowledge and experience would fall as a subset of belief. Need I remind the reader that words differ not only in their spelling, but in their meanings? The following gives examples of non-beliefs:
Acceptance: Although belief requires some form of acceptance, not all things accepted require belief (beliefs have no bilateral symmetry requirements). Examples: I can accept the premise of a fictional story, but I do not for one moment believe in it. I can accept a scientific hypothesis without believing in it. Computers accept data and produce solutions, but computers have no consciousness, let alone beliefs. Many arguments can take the form of Devil's Advocate to oppose an argument with which the arguer may not necessarily disagree.
Action: Although many people believe in the actions they perform, one can act without beliefs (beliefs have no bilateral symmetry requirements). Actions can occur out of a desire, a submission to an authority, or by unplanned events or even by mechanical means completely absent of humans. Examples: I can act a part without believing in it. I can act from a set of rules, but I do not need to believe the rules. I might act from an order of the police or government. I may act out of a desire to achieve something. There occurs no action which requires belief.
Agreement: Although belief requires some form of agreement (believers agree that their beliefs have validity), not all agreements represent beliefs (beliefs have no bilateral symmetry requirements). However, for some people (myself included), agreement requires no belief at all. Examples: I might agree that Captain Kirk served aboard the Starship Enterprise, but I hold no beliefs in Star-Trek fiction. I may agree with the rules of football, but I do not need to believe in football in order to understand the game; I may not even like the game! I may agree with any premise, without believing in it.
Knowledge: Knowledge comes from awareness of the world, or understanding gained through experience. Although people may believe in what they know, knowledge has no requirement for belief (beliefs have no bilateral symmetry requirements). Examples: I may have knowledge of a story, poem or song, but I have no need to believe it. I know the rules of many games, but I do not believe in games. I know the mathematics of calculus, but I do not believe in calculus. I have knowledge of information, but I do not believe in information. I have direct knowledge of my existence through sensations, thought, and awareness, but I do not believe I exist: I know I exist (even though I may not know how I exist).
Information: Although many people believe the information they receive, information received does not require belief (again, beliefs have no bilateral symmetry requirements). Examples: the information from books, stories, science, theories, fiction, religion, etc., all represent communicated ideas, but one does not need to believe in any communication in order to utilize it. Biological evolution through natural selection requires information stored in chemical structures (DNA) but it lacks not only beliefs, but consciousness, as well.
Differences between beliefs and thinking without beliefs
The two charts above represent a visual abstract concept of the differences between the paths of belief and the path to knowledge. Both paths represent a form of thinking or mental activity. Note that the chart on the left shows a convergence point at the bottom where simple beliefs and thoughts coexist. At this level, they appear virtually the same with the only difference amounting to its semantic designation ("believe" can substitute for "think" and vise versa). However as each path progresses, they diverge; the path of belief progresses towards intransigence and the path of knowledge leads to factual knowledge. Each progresses as a matter of degree and each forms an independent path. For example, beliefs requires no external evidence whatsoever (examples: belief in ghosts, gods, astrology, etc.) The path of knowledge requires no reliance on beliefs (examples: the observation that the earth orbits the sun and airplanes fly, etc. appears regardless of whether you believe in them or not.) However, the path towards knowledge requires external verification (observation and testing) whereas the path of belief does not. The path towards workable knowledge (facts) must agree with nature if we wish to utilize it. The path of belief requires no agreement with nature at all (although it might coincide with it).
Unfortunately, the usual practice of thinking involves the combination of beliefs with theory and factual knowledge (see the right chart). Most people tend to own beliefs of facts and knowledge, including perhaps the most rational people of all-- scientists and philosophers. A hypothesis or a theory may lead a scientist to strongly believe in his or her theories, the verification of test results may lead them to have faith in the results, and an established fact may lead some scientists to dogmatically hold to its verification (even if later evidence contradicts it). Thus even a scientist can attach beliefs to theories, faith to verification, and dogma to facts. Although scientists rarely approach intransigence (although some do), they usually believe in their data and theories and most philosophers believe in their philosophies and most of them will die with their beliefs. As Maxwell Planck once said, "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Fortunately, scientific dogmatic beliefs do not appear as prevalent as it once did in the last two centuries. Scientists like Freud, Jung, Velikovsky, and even Einstein held stubborn beliefs bordering on inflexible religious-like thinking, even when presented with evidence that contradicted their beliefs. I suspect that much of the reduced degree of dogma in the scientific communitiy today results in better communication (especially through the internet), and a broader understanding of the sciences around them, and a humbling realization that some other scientist will call them out on their theories, but it still occurs to an unnecessary degree in my opinion.
If facts about nature come from nature itself, then every scientific fact can stand as the evidence alone and the theories that explain those facts. At no time do we need beliefs to understand facts and theories. Nature occurs without human beliefs and so does reliable evidence. And once we understand our facts and theories we call it knowlege. There simply exists no apparent necessity for attaching beliefs to knowledge.
Think about the following: Regardless of how strongly one has attached faith to scientific facts, no matter how religious the disposition of a scientist, there has never appeared a single workable theory or scientific fact that required the concept of a god or superstitious idea. Not a single workable mathematical equation contains a symbol for a "creator." There occurs not the slightest evidence for ghosts in our machines or in our bodies. Even the most ardent non-believers can live their lives in complete accord with nature and live as long as the most fanatical believer. The same holds true for non-religious beliefs and in spite of the temporary mental comfort that belief might bring, (as do drugs) then what purpose can belief serve in the establishment of useful knowledge about the world? Note that when a person dies, so goes his or her beliefs, but if that person lived as a scientist and provided a world with a workable piece of knowlege about nature, then only the knowlege remains useful. The beliefs during the person's lifetime have no bearing, whatsoever, on the usefulness of the knowlege that he or she brought into the world.
Now you might argue that the knowlege brought to us by persons no longer living still requires people to believe in the knowlege that they brought, but on what grounds and to what degree?
"Have you ever noticed.... Anybody going slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" --George CarlinI find it interesting to observe the state of belief in people. They most always see the problems of fanatical belief above them on the chart, but they never accept the disbelief of those below them. Believers always retain just the right amount of belief, it seems, and they unconsciously put themselves in a kind of self-centered, subjective dogma. I contend that most of us do not own beliefs of every kind and, indeed, we disbelieve more than we believe. Just as some believers have fewer beliefs than others, non-believers simply sit at the bottom of the scale. If you can, temporarily, put yourself outside of your own beliefs, you can question why you dismiss the beliefs of others, while perhaps understanding why non-believers dismiss yours.
The degree problem goes away once you understand that the amount of belief says nothing about the usefulness or factual nature of knowledge. If you squint your eyes, pray, or through sheer willpower force your belief to strengthen, will that improve your knowledge? (It can certainly produce falsehoods, but how can it improve on knowledge?) Conversely, if you act on your knowledge without belief, will that change the status of your knowledge? If you think knowledge requires belief between the extremes of strong belief and no belief, then just what degree of belief do you think it necessary for the proper understanding of knowledge?
Some people have argued that all knowledge represents forms of beliefs. Well it certainly can if you believe that and, no doubt, most people do believe that knowledge describes a belief, but that doesn't mean it has to. Even Plato and Socrates defined knowledge as "justified true belief," but this only describes what I already mentioned above (combining beliefs with knowledge), and again, this certainly serves far better than a belief without knowledge (I suppose Plato might call that unjustified false belief). But can knowledge exist without beliefs at all? Yes. And I can give examples.
I could use examples of animals such as insects or reptiles but someone might object on the grounds that they possess some form of consciousness and beliefs, so I will give an example of non-life entities: Autonomous computers. Autonomous drones, for example can take-off, fly and land without a human pilot or even a remote pilot. These aircraft take in information from the world around them through cameras and sensors, process that information, make algorithmic decisions and act on them by navigating, taking photos, or sending lethal bombs to kill enemy targets. To give another example, IBM's computer called Watson (also autonomous) defeated the best Jeopardy players in the world. Its designers made it capable of understanding human language and knowledge by data mining documents, dictionaries, anthologies, and encyclopedias and deriving a correct answer. These computer systems, in fact, posses some knowledge about the world around them, otherwise they would not have the ability to carry out their tasks. These Autonomous computers have no consciousness or emotions, so they cannot possibly have beliefs. Knowledge can indeed exist without beliefs. Humans, too, can act on knowledge even without consciousness. Sleep walking, driving a car while having a conversation, for example, can result in actions from subconscious knowledge even without that person consciously knowing what has happened.
Of course humans do not live like computers and we grow up with beliefs, perhaps even ingrained into our genes, but I submit that to suggest that an intelligent conscious human cannot understand knowledge without beliefs has no bases. Humans have a unique ability to understand abstractions and even abstractions about abstractions (metacognition) At least some humans have that ability (more on this below). One can understand how a belief can adversely affect knowledge and thusly learn to act on knowledge without owning beliefs. Nor do I claim that all people have the ability to disown beliefs. Perhaps some people can't, even if they wanted to. It certainly seems that some people, especially highly religious people, do not have that ability. Perhaps their genetic and/or cultural upbringing forever prevents them from doing so, I don't know. However, to suggest that every human must have beliefs belies the very fact that some of us don't.
I submit that some, if not most, conscious human beings can learn to gather, understand, and accumulate knowledge and act on it without owning a single belief and that this provides far more of an advantage for the advancement of knowledge than a disadvantage.
Problems that derive from belief
Beliefs produce feelings that certain propositions seem true, even if the propositions prove false. People who continue to believe in false propositions can result in behaviors that lead to tragedies. Science provides one way out of this by allowing us to improve our propositions so that when we believe in something, our feelings of truth follow the improved propositions, but this, by no means, eliminates beliefs; it simply reduces the dangers of beliefs. Many a scientist has believed in hypothetical propositions (hypotheses) which later proved untrue, yet the scientist continues to believe in them.
Although one can argue that beliefs supported by scientific evidence represent a benign form of beliefs, they also act as barriers towards further understanding. Even the most productive scientists and philosophers through the ages have held beliefs which prevented them from seeing beyond their discoveries and inventions. For example, Aristotle believed in a prime mover, a "god" that moves the sun and moon and objects through space. With a belief such as this, one cannot possibly understand the laws of gravitation or inertia. Issac Newton saw through that and established predictions of gravitational events and developed a workable gravitational theory. Amazingly, Newton began to think about relativity theory long before Albert Einstein. However, his belief in absolute time prevented him from formulating a workable theory. Einstein, however, saw through that and thought in terms of relative time and formulated his famous theory of General relativity. But even Einstein owned beliefs which barred him from understanding the consequences of quantum mechanics. He could not accept pure randomness in subatomic physics, thus he bore his famous belief: "God does not play dice." Regardless, physicists now realize that for quantum mechanics to work, nature not only plays with dice, but randomness serves as a requirement if one wishes to predict with any statistical accuracy. And on it goes.
Even though great scientists, like any human, can fall prey to beliefs, their discoveries live beyond the barriers of their naive beliefs. Not only did they establish new knowledge about the universe but they also established its limits and, with them, the elimination of absolutes (and if you think about it, only a believer could pretend to know about absolutes, something not even in principle testable for mortal humans). For example, Einstein found the limits to velocity and time (once believed as absolute), Heisenberg saw the limits to reality (uncertainty principle), and Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem set a limit on our knowledge of the basic truths of mathematics. A belief in absolutes that directly contradict these scientific discoveries can only bar one from further understanding.
Although thinking without beliefs does not, by any means, guarantee that people will make scientific breakthroughs, it can, at the very least, remove unnecessary mental obstructions. Belief, even at its lowest form of influence can create problematic and unnecessary barriers.
As belief progresses towards faith and dogma, the problems escalate and become more obvious. We see this in religions and political ideologies, especially those that contain scripts (bibles, manifestos) which honor war, intolerance, slavery and superstitions. We see this in the religious inquisitions, "holy" wars, and slavery. During the period of the black plague, millions of humans died out of ignorance of the disease with beliefs that God or Satan caused it. Meanwhile their religious leaders did little or nothing to encourage experimental scientific investigation. In the 1930s and 40s the world saw the fanatical idealism of communists (which has far more in common with religion than it does with atheism) as they destroyed millions of lives. We saw how Christianized Germany produced Nazism and the holocaust in order to defend against the Jews in order to fight for the Lord (Hitler's belief). To this day, one can observe religious and ethnic beliefs creating war and intolerance in Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Israel, Africa, Russia and in Muslim countries. The tragedy of 9/11 could not have occurred without religious belief in an afterlife. Only religion produces the concept of moral war. Only a religious minded government would allow science to flounder while emphasizing faith-based programs.
Why does religious belief create such monstrous atrocities? Because religion expresses everything into terms of belief, faith, and absolutes, without need for reason or even understanding. Religion puts reality, morality, love, happiness and desire in a supernatural realm inaccessible to the mind of man. How can humans ever achieve peace when their religious scripts has their god condoning war and violence, while man must accept the superstitious belief that their unknowable god does this for mysterious reasons, forever beyond the comprehension of man? How can you understand the physics of the universe if you believe that an unfathomable supernatural agent created everything just a few thousand years ago? How can you live a full happy life if your religion denies the nature of sex, desire, and mind? How can you have workable government if you believe laws derive from an incomprehensible super-being? How can you have the future of the planet or your grand children if you believe that supernatural predestination will end the world?
Parents teach children at a very young age to believe in abstract concepts such as Santa Claus, the toothfairy, and supernatual gods. These parents have no understanding of the dangers that their beliefs might cause. Thus we prepare our society to not only accept beliefs, but to honor and fight for them. This commonly results in conflicts between free expression and censorship. For a believer, expression of ideas in-and-of-themselves represent beliefs. Thus violent television, movies and fictions present opportunities for the unaware to believe in them.
If, instead, we taught our children about beliefs and how they infect the mind and the dangers they can produce, society would have little need for censoring ideas. For without believers, there would live no one to believe them and the violence and fantasy portrayed by their fictions could only represent just that-- fictions.
- "Don't believe anything. Regard things on a scale of probabilities.
The things that seem most absurd, put under 'Low Probability', and
the things that seem most plausible, you put under 'High
Probability'. Never believe anything. Once you believe anything, you
stop thinking about it."- --Robert A. Wilson
The mechanism of belief
Because belief requires a mental process involving neural activity, this allows scientific investigation into its mechanism. Although the abstractions of belief sit at a hierarchical level above the neuron level, there obviously occurs a connection between neuron activity to mental thought and vise versa. Unfortunately we still have only minute knowledge about the working of the brain, let alone the complex process that produces thought. However, studies have shown that some forms of delusional thought involve problems with the neocortex. Indeed, one of the characteristics of schizophrenic delusion involves grandiose and religious thinking [3] Some have even suggested that schizophrenia involves beliefs and attitudes taught to them while young [4]
Also, in epilepsy, neurological storms can trigger feelings and thoughts divorced from external events. Although the neocortex and its sensory equipment gets its information from the external world, the limbic system takes its cues from within. The neuroscientist, Paul MacLean became fascinated with the "limbic storms" suffered by patients with temporal-lobe epilepsy. [5] MacLean reported:
"During seizures, they'd have this Eureka feeling all out of context-- feelings of revelation, that this is the truth, the absolute truth, and nothing but the truth."
"You know what bugs me most about the brain? It's that the limbic system, this primitive brain that can neither read nor write, provides us with the feeling of what is real, true, and important."
This provides an important clue as to the mechanism of belief because it suggests that what we think of as true or real, actually produces or triggers a feeling. Belief in this sense then means a thought with a feeling "attached" where the feeling gives us a sense of conviction or truth. In normal people, a well reasoned thought can trigger a eureka-like feeling, thus the generation of a belief. This emotional tag attached to a thought may very well have served an important evolutionary role because it would allow Homo sapiens a way to prioritize thoughts that give a survival advantage. These eureka-like emotions also feel good and might very well enhance the memory of survival thoughts.
In abnormal thinking, even an irrational thought can trigger the same eureka-like feeling. In other words, regardless of a reasoned thought or an irrational thought, both can trigger a feeling of "truth"; or in other words, a belief. In its most extreme form, epiphany-like beliefs can result from the ingestion of hallucinogenic chemicals, fanatical religious rituals, extreme fasting, or chemical imbalances in the brain (i.e., manic-depressive, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, etc.) All of these mental disorders can lead to excessive beliefs and intense feeling, yet with only irrational thoughts attached to them.
The worst forms of schizophrenia almost always involve extreme forms of delusional beliefs. Schizophrenics hear voices, act on impulse, think they hear the voice of God, Satan, or act out whatever belief-myth they grew up with. Interestingly, it appears that only thinking animals develop schizophrenia. We have no other animal model for this disease for holding false beliefs and the perception of unreal things. [6] Schizophrenia appears to exist only in humans.
According to V.S. Ramachandran, patients with temporal lobe epilepsy may experience a variety of symptoms that include an obsessive preoccupation with religion and the intensified and narrowed emotional responses that appear characteristic of mystical experience.
I present epileptic storms and schizophrenia here because they represent examples of mental disorder that can result in beliefs pegged to their extreme limit. I trust that most people will recognize that these mental diseases can result in dangerous forms of thinking. If the extreme beliefs held by schizophrenics represents a danger and an undesirable trait, then at what point below this do we consider beliefs desirable?
Since I first posted this article, further research has arrived on the subject that supports the connection of emotions to belief. In 2007, Sam Harris, et all, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study brains of 14 adults while they judged written "truth," "false" or "undecidable" statements. They found "strong reciprocal connections from the limbic system, the basal ganglia, and the association cortex of the parietal lobe. This region of the frontal lobes appears to be instrumental in linking factual knowledge with relevant emotional associations." The study suggests an anatomic link between purely cognitive aspects of belief and emotional reward. It also suggests that "the physiological difference between belief and disbelief can be independent of a proposition's content and affective associations." (italics, mine) [Harris] This suggested independence means that a proposition, or knowledge itself, does not require any emotion at all. In disbelief (a form of negative belief, and not the same as no-belief), the researchers also found a similar pattern of activation as that of belief.
Many believers seem to think that all humans believe and that belief represents a requirement for human life. We can show the falsity of this assumption by simply eliminating thought entirely. Not everyone can do this, especially schizophrenics, but for those that wish to, there exists methods for doing so.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, some people can completely stop their thoughts. And when someone can stop their thought process, beliefs cease to exist, at least temporarily. Ancient meditation or modern biofeedback practices show how to reduce or stop the semantic noise within our heads. During this practice, concentrating on a single idea or word (mantra) can reduce the thought level to a minimum (ekaggata). The final aim at eliminating this single thought results in a state of no-thought ("higher" levels of jhanic samadhi). While in such a state, all thoughts, ideas, and beliefs cease. Indeed EEG (electroencephalography) scans reveal that during meditative states, theta and alpha brain waves (brain waves associated with relaxed attention) dominate whereas delta waves (associated with goal-oriented and mental thoughts) are eliminated.
I bring up meditation and delusion to show that there occurs some range of degree of intensity of belief between the two extremes.
The curve above represents a population of beliefs from 0 (no beliefs, no thinking) to 1 (extreme beliefs, irrational thinking), charted with only two data points (x). The dotted line represents a guess since I have no data to plot actual probabilities (future investigators will have to gather this information). The degree of belief determines dispositions to hold an idea as absolute or true. Thus, insane forms of thinking (delusional, schizophrenia, etc.) would appear on the far right end of the graph. The extremists (far-right-political and religious-right, for example) might appear at around .8-.9. The opposite of extremism would fall toward the left end of the chart (meditators, day dreaming, etc.). From my personal observation, most people do not fall at either end of the spectrum; most fall somewhere well between the two limits. For the general population, I suspect the graph would appear as a Bell curve as shown above.
DEGREES OF BELIEFS
Although schizophrenia describes an obvious dysfunctional disease that causes harm to themselves and possibly to others, many schizophrenic properties can coexist in the "normal" human thinking process without causing notice to people observing them. Delusional thinking usually accompanies schizophrenia. But note that delusions represent false beliefs, virtually the same as the conditions for faith. Faith has become acceptable mainly because powerful social institutions support it.
Symptoms of mental disease, of course, do not appear identical for everyone. Some people may have only one episode of schizophrenia in their lifetime. Others may have recurring episodes but lead relatively normal lives in between. Others may have severe symptoms for a lifetime. Indeed, many who we consider sane commit the most atrocious criminal acts without a diagnosis of insanity. Even legal acts such as war, inquisitions, and pogroms can cause harm to its believers as well as to others. Yet we do not diagnose these acts of belief as a mental disease because the very engine of belief puts them in the context of acceptability. Most societies do not abhor war; instead, they honor it because their belief-systems support the notion of solving problems through mass killing called war. If, instead, we approached belief supported violence the way we attempt to solve mental diseases, perhaps we might produce solutions to some of our cultural problems.
A question arises out of these low-to-extreme forms of beliefs: If extreme beliefs represent a symptom or cause of mental disorder, then can a lack of belief produce a better, healthier, [or whatever desirable characteristic word you may want to use] way of socially interacting with people? At the low limit, that of meditation, one not only stops belief, but all forms of thought. This of course would result in a dangerous living condition if continued indefinitely, but only at the expense of the meditator. At worst the meditator might die for lack of food, but he or she could hardly harm anyone else. But what if one could learn how to think without beliefs? Might it not serve and advantage to make our thoughts more efficient?
Of course accidents will happen and tragedies will occur. Errors in our models of perception will no doubt always happen. But if we can reduce or eliminate beliefs, wouldn't we have fewer reasons to harm others through prejudice or violence? Without beliefs, our thoughts would follow the prevailing evidence instead of blocking them with unnecessary convictions.
Even if we cannot solve all mental diseases or prevent dangerous beliefs from forming, we might at least become aware of the mental processes that create beliefs and why they sometimes lead to intransigence. Although no one yet has a clear understanding of how schizophrenia originates, it appears that it may have some connection with genetics, brain damage, chemical imbalances or social upbringing. Fortunately treatments have become available for many mental diseases. For those who have mild cases of mental problems, education alone may redirect the neural path towards productive thinking. For others, drugs and therapy can help alleviate mental problems. Likewise, early education in critical thinking, identification of logical fallacies, and the mechanism of belief may alleviate many of our dangerous beliefs.
Disowning beliefs From the meaning of beliefs as described above, a person who owns a belief must possess two things: a thought and the feeling of that thought as 'true." The first requires a functioning neocortex and the second requires a functioning limbic system (note, by functioning, this also includes abnormal as well as normal functioning). This evolutionary and biologically inherited function brings up a valid question:
If a functioning human brain produces thought along with a feeling of 'truth,' then all humans who have functioning brains must experience beliefs, no?
Yes! And although this seems to contradict the very concept of no-beliefs, we humans have something that other animals don't have (except for, perhaps, some other primates): the power of retrospection and the ability to see our own abstractions (at least some humans have this ability). Psychologists call this ability, metacognition (coined by John Flavell). Metacognition simply means "cognition about cognition." Indeed, I have the experience of belief as when reading a convincing novel or watching a movie or a play, but I know that novels and movies represent fictions because I have the ability to think about my feelings and thoughts. Although I buy, temporarily, the belief for the entertainment value, I do not own the belief. It would prove not only silly but dangerous to walk out of a theater (say The Exorcist) and still believe the story. The same goes with any belief experience whether it comes from rational scientific reasoning or to fictions or myths. I may feel (believe) that I have discovered a scientific truth, but I know that my belief comes as a property of brain function and I have the ability to disown the belief. I can say that it feels right, but I also know that feelings don't represent facts or knowledge any more than color exists as a property in matter. I also know that feelings-of-truth can mislead, especially when future evidence contradicts the truth-valve of the belief and can lead to intransigence. I can acknowledge the feeling but I don't have to acknowledge the belief.
By putting yourself in a higher abstraction, you can 'see' the abstractions below you. In this sense you act at the arbitrator of your thoughts, picking out which produces the best results and dismissing those which don't work, all without owning any belief. Owning beliefs means that you blind yourself to seeing them as what they represent: abstractions. You must also defend the beliefs you own or else feel oppressed when someone attacks them, and this can lead to depression, argument, violence, or to any ultimate tragic end. By disowning beliefs, you not only don't have to defend them through emotion, but you avoid the problems associated with them.
If you still don't understand how you can disown an inherited biological function, let me give you an analogue using an even older biological function: the sense of balance.
Every normal human has it, those little grains of calcium carbonate, the otoconia, in the inner ear that tickle the hairs of the maculae, that detect gravity and acceleration. Pilots of early aviation used to rely on this sense in what they called, "flying by the seat of the pants." But during stormy weather or night flying, pilots became disoriented and began to lose their lives. At first the survivors chalked it up to high winds (how dare they accuse these brave pilots of becoming disoriented). But the aviation scientists knew better. When they invented instrument flying, the old timers balked, but pilots grudgingly learned to rely on the instruments. They learned to distrust their own senses and replaced it with more reliable instruments. One might even ask the heretical question: Do humans really need a sense of balance to fly at all? Note that nowhere in that statement does it say that one should eliminate the sense of balance.
I simply ask a similar question about belief. Do humans need beliefs to survive? Nowhere in that statement do I claim that one should eliminate the feeling of beliefs, only that one can eliminate the ownership of them. We humans have an evolved brain that can contemplate our own abstractions and beliefs. We can disown beliefs and replace them. So in the analogy of the sense of balance, what mechanism serves as the flying instrument that replaces belief? Critical thinking coupled with empirical testing (science).
You can feel that something seems true, even if false, while at the same time you do not have to think of it as true.
Inside our head vs Outside our head Many people have a difficult time telling the difference between what happens inside their heads as opposed to what happens outside their heads. And I don't mean just schizophrenics or psychopaths, but also sane people. Most of us have had confusions about "reality" at some times in our lives. Since all sensations and information comes to the brain filtered, we experience all our perceptions in our head. To establish the difference between outside verses inside events, we usually derive, through intuition, some sort of comparative test. Most of our sensations instinctively tell us what occurs outside. As infants, we quickly learn that the sounds we hear in our heads actually emanate from the outside. We learn to manipulate objects through touch, observe movement through sight, etc. As we grow, we begin to form abstract thought and we attach these abstractions to our perceptions. Observation, reasoning, and experimentation gives us the means to determine the difference between outside our heads and inside our heads.
Errors can creep into our thinking process. And from there it can invade our language system. This happens, virtually in any information system. If we do not correct these linguistic and logic errors, we may go for years propagating ancient errors without thinking about them. It seems obvious that this has already occurred to many cultures that have promoted dangerous belief sets. Although most will agree that dangerous beliefs present a threat and that we should do something about them, many beliefs that seem inconsequential receive no concern at all. These, seemingly, innocent beliefs act through our language system and can give us a false sense of "knowing."
To give an example, we usually think of color as "out there." We observe green foliage, blue skies, red apples, etc. Yet color, demonstrably, does not occur "out there," but rather, exclusively inside our heads. Matter contains no color. Color has no bases from the physics of light. Color, rather, describes a sensation. [10] However, matter does "reflect" or produce light. Our eyes absorb this energy and our brains interpret this information by "tagging" a sensation of color to it. Many times we express this perception through an error of language that projects color as "out there." We use ancient "essence" words like "is" and "be" that put mystical properties to events which occur only in our heads. For example, "the grass IS green" seems to project the property of "greenness" to an external plant form. Regardless of how much chlorophyll a plant may contain, it contains no "green." The color green occurs in our brains as a "tag" to an indirect reflective property of light. Yet our "essence" words and ideas continually fool us into thinking that things exist outside our heads, without the slightest evidence to support it. To help eliminate these "essence" verbs, we can simply replace them with descriptive verbs. Instead of saying "The grass is green," I might say, "The grass appears green (to me)." The descriptive verb "appears" connects perception to the observer instead of placing it outside the body. Many sentences which use "to be" verbs produce false or misleading statements. [9]
From belief to faith Many rational people, including most scientists, still insist on utilizing beliefs with the rationale that beliefs must accompany evidence to support them. Of course it proves more prudent to attach evidence to one's beliefs than to own beliefs without evidence, but why should anyone feel compelled to attach beliefs to evidence at all? Why not stand on the evidence without beliefs? Consider a measurement, for example the velocity of light. I can simply state the calculated or measured velocity as a numerical figure or I can say "I believe that the speed of light equals 299,790 KPS. But the velocity represents a measurement of an external event, not a belief. The belief of the velocity of light adds nothing to the information about the velocity of light. The belief only reflects an intransigent property of the believer and nothing at all about the measured property. Regardless of how mild the intransigence, the belief itself provides no scientific value at all. On the contrary, the belief within that individual may grow to such extent that it overshadows the evidential data and may cause the believer to hold on to his theory even if future evidence contradicts it. As a theory only, without belief, the possibility of future evidence may reveal new data that would modify and improve the theory.
I have met such believers before and when shown evidence of the differing velocity of light in crystals, their belief of an absolute value of light rose to the occasion to combat this new (to them) information. Note that when I say that belief appears unnecessary to evidence, I do not mean that ideas and thoughts should not accompany them. On the contrary, instead of beliefs, we can establish theories and models about the evidence, a predictive and productive way of understanding the consequences of the evidence. (I'll add more about this later.)
Although the reasons why people tend towards certain belief-systems remains unclear, Frank Sulloway, a research scholar, has proposed that family dynamics and birth order influences social survival strategies [8]. In general terms, firstborns tend to think conservatively and laterborns tend to think as liberals. In the extremes of both liberals and conservatives, the beliefs can take on a fantastical form of thinking. In its most dangerous form, belief can take its most intransigent property as faith, the reliance on hope and ignorance. Indeed, many psychopaths and schizophrenics provide extreme examples of faith as the beliefs inside their heads take over the evidence from outside their heads. Some researchers have noted the higher prevalence of schizophrenia in certain religions [11].
Hypotheses, theories and models
Many religious people who challenge scientists, attempt to make their scientific theories equivalent to faith. I suspect this gives the faithful comfort, as reducing theory to the level of faith puts both on an equal plane. However, useful theories do not rely on faith and do not even require belief. Scientific theories must agree with nature to some degree, faith does not. If a theory's prediction fails to produce results, then the theory itself cannot provide usefulness and the scientists must throw it out. A hypothesis represents nothing more than a good guess subject to further verification and usually precedes a theory. A workable theory, however, represents a good guess based on evidence and makes useful predictions.
Newton's theory of gravity, for example, represents a useful set of guesses that make predictions about matter traveling through space. Newton's mechanics, however, does not give us absolute or exact predictions. It only allows predictions about matter within acceptable tolerances. Einstein's theory of gravity carries Newton's theories to ever more exact figures and we can make even better guesses. But note that the theories of gravity must rely on outside evidence, and the guess must agree with experiment. A theory, therefore, without supporting evidence has no meaning. The following provides some examples of theories:
- "It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is-- if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it."
- -Richard Feynman
The kinetic theory of matter depends on the measurable properties between the forces between particles of matter.
The theories of gravitation depend on the facts of the measurable results of matter in the field of gravity.
The theory of natural selection depends on the facts of evolution as confirmed by observation, evidence and experiment.
Note that understanding any scientific aspect about the physical world requires some form of theoretical thought.
Models differ from theories, in that they usually represent an abstract copy of the event or thing that we wish to understand. They may provide us with predictions, but they can never fully represent the subject in all its nature. A model represents an incomplete abstraction of a thing outside our heads. Maps, scale models, computer simulations, etc. all provide us with methods to predict the future of an event or thing. For an example of scientific modeling, look at the history of the investigation of atoms. As the evidence accumulated, the physicists made better and more accurate (although incomplete) models of the structure of matter.
A hypothesis may lead to experiment and both may lead to a theory. If the theory of the evidence provides accurate predictions every time, sometimes we call these "laws" or "knowledge." Note, however, that "knowledge" does not mean that it comes absolute. A fact or theory may change in the future and we may have to modify our knowledge to accommodate the changing evidence.
By utilizing hypotheses, theories and models, we can express thoughts about the world without resorting to beliefs and faith.
Logic, mathematics, and reason
Unfortunately, many people misuse the concept of logic and believe that it provides a method of arriving at "truth" about the world; that if they propose a logical argument it, somehow, has validity to external events. However, logic, by itself, says little about the world and does not guarantee "truth." Logic provides a language of self-consistent reasoning that pertains only to the construction of itself. A logical conclusion based on sound reasoning, in fact, might disagree with the external event we wish to understand. For example, in the following logical construction:
All judges are lawyersThe above syllogism consists of valid logic. However, each of its propositions must agree with observation before its conclusion can provide any usefulness. Does every judge actually serve as a lawyer? Have no bishops ever served as lawyers? Reason and logic without evidential support cannot determine much about the world until the evidence supports the propositions.
No bishops are lawyers
Therefore: No bishops are judges
All ghosts are spiritsThe logic above appears sound, but what in the world does it mean and how does it relate to the world? In what context does it refer? What about Casper the ghost?
No cartoons are spirits
Therefore: No cartoons are ghosts
Interestingly, one of the signs of mental illness, especially schizophrenia, involves their irrational thinking and the errors they make in syllogistic reasoning [12].
Note also that many different "Logics" occur for many different fields. Traditional logic, for example, simply does not work in the world of quantum physics. The math, the reasoning, and the logic of the quantum world differs widely from the macro-world. Unfortunately, today most people rely on only one kind of logic, usually some from of aristotelian logic. We tend to think in terms of black/white, true/false, good/evil, guilty/not-guilty, up/down, inside/outside, etc. Although many things, indeed, follow this simple kind of logic, a plethora of things operate through a continuum. Although aristotelian logic may work great for digital circuits, or simple syllogisms, it fails miserably when trying to understand the human condition or things that work through calculus.
Mathematics represents a symbolic language of logic and provides us with a tool for reasoning. But mathematics and logic must accommodate the external events if it wishes to explain them. Of course people may have beliefs about one mathematical system over another, but any philosophical belief always fails in light of nature. Only the results of the accuracy of the predictions matter in the mathematical world; beliefs have no requirement in the outcome, regardless of how good it may make its believers feel. In fact, it has appeared commonplace in physics, especially quantum mechanics, where two entirely different mathematical approaches derived from different starting points turn out to give identical quantitative answers [13].
Although logic and mathematics may provide a useful tool for reason, scientists may encounter information about the world that matches no logic whatsoever. Unknowns and incomplete information occurs many times, but that does not necessarily prevent establishing useful results. Doctors knew that aspirin, for example, worked as a pain blocker, but for many years they had no workable explanation of how it worked. Even gravity, to this day, with all the mathematics predicting its effect on matter, has stumped physicists as to the nature of its mechanism. Many times the physicists do not even understand why their system works. They only know that it works. The prime requirement of making useful predictions must come from nature herself, from things outside our heads. All the beliefs, theories, logics and models, regardless of how well they got constructed, cannot do us any good unless they have some support from evidence. Many times events outside our heads provide us with life sustaining support without our thinking about them at all (such as breathing air)!
Instead of relying on one logical system, as most people do, we might instead incorporate a language that incorporates a system of logics and we might choose the system that best fits the object of investigation. Sadly our English language contains severe limitations and cannot possibly express many of the extraordinary discoveries of the new physics. Mathematics allows a language of continuum, multiple dimensions, and infinities and all without the need for introducing ghostly beliefs.
Preconceived beliefs
I once heard an amusing story about the artist, Picasso. I don't know if this actually happened but it makes a point about how people construct beliefs of reality from abstractions:
A stranger recognizing Picasso asked him why he didn't paint pictures of people "the way they really are." Picasso asked the man what he meant by "the way they really are," and the man pulled out of his wallet a snapshot of his wife as an example. Picasso responded: "Isn't she rather small and flat?
To believe that an abstract representation shows the actual thing leads to an unnecessary biased form of perception. Belief of any kind puts a kind of shield on the thinker and puts in its place a form of thought which in effect says: "This is real." Preconceived beliefs coupled with the lack of information can lead to false conclusions.
To take another example, I might say to a group of people, "I love fish." Everyone may hear me correctly, but because of their preconceived beliefs and a lack of context, some may interpret my meaning as a statement about dining and others may believe I have a love for aquarium fish. Virtually all expressions of thought contain some limitations and to add preconceived ideas without evidentiary support can produce false statements and beliefs.
Without resorting to belief, I can look at a photograph and see that it only resembles some aspect of a particular thing or person, and that it represents an indirect abstraction. Without belief, I can question a proposition before arriving at a conclusion.
Limitations of knowledge
Our thoughts and expressions through language represent abstractions about the world, metaphors and models about things and not the things themselves. Language and thought cannot describe the totality of a thing anymore than a painting or picture can. A picture does not equal its subject, and a map does not equal its territory. But our myths, maps, models, and abstract thoughts do provide a limited means to understand the world and to make predictions about external events. They provide a way to quantify and simplify our communication systems so that we can perform desirable and useful actions in the world. But if we allow unnecessary thoughts and beliefs to reside with our abstractions, we develop semantic noise which can lead to incorrect information.
- "It used to be thought that physics describes the universe. Now we know that physics only describes what we can say about the universe."
- -Niels Bohr
- "It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong."
- -Thomas Jefferson
As limited humans, we do not possess absolute knowledge. Our perceptions and information comes to us incomplete. When we look, touch and measure an object, for example, we only observe part of its totality. Belief, on the other hand, can produce the illusion that we understand without limitations. Eliminating concepts of beliefs, at least puts us closer to the range of our perceptions. We inherit mortal limitations, we cannot know with absolute certainly about the external world; we cannot completely remove doubt about our conclusions. Many philosophers and scientists have come to this same observation [14]. Doubt leaves the door open for further investigation. Intransigent belief puts a mental barrier to further knowledge.
Bias (point of view)
Because our models and theories represent limited knowledge about the world, this forces us to examine the universe within boundaries. This produces a point of view. Bias represents a focus, direction, or preference towards a point of view without examining or ignoring existing evidence. One cannot avoid a point of view. Regardless of how one might try to prevent bias, there will most always occur something left out of the description. Similar to Heisenburg' Uncertainty Principle, as a focus becomes narrow, the more outside its focus gets left out. And vice versa, the more general a view becomes, the more the details get left out. If one tries to include the details with the general, a view can bog down with an overblown aggregation of information, turning a direction of thought into a cloud of complexity; and even still, the entire system would reside within a framework of limitations. Regardless of how one may reject beliefs, a point of view occurs if only because we represent a unique and limited spatial entity within the universe.
The negative aspect we usually associate with bias does not come from bias itself but rather the belief that comes with it. Belief produces a set of brackets around a point of view that says in effect "The answer lies here." Once you believe you have found the answer, your point of view becomes biased, (intransigent and prejudiced) and prevents you from looking at other possible alternatives. Again, beliefs act as a barrier to further understanding. If a person develops a faith in a point of view, then it becomes overwhelming to the point that nothing, even in the light of convincing evidence, will the faithful yield to better information. A biased belief can convince its believers that they hold the key to all understanding and "truth" without providing any evidence to support it.
A point of view, however, does not demand a predisposition to belief; it can simply represent a direction of thought. Ideas, by their very nature, represent limitations of thought. As long as a point of view produces a reasonable explanation, uses only pertinent information necessary to make predictions and leaves open the possibility of change in favor of better evidence, then it serves as a useful and productive tool. As we learn and understand our limitations, that a point of view represents an understood direction, we have the possibility to transcend it into an even more productive point of view.
Imagination, fantasy and wonder
As humans, we have the remarkable ability to make things up and to pretend. Imagination and fantasy provides us with one of the most pleasurable ways to experience thoughts and gives us one of the fundamental requirements for the ability to create. Our imagination provides us with the mental capacity to express models in our heads and to act out scenarios of love, conquest, gamesmanship and adventure. I can't imagine any new invention, art, or literature deriving without its author engaging in the pleasure of a fantasy. The feeling of wonder about things in the world and the mysteries of the universe fills us with imagination and speculation.
- "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
- -Albert Einstein
Fantasies and imaginations, of course require no belief in them. They provide us a way to model and hypothesize non-actual events that may eventually lead to knowledge of actual things or perhaps even a novel invention. Fantasy coupled with ideas about actual events can lead to great insights about future events. Many a science fiction story, for example, has inspired scientists to construct hypotheses that lead to verifiable experiment and the invention of useful machines. Even fantasy by itself provides an enjoyable way of expressing thoughts. But if an individual begins to believe in his own fantasy, or worse, has faith in it, then usually only disappointment or tragedies result.
Natural desire
Desire comes to us as a natural feeling. As biological animals, we cannot avoid desires. We desire food, shelter, freedom of expression, etc. As exploratory animals, we humans use our minds as a tool to help satisfy the desires within us. With reflection and thought, we learn the limits to our desires. Eating too much, for example, can lead to limited heath and the prevention of satisfying other desires. By understanding the consequences of desire, we can avoid the excesses and blockages of desire. To express and satisfy our desires (sex, feelings, hunger, etc.) provides a human need. And if we do not satisfy our natural needs, then severe consequences can result.
- "We always move on two feet-- the two poles of knowledge and desire."
- -Elie Faure
Sadly, many of our belief-systems put a stranglehold on our natural instinctive desires. If a belief-system teaches that "sex is evil," "only godly belief will help you," or suppresses expression and communication, we may turn depraved, depressed, or violent.
Believers many times express desire indirectly in terms of hope, a form of wishful thinking. Indeed faith hinges on the requirement of hope and ignorance. Hope without an adequate method of achieving our desires can lead to debilitating disappointment and sorrow. I can only imagine the number of tragedies that have occurred from failures due to excessive wishful thinking. Instead of relying on faith and hope, we might analyze our desires and use our knowledge and creative minds to find a way of satisfying them.
Morality
Many people think that morality stems from religion, usually from some form of 'divine' instruction in the form of scripture, holy writ or from the teachings of shamans or priests. However, research from evolutionary biologists and sociobiologists have shown that the precursors of human morality occur in many other social animals, especially primates such as chimpanzees and bonobos (our closest animal relatives). Religion emerged after morality and, thus, human morality cannot have come originally from religion. As an example from personal experience, I remember as a child that I learned about golden rule behavior by interacting with my fellow school mates in the sandlot before anyone taught me about religion, nor did I even know about what the golden rule or morality meant! I simply behaved in a manner that felt right to me at the time. (A few other children acted through Iron rule behavior, the "bullies").
Morality ultimately stems from the brain and it requires emotions and consciousness. The science of human behavior suggests that innate morality comes to us from birth, perhaps similar to the language instinct where humans have an innate capacity for language even though any particular language comes from cultural development (see Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky). Religion may have served as the first system to control morality through religious belief instruction (and force) but that says nothing about the workability of a moral system. In fact, one can argue that religious morality creates more moral problems because it does not conform to reality (because it relies on supernatural beliefs, not on nature) and it produces dogma which can prevent one from establishing workable morality in light of new evidence. After all, the three most influential religions in the world (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) stem from books written during the Bronze and Iron ages long before people understood the science of biology and human behavior. Clearly thousands of years of moral instruction from these religions have never produced a workable moral system (do I really need to go into wars, slavery, pogroms, witch hunts, intolerance's, etc. to explain this?)
Since humans live in the natural world and science provides the only tools to understand the natural world, it follows that science might provide us with the best way to establish workable moral systems. Unfortunately, much of human nature remains unknown to us and scientists have barely begun to study moral systems. Moreover, the dogmatic belief that morality can only come from religion further bars people from thinking about it, even from many scientists. Nevertheless, the science of morality started with the philosophical ideas from Jeremy Bentham, the philosophy of consequentialism, the research on human cooperation from Robert Axelrod, and many scientists now studying how the brain creates moral judgments.
Innate morality does not require ownership of beliefs because it acts through our biological system in response to stimulus and our environment (although many people do attach beliefs to them). I do not have to believe in order to act. However religious morality almost always requires belief because it involves religious instruction which one must believe in order to accept the dogma. In both cases, innate morality or religious morality might prove tragically wrong because of particular circumstances (for example, I might treat someone altruistically not knowing that that person relies on deception and trickery to get what he wants, or I might turn the other cheek to an enemy which could result in the death of myself and others).
Instead of relying on innate feelings or belief, I can spend more time thinking and evaluating my feelings and the feelings of others around me and to try to establish the consequences of my actions (ethics).
Morality requires feelings and emotions because our subjective values stem from emotions, and we need values to establish morality. Here we have emotions that trump logical reasoning (just opposite of beliefs). For morality, we want to use emotions with logical structures but not as beliefs but as a way to achieve desires and wants. Beliefs involve statements about external truths which do not require the feelings but in morality we must use our feelings to direct us toward a workable moral system. But one does not need to use belief statements to do this. Instead one need only use desire statements. For example, I want people to live together peacefully because everyone will feel better as a result. And then I might describe a way to achieve this want by using a theory to establish it. At no time do I require beliefs to establish statements about morality.
Much of our innate feelings already drives us in this direction but only a full study of the behavior and feelings of humans can result in any kind of consensus on the right action to take. And this requires science. In any case, one could construct an ethical system that remains flexible, based on human nature and science, all without owning a single moral belief. Of course disowning beliefs does not guarantee a workable moral system but it does get rid of all the belief based systems that have no connection at all with human nature. At the very least, this opens up opportunities to create a moral system that works for both the individual as well as others.
Everyone believes in something?
Many a believer, religious and atheist alike, will become astonished at any statement against belief, if for no other reason because they believe and the people around them have beliefs. They tend to form a belief-of-its-own that projects beliefs onto others. However, simply because most people own beliefs does not necessarily follow that all people own beliefs. To claim the knowledge that everyone on earth believes in something portends an astonishing proclamation. It would require an omniscient ability to see into the minds of every human on earth. Moreover, many people fail to understand that belief requires conscious acceptance. People who own beliefs (unless they lie) do not deny them. Quite the contrary, people who believe, admit their beliefs quite readily. Furthermore, few people stop to ask what we mean by beliefs or understand that one can replace belief with other forms of "thinking."
I don't believe the sun will rise tomorrow, but I predict it will
Not believing in something does not mean thinking something may not happen. The absence of belief does not prevent one from predicting the event. It may seem fatuous not to believe the sun will not appear the next day. However, as a limited human being, I maintain no absolute certainty that a sunrise will occur. At best. I can only make a prediction based on past experience. Since I have experienced daylight every day of my life, and know of no human who hasn't, I have little evidence that a sunrise will not occur tomorrow. Therefore I can make a prediction based on past experience that a sunrise will appear highly likely to occur the next day. Note that I do not require believing to do this, only observation, experience, and good guessing. Prediction based on experience, in this case, replaces belief. But note that my prediction may prove wrong, regardless of how remote the chances. We have evidence that supernovas exist in the universe that can destroy local solar systems. If, indeed, such an event occurred in our part of the galaxy, our sun could possibly get absorbed, along with the earth and all humans on it. So although there exists a very remote chance that the sun will not appear, I can at least predict with great (but imperfect) accuracy that I will see sunlight the next day.
By replacing belief with predictive thought, one can eliminate the need for belief, yet still maintain an outlook on life and make useful predictions.
Don't you believe you exist?
To the believer who poses this question, I can only respond with, "Of course I don't believe I exist, I know I exist. Apparently you only believe you exist." Knowledge trumps belief every time.
Questions about belief of our own existence aim to put a philosophical end to the discussion by proposing an impossible (to believers) proposition that no one could possibly deny. However, eliminating belief does not deny the evidence of existence. This appears so obvious and apparent that it only shows the power of belief to blind people from the world around them.
Any fair observer will note that no animal, including humans, require a need to believe in their existence. Humans, however, have the power of knowledge and the ability to express themselves. I know I exist because I get knowledge of my existence every second of my conscious life directly from my feelings, perceptions, dreams, or thoughts, and I can examine my physical body- no belief required. Belief only introduces an unnecessary proposition. I can simply say "I exist," instead of "I believe I exist." My knowledge of existence comes from experience, not belief. The elimination of beliefs, makes our statements more concise, accurate and meaningful.
However, when one only believes in their existence, they automatically reduce their entire life to an abstraction: a belief. In effect, they have put an unnecessary barrier between their minds and the world around them.
Owning no beliefs does not result in nihilism
To characterize no beliefs as nihilist only creates a straw man. Of course a nihilist might very well claim to abandon knowledge of existence but usually it comes in the form of a belief-- one who believes that nothing exists or one who believes that no one can know anything. Nothing I have written rejects the notion of existence or knowledge, whether it comes from metaphysical, political or ethical thought. Abandoning beliefs does not prevent one from reality, morality or sociality. On the contrary, I submit that eliminating ownership of beliefs tends to enhance the knowledge of things by the very act of eliminating the very obstruction which prevents us from knowing how things work in the universe. The elimination of beliefs as I describe it illustrates the very antithesis of nihilism. The problems that derive from beliefs prevent us from knowledge of existence, morality and workable political systems.
Ironically many believers who accuse others of nihilism follow a similar path of nihilism by denying reality in favor of superstitious beliefs. How in the world can one know about reality when one believes in a supernatural force which (according to religious philosophers) remains entirely separated from the world, and in principle, no one can know?
So if you think (or believe) that I submit to a form of nihilism, then you will have abandoned a main premise and put yourself at a personal disadvantage by ignoring or denying an idea (a valid and very workable idea in my opinion).
No, I don't believe my own words
And neither should you. But I do ask questions, and because you've read this far you, and even if you strongly disagree, you must ask yourself this: Which method works best: acting on beliefs or acting on knowledge? If you have difficulty answering this question, then perhaps your beliefs prevent you from acknowledging the obvious.
This text presents points of views based from my (and others) experiences, observations, and research about the thought process. I do not present them as beliefs but rather as an investigation into the mechanism of belief. If any of my statements prove false, then they will show simply that, and subject to further revision. Disowning beliefs does not guarantee "truth" or accuracy, only a method to help clear away superstitions and falsehoods.
Summary
Beliefs and faiths represent a type of mental activity that produces an unnecessary and dangerous false sense of trust and wrongful information (thinking coupled with the feeling of 'truth'). Faith rarely agrees with the world around us. History has shown that beliefs and faith, of the most intransigent kind, have served as the trigger for tragic violence and destruction and sustained the ignorance of people. Replacing beliefs with predictive thoughts based on experience and evidence provide a means to eliminate intransigence and dangerous superstitious thought.
Beliefs and faiths do not establish "truths" or facts. It does not matter how many people believe or for how many centuries they have believed it. It does not matter how reverent or important people think of them, if it does not agree with evidence, then it simply cannot have any validity to the outside world. All things we know about the world, we can express without referring to a belief. Even at its most benign level, beliefs can act as barriers to further understanding.
I present a very simple observation at the limits of ignorance and knowledge: If you don't know about something and you submit it to nothing but belief, it will likely prove false; if you know about something, then you don't need to believe it, because you know it. Between ignorance and knowledge you have the uncertainties about the world, and the best way to handle uncertainties involves thinking in terms of probabilities. So what use does belief have?
If you have awareness of abstracting, you can then begin to replace believing with thinking.
Instead of owning beliefs, we can utilize hypothesis, theory, and models to make predictions about things in the world. In its semantic form, we can replace "belief" words with "thinking" words which better describes the formation of our ideas. We can use our imaginations to create new hypothesis towards desired goals. The wonder of the universe gives us a powerful feeling of inquisitiveness. Certainly we will fail sometimes, but disowning beliefs allows us to correct our mistakes without submitting our ideas to years or centuries of traditional time consuming barriers. Theory coupled with imagination can yield inventive thoughts and points of views. By further understanding our language and eliminating unworkable essence words, we can communicate without resorting to preconceived ideas based on past beliefs. Our feeling of wonder about the universe provides us the fuel for exploration; how much more magnificent the results from useful thoughts than ones based on belief or faith.
Notes:
[1] Sagan, C., Duryan, A., "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," p. 198
[2] Eisler, Riane, "The Chalice & the Blade," Chapter 2
[3] Shapiro, Sue A., "Contemporary Theories of Schizophrenia, Review and Synthesis," p.10
See also Early Warning Signs of schizophrenia: http://www.mentalhealth.com/book/p40-sc02.html#Head_5
[4] Modrow, John, "How to Become a Schizophrenic," See Introduction & Chapter 1
[5] Hooper, Judith & Teresi, Dick, "The 3-Pound Universe, "p. 48 (paperback)
[6] Hooper, Judith & Teresi, Dick, "The 3-Pound Universe, "p. 106 (paperback)
[7] Scheibe, Karl E., "Beliefs and Values," p.27
[8] Sulloway, Frank J., "Born to Rebel: Birth Order; Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives." Sulloway presents a scientific statistical analysis of radical believers in history compared to conservative believers. His findings offer evidence that family dynamics influences the behavior of siblings. Firstborns tend to identify with parents of authority and status quo, while laterborns tend to rebel against authority. This engine of behavior can influence what we believe in.
[9] Bourland, Jr., D. David, and Johnston, P. D., "To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology, 1991, International Society for General Semantics
[10] Feynman, Richard, "The Feymnan Lectures on Physics," Vol 1, pp. 35-10
[11] Bellak M.D., Leopold, "Disorders of the Schizophrenic Syndrome," pp. 26-27
[12] Chapman, Loren J. & Champman, Jean, P., "Disordered Thought in Schizophrenia," Chapter 8: "Errors in Syllogistic Reasoning"
[13] Heisenberg's matrix mechanics and Schrodinger's wave mechanics provide an example of two mathematical systems which give equivalent results. See Polkinghorne, J.C., "The Quantum World," p.14 (paperback)
[14] Levi, Isaac, "The Fixation of Belief and its Undoing," pp. 2-3
Bibliography (click on an underlined book title if you wish to obtain it):
Bellak M.D., Leopold, "Disorders of the Schizophrenic Syndrome," Basic Books, Inc., New York, 1979
Bourland, Jr., D. David, and Johnston, P. D., "To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology," International Society for General Semantics, 1991
Chapman, Loren J. & Champman, Jean, P., "Disordered Thought in Schizophrenia," Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973
Crees, Adrian, "Anatomy of Religion," Freshet Press, 1989
Dawkins, Richard, "The God Delusion," Bantom Press, 2006
Feynman, Richard, "The Character of Physical Law," The M.I.T. Press, 1965
Feynman, Richard, "The Feymnan Lectures on Physics," Vol. 1, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1963
Gottesman, Irving I., "Schizophrenia Genesis, the Origins of Madness," 1991
Harris, Sam, Sameer, A. Sheth, Cohen, Mark S, "Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty," 2007
Herbert, Nick, "Quantum Reality, Beyond the New Physics," Anchor Books, 1985
Hoffer, Eric, "The True Believer, "The New American Library," 1951
Hooper, Judith & Teresi, Dick, "The 3-Pound Universe," Dell Publishing, 1986
Is Religion a Form of Insanity a Free Inquiry Symposium, [Free Inquiry, Summer, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1993]
Levi, Isaac, "The Fixation of Belief and its Undoing," Cambridge University Press, 1991
Modrow, John, "How to Become a Schizophrenic," Apollyon Press, 1995
Murphy, H.B.M., "Cultural Factors in the Genesis of Schizophrenia, in the transmission of schizophrenia," Rosenthal, D., & Kety, S.S., Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1968
Polkinghorne, J.C., "The Quantum World," Princeton University Press, 1984
Ramachandran, V.S; Blakeslee, S., "Phantoms in the Brain : Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind," Quill, 1999
Sagan, Carl & Druyan, Ann, "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," Random House, New York, 1992
Scheibe, Karl E., "Beliefs and Values," Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970
Shapiro, Sue A., "Contemporary Theories of Schizophrenia, Review and Synthesis," McGraw-Hill Book Co. 1981
Sinclair, W.A., "The Traditional Formal Logic," Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1937
Sulloway, Frank J., "Born to Rebel: Birth Order; Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives," Pantheon Books, New York, 1996
Internet sites:
An Essay on Belief and Acceptance by Jonathan Cohen
Atoms, a short history of the knowledge of the atom by Jim Walker
Brain Waves and Meditation
Confusing the Map for the Territory by Jim Walker
Schizophrenia: early warning signs by Max Birchwood, Elizabeth Spencer & Dermot McGovern
Pictures of the brain's activity during Yoga Nidra by Robert Nilsson
Understanding E-Prime: by R. A. Wilson
HOME
-------------------
Jane Goodall
How humans and animals can live together
Good afternoon, good evening, whatever. We can go, jambo, guten Abend, bonsoir, but we can also ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. That is the call that chimpanzees make before they go to sleep in the evening. You hear it going from one side of the valley to the other, from one group of nests to the next.
00:44
And I want to pick up with my talk this evening
from where Zeray left off yesterday.
He was talking about this amazing, three-year-old Australopithecine child, Selam.
And we've also been hearing about the history, the family tree, of mankind
through DNA genetic profiling.
And it was a paleontologist, the late Louis Leakey,
who actually set me on the path for studying chimpanzees.
And it was pretty extraordinary, way back then.
It's kind of commonplace now,
but his argument was -- because he'd been searching
for the fossilized remains of early humans in Africa.
And you can tell an awful lot
about what those beings looked like from the fossils,
from the shape of the muscle attachments,
something about the way they lived
from the various artifacts found with them.
But what about how they behaved? That's what he wanted to know.
And of course, behavior doesn't fossilize.
He argued -- and it's now a fairly common theory --
that if we found behavior patterns similar or the same
in our closest living relatives, the great apes, and humans today,
then maybe those behaviors were present in the ape-like,
human-like ancestor some seven million years ago.
And therefore, perhaps we had brought those characteristics with us
from that ancient, ancient past.
02:18
Well, if you look in textbooks today that deal with human evolution,
you very often find people speculating about how early humans
may have behaved, based on the behavior of chimpanzees.
They are more like us than any other living creature,
and we've heard about that during this TED Conference.
So it remains for me to comment on the ways in which chimpanzees
are so like us, in certain aspects of their behavior.
02:50
Every chimpanzee has his or her own personality.
Of course, I gave them names. They can live to be 60 years or more,
although we think most of them probably don't make it to 60 in the wild.
Mr. Wurzel. The female has her first baby when she's 11 or 12.
Thereafter, she has one baby only every five or six years,
a long period of childhood dependency when the child is nursing,
sleeping with the mother at night, and riding on her back.
And we believe that this long period of childhood
is important for chimpanzees, just as it is for us, in relation to learning.
As the brain becomes ever more complex
during evolution in different forms of animals,
so we find that learning plays an ever more important role
in an individual's life history.
And young chimpanzees spend a lot of time watching what their elders do.
We know now that they're capable of imitating behaviors that they see.
And we believe that it's in this way
that the different tool-using behaviors -- that have now been seen
in all the different chimpanzee populations studied in Africa --
how these are passed from one generation to the next,
through observation, imitation and practice,
so that we can describe these tool-using behaviors as primitive culture.
04:12
Chimpanzees don't have a spoken language. We've talked about that.
They do have a very rich repertoire of postures and gestures,
many of which are similar, or even identical, to ours
and formed in the same context. Greeting chimpanzees embracing.
They also kiss, hold hands, pat one another on the back.
And they swagger and they throw rocks.
In chimpanzee society, we find many, many examples of compassion,
precursors to love and true altruism.
Unfortunately, they, like us, have a dark side to their nature.
They're capable of extreme brutality, even a kind of primitive war.
And these really aggressive behaviors, for the most part,
are directed against individuals of the neighboring social group.
They are very territorially aggressive.
Chimpanzees, I believe, more than any other living creature,
have helped us to understand that, after all, there is no sharp line
between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.
05:16
It's a very blurry line, and it's getting more blurry all the time
as we make even more observations.
The study that I began in 1960 is still continuing to this day.
And these chimpanzees, living their complex social lives in the wild,
have helped -- more than anything else --
to make us realize we are part of, and not separated from,
the amazing animals with whom we share the planet.
So it's pretty sad to find that chimpanzees,
like so many other creatures around the world, are losing their habitats.
This is just one photograph from the air,
and it shows you the forested highlands of Gombe.
And it was when I flew over the whole area, about 16 years ago,
and realized that outside the park, this forest,
which in 1960 had stretched almost unbroken
along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika,
which is where the tiny, 30-square-mile Gombe National Park lies,
that a question came to my mind.
"How can we even try to save these famous chimpanzees,
when the people living around the National Park are struggling to survive?"
More people are living there than the land could possibly support.
The numbers increased by refugees pouring in from Burundi
and over the lake from Congo.
And very poor people -- they couldn't afford to buy food from elsewhere.
06:45
This led to a program, which we call TACARE.
It's a very holistic way of improving the lives
of the people living in the villages around the park.
It started small with 12 villages. It's now in 24.
There isn't time to go into it, but it's including things like tree nurseries,
methods of farming most suitable to this now very degraded,
almost desert-like land up in these mountains.
Ways of controlling, preventing soil erosion.
Ways of reclaiming overused farmland,
so that within two years they can again be productive.
Working to help the villagers obtain fresh water from wells.
Perhaps build some schoolrooms.
Most important of all, I believe,
is working with small groups of women,
providing them with opportunities for micro-credit loans.
And we've got, as is the case around the world,
about 95 percent of all loans returned.
Empowering women, working with education,
providing scholarships for girls so they can finish secondary school,
in the clear understanding that, all around the world,
as women's education improves, family size drops.
We provide information about family planning and about HIV/AIDS.
08:13
And as a result of this program,
something's happening for conservation.
What's happening for conservation is that the farmers living in these 24 villages,
instead of looking on us as a bunch of white people
coming to study a whole bunch of monkeys --
and by the way, many of the staff are now Tanzanian --
but when we began the TACARE program,
it was a Tanzanian team going into the villages.
It was a Tanzanian team talking to the villagers,
asking what they were interested in.
Were they interested in conservation? Absolutely not.
They were interested in health; they were interested in education.
And as time went on, and as their situation began to improve,
they began to understand ever more about the need for conservation.
They began to understand
that as the upper levels of the hills were denuded of trees,
so you've got this terrible soil erosion and mudslides.
09:13
Today, we are developing what we call the Greater Gombe Ecosystem.
This is an area way outside the National Park,
stretching out into all these very degraded lands.
And as these villages have a better standard of life,
they are actually agreeing to put
between 10 percent and 20 percent of their land in the highlands aside,
so that once again, as the trees grow back,
the chimpanzees will have leafy corridors
through which they can travel to interact --
as they must for genetic viability --
with other remnant groups outside the National Park.
So TACARE is a success.
We're replicating it in other parts of Africa,
around other wilderness areas
which are faced with extreme population pressure.
10:03
The problems in Africa, however, as we've been discussing
for the whole of these first couple of days of TED,
are major problems.
There is a great deal of poverty.
And when you get large numbers of people
living in land that is not that fertile,
particularly when you cut down trees,
and you leave the soil open to the wind for erosion,
as desperate populations cut down more and more trees,
so that they can try and grow food for themselves and their families,
what's going to happen? Something's got to give.
And the other problems -- in not only Africa,
but the rest of the developing world and, indeed, everywhere --
what are we doing to our planet?
You know, the famous scientist, E. O. Wilson
said that if every person on this planet
attains the standard of living of the average European or American,
we need three new planets.
Today, they are saying four. But we don't have them. We've got one.
11:13
And what's happened? I mean, the question here is, here we are,
arguably the most intelligent being that's ever walked planet Earth,
with this extraordinary brain,
capable of the kind of technology
that is so well illustrated by these TED Conferences,
and yet we're destroying the only home we have.
The indigenous people around the world,
before they made a major decision,
used to sit around and ask themselves,
"How does this decision affect our people seven generations ahead?"
Today, major decisions -- and I'm not particularly talking about Africa here,
but the developed world --
major decisions involving millions of dollars,
and millions of people, are often based on,
"How will this affect the next shareholders' meeting?"
And these decisions affect Africa.
12:06
As I began traveling around Africa
talking about the problems faced by chimpanzees and their vanishing forests,
I realized more and more how so many of Africa's problems
could be laid at the door of previous colonial exploitation.
So I began traveling outside Africa, talking in Europe,
talking in the United States, going to Asia.
And everywhere there were these terrible problems.
And you know the kind I'm talking about. I'm talking about pollution.
The air that we breathe that often poisons us.
The earth is poisoning our foods.
The water -- water is perhaps one of the most crucial issues
that we're going to face in this century --
and everywhere water is being polluted by agricultural,
industrial and household chemicals
that still are being sprayed around the world,
seemingly with the inability to profit from past experience.
The mangroves are being cut down;
the effects of things like the tsunami get worse.
We've talked about the soil erosion.
We have the reckless burning of fossil fuels
along with other greenhouse gasses, so called,
leading to climate change.
Finally, all around the world, people have begun to believe
that there is something going on very wrong with our climate.
13:24
All around the world climates are mixed up.
And it's the poor people who are affected worse.
It's Africa that already is affected.
In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the droughts are so much worse.
And when the rain does come, it so often leads to flooding
and added distress, and the cycle of poverty and hunger and disease.
And the numbers of people living in an area that the land cannot support,
who are too poor to buy food,
who can't move away because the whole land is degraded.
And so you get desertification -- creeping, creeping, creeping --
as the last of the trees are cut down.
And this kind of thing is not just in Africa. It's all over the world.
14:13
So it wasn't surprising to me
that as I was traveling around the world
I met so many young people who seemed to have lost hope.
We seem to have lost wisdom, the wisdom of the indigenous people.
I asked a question. "Why?"
Well, do you think there could be some kind of disconnect
between this extraordinarily clever brain,
the kind of brain that the TED technologies exemplify,
and the human heart? Talking about it in the non-scientific term,
in terms of love and compassion. Is there some disconnect?
And these young people, when I talk to them,
basically they were either depressed or apathetic,
or bitter and angry. And they said more or less the same thing,
"We feel this way because we feel you've compromised our future
and there's nothing we can do about it."
15:10
We have compromised their future.
I've got three little grandchildren, and every time I look at them
and I think how we've harmed this beautiful planet since I was their age,
I feel this desperation.
And that led to this program we call Roots and Shoots,
which began right here in Tanzania
and has now spread to 97 countries around the world.
It's symbolic. Roots make a firm foundation.
Shoots seem tiny; to reach the sun they can break through a brick wall.
See the brick wall as all these problems we've inflicted on the planet,
environmental and social. It's a message of hope.
Hundreds and thousands of young people around the world
can break through and can make this a better world for all living things.
The most important message of Roots and Shoots:
every single one of us makes a difference, every single day.
We have a choice. Every one of us in this room,
we have a choice as to what kind of difference we want to make.
The very poor have no choice. It's up to us to change things
so that the poor have choice as well.
16:19
The Roots and Shoots groups all choose three projects.
It depends on how old they are, and which country,
whether they're in a city or rural, as to what kinds of projects.
But basically, we have programs now from preschool right through university,
with more and more adults starting their own Roots and Shoots groups.
And every group chooses, between them,
three different kinds of project to make this a better world,
recognizing that all these different problems are interconnected
and impinge on each other.
So one of their projects will be to help their own human community.
And then, if they're able, they may raise money to help communities
in other parts of the world.
One of their projects will be to help animals -- not just wildlife,
domestic animals as well.
And one of their projects will be to help the environment that we all share.
And woven throughout all of this is a message
of learning to live in peace and harmony within ourselves,
in our families, in our communities, between nations, between cultures,
between religions and between us and the natural world.
We need the natural world. We cannot go on destroying it at the rate we are.
We not do have more than this one planet.
17:38
Just picking one or two of the projects right here in Africa
that the Roots and Shoots groups are doing,
one or two projects only -- in Tanzania, in Uganda, Kenya,
South Africa, Congo-Brazzaville, Sierra Leone, Cameroon
and other groups. And as I say, it's in 97 countries around the world.
Of course, they're planting trees. They're growing organic vegetables.
They're working in the refugee camps, with chickens
and selling the eggs for a little amount of money,
or just using them to feed their families,
and feeling a sense of pride and empowerment,
because they're no longer helpless and depending on others
with their vegetables and their chickens.
It's being used in Uganda
to give some psychological help to ex-child soldiers.
Doing projects like this is bringing them out of themselves.
Once again, they're useful members of society.
We have this program in prisons as well.
So, there's no time for more Roots and Shoots now.
But -- oh, they're also working on HIV/AIDS.
That's a very important component of Roots and Shoots,
with older kids talking to younger ones.
And unwanted pregnancies and things like that,
which young people listen to better from other youth, rather than adults.
18:56
Hope. That's the question I get asked as I'm going around the world:
"Jane, you've seen so many terrible things,
you've seen your chimpanzees decrease in number
from about one million, at the turn of the century,
to no more than 150,000 now, and the same with so many other animals.
Forests disappearing, deserts where once there was forest.
Do you really have hope?" Well, yes.
You can't come to a conference like TED and not have hope, can you?
And of course, there's hope. One is this amazing human brain.
19:29
And I mean, think of the technologies.
And I've just been so thrilled, finally, to come to people talking about compost latrines.
It's one of my hobbyhorses.
We just flush all this water down the lavatory, it's terrible.
And then talking about renewable energy -- desperately important.
Do we care about the planet for our children?
How many of us have children or grandchildren, nieces, nephews?
Do we care about their future?
And if we care about their future, we, as the elite around the world,
we can do something about it. We can make choices as to how we live each day.
What we buy. What we wear.
And choose to make these choices with the question,
how will this affect the environment around me?
How will it affect the life of my child when he or she grows up?
Or my grandchild, or whatever it is.
So the human brain, coupled with the human heart,
and we join hands around the world.
And that's what TED is helping so well with, and Google who help us,
and Esri are helping us with mapping in Gombe National Park.
All of these technologies we can use.
20:42
Now let's link them, and it's beginning to happen, isn't it?
You've heard about it this afternoon. It's beginning to happen.
This change, this change. To see change
that we must have if we care about the future.
And the next reason for hope -- nature is amazingly resilient.
You can take an area that's absolutely destroyed,
with time and perhaps some help it can regenerate.
And an example is the TACARE program.
I told you, where a seemingly dead tree stump --
if you stop hacking them for firewood,
which you don't need to because you have wood lots,
then in five years you can have a 30-foot tree.
And animals, almost on the brink of extinction,
can be given a second chance. That's my next book.
It's inspiring. And it brings me to my last category of hope,
and we've heard about this so much in the last two days:
this indomitable human spirit. This determination of people,
the resilience of the human spirit,
So that people who you would think would be battered by poverty,
or disease, or whatever, can pull themselves up out of it,
sometimes with a helping hand, and take their part in society,
and take their part in changing the world.
21:55
And just to think of one or two people out of Africa who are just really inspiring.
We could make a very long list,
but obviously Nelson Mandela, emerging from 17 years
of hard physical labor, 23 years of imprisonment,
with this amazing ability to forgive, so that he could lead his nation
out the evil regime of apartheid without a bloodbath.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, in Nigeria, who took on the giant oil companies,
and although people around the world tried their best, was executed.
People like this are so inspirational.
People like this are the role models we need for young Africans.
And we need some environmental role models as well,
and I've been hearing some of them today.
So I'm really grateful for this opportunity to share this message
again, with everyone at TED.
And I hope that some of us can get together and talk about some of these things,
especially the Roots and Shoots program.
22:54
And just a last word on that --
the young woman who's running this entire conference center,
I met her today.
She came up so excited, with her certificate. She was [in] Roots and Shoots.
She was in the leadership in Dar es Salaam.
She said it's helped her to do what she's doing.
And it was very, very exciting for me to meet her
and see just one example of how young people,
when they are empowered, given the opportunity to take action,
to make the world a better place,
truly are our hope for tomorrow.
Thank you.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_goodall_at_tedglobal_07/transcript
-----------------
Refugees as Weapons in a Propaganda War
In
the wake of the horrific terror attacks in Paris, world attention will
once again be focused on the issue of refugees entering Europe. While
much of the spotlight has been rightly pointed at Syrian refugees
fleeing the western-sponsored war against the Syrian government, it must
be remembered that the refugees come from a variety of countries, each
of which has its own particular circumstances, with many of them having
been victims of US-NATO aggression in one form or another. Syria,
Afghanistan and Libya have of course been targeted by so-called
‘humanitarian wars’ and fake ‘revolutions’ which have left the countries
fractured, divided, and unable to function; these countries have been
transformed into failed states thanks to US-NATO policy.
What often gets lost in the discussion
of refugees however is the fact that a significant proportion of those
seeking sanctuary in Europe and the US are from the Horn of Africa:
Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea primarily. While there is some
discussion of this issue in western media, it is mostly ignored when it
comes to the first three countries as news of fleeing Sudanese, Somalis,
and Ethiopians does not bode well for Washington’s narrative as the US
has, in one way or another, been directly involved in each of those
countries.
However, in the case of Eritrea, a
fiercely independent nation that refuses to bow to the diktats of the
US, the country is presented as a seemingly bottomless wellspring of
refugees fleeing the country. Were one to read solely the UN reports and
news stories, one could be forgiven for thinking that Eritrea has been
mostly depopulated as hordes of Eritrean youth flee the country in
droves. But that narrative, one which is periodically reinforced by
distorted coverage in the media, is quickly being eroded as increasingly
the truth is coming out.
Countering the Eritrean Refugee Propaganda
The popular understanding of Eritrea in
the West (to the extent that people know of the country at all) is of a
nation, formerly ruled by Ethiopia, which has become the “North Korea of
Africa,” a systematic violator of human rights ruled by a brutal
dictatorship that uses slave labor and tortures its citizens. As such,
Eritrea is immediately convicted in the court of public opinion and,
therefore, becomes a convenient scapegoat when it comes to migration. In
fact, it seems that the propaganda against Eritrea has been so
effective, with the US and Europe so keen to take in anyone fleeing the
country, that it has become the stated country of origin for thousands
upon thousands of refugees from a number of countries. It seems that
African refugees, regardless of their true country of origin, are all
Eritreans now.
Take for instance the comments by the Austrian ambassador to Ethiopia
who unabashedly explained that, “We believe that 30 to 40 percent of
the Eritreans in Europe are Ethiopians.” Depending on who you ask, the
numbers may actually be even higher than that. Indeed, being granted
asylum in Europe is no easy feat for African refugees who, knowing the
political agenda of Europe and its attempts to isolate and destabilize
Eritrea through promoting the migration of its citizens, quickly lose
their passports and claim to be Eritreans fleeing political persecution.
But who can blame these people when the
US itself has established specific policies and programs aimed at luring
Eritrean youths away from their country? As WikiLeaks revealed in a 2009 diplomatic cable
from the US Embassy entitled “Promoting Educational Opportunity for
Anti-Regime Eritrean Youth,” the former US ambassador to Eritrea Ronald
K. McMullen noted that the US:
…intends to begin adjudicating student visa applications, regardless of whether the regime is willing to issue the applicant an Eritrean passport and exit visa …With an Eritrean passport and an F1 visa in a Form DS-232, the lucky young person is off to America. For those visa recipients who manage to leave the country and receive UNHCR refugee status, a UN-authorized travel document might allow the young person to travel to America with his or her F1 in the DS-232.…Due to the Isaias regime´s ongoing restrictions on Embassy Asmara, [the US] does not contemplate a resumption of full visa services in the near future. However, giving young Eritreans hope, the chance for an education, and the skills with which to rebuild their impoverished country in the post-Isaias period is one of the strongest signals we can send to the Eritrean people that the United States has not abandoned them…
Using the twin enticements of
educational scholarships and escape from mandatory national service, the
US and its European allies have attempted to lure thousands of
Eritreans to the West in the hopes of destabilizing the Asmara
government. As the Ambassador noted, the US intention is to usher in a
“post Isaias [Afewerki, president of Eritrea] period.” In other words:
regime change. And it seems that Washington and its European allies
calculated that their policy of economically isolating Eritrea through sanctions has not effectively disrupted the country’s development.
And it is just such programs and
guidelines which look favorably on Eritrean migrants which have
motivated tens of thousands of Africans to claim that they all come from
the relatively small Eritrea. The reality however is that a significant
number of these refugees (perhaps even the majority) are actually from
Ethiopia and other countries. As Eritrea-based journalist and East
Africa expert Thomas Mountain noted in 2013:
Every year for a decade or more a million Ethiopians, 10 million and counting, have left, or fled, their homeland… Why, why would ten million Ethiopians, one in every 8 people in the country, risking their lives in many cases, seek refuge in foreign, mostly unwelcoming, lands? The answer lies in the policies of the Ethiopian regime which have been described by UN investigators in reports long suppressed with words such as “food and medical aid blockades”, “scorched earth counterinsurgency tactics”, “mass murder” and even “genocide”…Most of the Ethiopians refugees are from the Oromo nationality, at 40 million strong half of Ethiopia, or the ethnic Somalis of the Ogaden. Both of these regions in southern Ethiopia have long been victims of some of the most inhumane, brutal treatment any peoples of the world have ever known.
There is little mention of this
Ethiopian exodus which, for a variety of reasons, is suppressed in the
West. Many of the refugees simply claim to be Eritrean knowing that they
stand a far greater chance of being admitted into Europe or the US if
they claim origin from a blacklisted country like Eritrea, rather than
an ally such as Ethiopia, a country long seen as Washington’s closest
partner in the region.
In fact, Ethiopia is consistently praised as an economic success story, with the World Bank having recently announced
that the African nation is the world’s fastest growing economy for
2015-2017. Despite this alleged ‘economic miracle,’ Ethiopia is still
hemorrhaging population as citizens flee in their thousands, providing
further evidence that outside the glittering capital of Addis Ababa the
country remains one of the most destitute and violent in the world.
The same can be said of South Sudan, a country created by the US and Israel primarily, and which has now descended into civil war sending more than 600,000 refugees
streaming out of the newly created country, with another 1.5 million
internally displaced. Somalia remains a living nightmare for the poor
souls unfortunate enough to have been born in a country that is a
nation-state in name only. According to the UN,
Somalia boasts more than 1.1 million internally displaced refugees with
nearly 1 million refugees located outside the country. Taken in total,
Ethiopian, South Sudanese, and Somali refugees comprise a population
greater than the entire population of Eritrea.
However, Somalia, Ethiopia, and South
Sudan are all strategic allies (read clients) of the United States and
its western partners; Eritrea is considered persona non grata by
Washington. This fundamental fact far more than anything else accounts
for the completely distorted coverage of the refugee issue in Eritrea.
Put another way, refugees and human trafficking are a convenient public
relations and propaganda weapon employed by the US to demonize Eritrea,
and to tarnish its project of economic and political self-reliance.
Refugees as Pretext, Independence Is the Real Sin
Eritrea has been demonized by the US and
the West mainly because it has refused to be subservient to the
imperial system. First and foremost among Eritrea’s grave sins is its
stubborn insistence on maintaining full independence and sovereignty in
both political and economic spheres. This fact is perhaps best
illustrated by Eritrean President Afewerki’s bold rejection of foreign aid of
various sorts, stating repeatedly that Eritrea needs to “stand on its
own two feet.” Afewerki’s pronouncements are in line with what
pan-Africanist leaders such as Thomas Sankara, Marxists such as Walter
Rodney, and many others have argued for decades: namely that, as
Afewerkie put it in 2007 after rejecting a $200 million dollar “aid”
package from the World Bank, “Fifty years and billions of dollars in
post-colonial international aid have done little to lift Africa from
chronic poverty… [African societies] are crippled societies…You can’t
keep these people living on handouts because that doesn’t change their
lives.”
Of course, there are also other critical
political and economic reasons for Eritrea’s pariah status in the eyes
of the so called “developed world,” and especially the US. Perhaps the
most obvious, and most unforgiveable from the perspective of Washington,
is Eritrea’s stubborn refusal to have any cooperation, formal or
informal, with AFRICOM or any other US military. While every other
country in Africa with the exception of the equally demonized, and
equally victimized, Zimbabwe has some military connections to US
imperialism, Eritrea remains stubbornly defiant. I suppose Eritrea takes
the notion of post-colonial independence seriously.
Is it any wonder that Afewerki and his
government are demonized by the West? What is the history of US and
European behavior towards independent African leaders who advocated
self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist
ideology? The answer is self-evident. Such ideas as those embodied by
Eritrea are seen by Washington, London, and Brussels as not only
defiant, but dangerous; dangerous not only because of what they say, but
dangerous because they’re actually working.
Naturally there are legitimate concerns
to be raised about Eritrea and major strides still to be made in the
political and economic spheres. Social progress is an arduous process,
especially in a part of the world where nearly every other country is
racked with violence, genocide, famine, and a host of other existential
crises. But the progress necessary for Eritrea will be made by and for
Eritreans; it cannot and must not be imposed from without by the same
forces that, in their humanitarian magnanimity, rained bombs on Libya
and systematically undermined, destabilized, and/or destroyed nations in
seemingly every corner of the globe.
Refugees should be treated with dignity
and respect. Their suffering should never be trivialized, nor should
they be scapegoated as terrorists. But equally so, their tragedies
should not be allowed to be cynically exploited for political gain by
the West. The flow of refugees is an outgrowth of the policies of the
Empire – the same Empire that continues to transform this crisis into a
potent weapon of destabilization and war.
Eric Draitser is an
independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City, he is the
founder of StopImperialism.org and OP-ed columnist for RT, exclusively
for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Refugees as Weapons in a Propaganda War
In the wake of the horrific terror attacks in Paris, world attention will once again be focused on the issue of refugees entering Europe. While much of the spotlight has been rightly pointed at Syrian refugees fleeing the western-sponsored war against the Syrian government, it must be remembered that the refugees come from a variety of countries, each of which has its own particular circumstances, with many of them having been victims of US-NATO aggression in one form or another. Syria, Afghanistan and Libya have of course been targeted by so-called ‘humanitarian wars’ and fake ‘revolutions’ which have left the countries fractured, divided, and unable to function; these countries have been transformed into failed states thanks to US-NATO policy.
What often gets lost in the discussion of refugees however is the fact that a significant proportion of those seeking sanctuary in Europe and the US are from the Horn of Africa: Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea primarily. While there is some discussion of this issue in western media, it is mostly ignored when it comes to the first three countries as news of fleeing Sudanese, Somalis, and Ethiopians does not bode well for Washington’s narrative as the US has, in one way or another, been directly involved in each of those countries.
However, in the case of Eritrea, a fiercely independent nation that refuses to bow to the diktats of the US, the country is presented as a seemingly bottomless wellspring of refugees fleeing the country. Were one to read solely the UN reports and news stories, one could be forgiven for thinking that Eritrea has been mostly depopulated as hordes of Eritrean youth flee the country in droves. But that narrative, one which is periodically reinforced by distorted coverage in the media, is quickly being eroded as increasingly the truth is coming out.
Countering the Eritrean Refugee Propaganda
The popular understanding of Eritrea in the West (to the extent that people know of the country at all) is of a nation, formerly ruled by Ethiopia, which has become the “North Korea of Africa,” a systematic violator of human rights ruled by a brutal dictatorship that uses slave labor and tortures its citizens. As such, Eritrea is immediately convicted in the court of public opinion and, therefore, becomes a convenient scapegoat when it comes to migration. In fact, it seems that the propaganda against Eritrea has been so effective, with the US and Europe so keen to take in anyone fleeing the country, that it has become the stated country of origin for thousands upon thousands of refugees from a number of countries. It seems that African refugees, regardless of their true country of origin, are all Eritreans now.
Take for instance the comments by the Austrian ambassador to Ethiopia who unabashedly explained that, “We believe that 30 to 40 percent of the Eritreans in Europe are Ethiopians.” Depending on who you ask, the numbers may actually be even higher than that. Indeed, being granted asylum in Europe is no easy feat for African refugees who, knowing the political agenda of Europe and its attempts to isolate and destabilize Eritrea through promoting the migration of its citizens, quickly lose their passports and claim to be Eritreans fleeing political persecution.
But who can blame these people when the US itself has established specific policies and programs aimed at luring Eritrean youths away from their country? As WikiLeaks revealed in a 2009 diplomatic cable from the US Embassy entitled “Promoting Educational Opportunity for Anti-Regime Eritrean Youth,” the former US ambassador to Eritrea Ronald K. McMullen noted that the US:
…intends to begin adjudicating student visa applications, regardless of whether the regime is willing to issue the applicant an Eritrean passport and exit visa …With an Eritrean passport and an F1 visa in a Form DS-232, the lucky young person is off to America. For those visa recipients who manage to leave the country and receive UNHCR refugee status, a UN-authorized travel document might allow the young person to travel to America with his or her F1 in the DS-232.…Due to the Isaias regime´s ongoing restrictions on Embassy Asmara, [the US] does not contemplate a resumption of full visa services in the near future. However, giving young Eritreans hope, the chance for an education, and the skills with which to rebuild their impoverished country in the post-Isaias period is one of the strongest signals we can send to the Eritrean people that the United States has not abandoned them…
Using the twin enticements of educational scholarships and escape from mandatory national service, the US and its European allies have attempted to lure thousands of Eritreans to the West in the hopes of destabilizing the Asmara government. As the Ambassador noted, the US intention is to usher in a “post Isaias [Afewerki, president of Eritrea] period.” In other words: regime change. And it seems that Washington and its European allies calculated that their policy of economically isolating Eritrea through sanctions has not effectively disrupted the country’s development.
And it is just such programs and guidelines which look favorably on Eritrean migrants which have motivated tens of thousands of Africans to claim that they all come from the relatively small Eritrea. The reality however is that a significant number of these refugees (perhaps even the majority) are actually from Ethiopia and other countries. As Eritrea-based journalist and East Africa expert Thomas Mountain noted in 2013:
Every year for a decade or more a million Ethiopians, 10 million and counting, have left, or fled, their homeland… Why, why would ten million Ethiopians, one in every 8 people in the country, risking their lives in many cases, seek refuge in foreign, mostly unwelcoming, lands? The answer lies in the policies of the Ethiopian regime which have been described by UN investigators in reports long suppressed with words such as “food and medical aid blockades”, “scorched earth counterinsurgency tactics”, “mass murder” and even “genocide”…Most of the Ethiopians refugees are from the Oromo nationality, at 40 million strong half of Ethiopia, or the ethnic Somalis of the Ogaden. Both of these regions in southern Ethiopia have long been victims of some of the most inhumane, brutal treatment any peoples of the world have ever known.
There is little mention of this Ethiopian exodus which, for a variety of reasons, is suppressed in the West. Many of the refugees simply claim to be Eritrean knowing that they stand a far greater chance of being admitted into Europe or the US if they claim origin from a blacklisted country like Eritrea, rather than an ally such as Ethiopia, a country long seen as Washington’s closest partner in the region.
In fact, Ethiopia is consistently praised as an economic success story, with the World Bank having recently announced that the African nation is the world’s fastest growing economy for 2015-2017. Despite this alleged ‘economic miracle,’ Ethiopia is still hemorrhaging population as citizens flee in their thousands, providing further evidence that outside the glittering capital of Addis Ababa the country remains one of the most destitute and violent in the world.
The same can be said of South Sudan, a country created by the US and Israel primarily, and which has now descended into civil war sending more than 600,000 refugees streaming out of the newly created country, with another 1.5 million internally displaced. Somalia remains a living nightmare for the poor souls unfortunate enough to have been born in a country that is a nation-state in name only. According to the UN, Somalia boasts more than 1.1 million internally displaced refugees with nearly 1 million refugees located outside the country. Taken in total, Ethiopian, South Sudanese, and Somali refugees comprise a population greater than the entire population of Eritrea.
However, Somalia, Ethiopia, and South Sudan are all strategic allies (read clients) of the United States and its western partners; Eritrea is considered persona non grata by Washington. This fundamental fact far more than anything else accounts for the completely distorted coverage of the refugee issue in Eritrea. Put another way, refugees and human trafficking are a convenient public relations and propaganda weapon employed by the US to demonize Eritrea, and to tarnish its project of economic and political self-reliance.
Refugees as Pretext, Independence Is the Real Sin
Eritrea has been demonized by the US and the West mainly because it has refused to be subservient to the imperial system. First and foremost among Eritrea’s grave sins is its stubborn insistence on maintaining full independence and sovereignty in both political and economic spheres. This fact is perhaps best illustrated by Eritrean President Afewerki’s bold rejection of foreign aid of various sorts, stating repeatedly that Eritrea needs to “stand on its own two feet.” Afewerki’s pronouncements are in line with what pan-Africanist leaders such as Thomas Sankara, Marxists such as Walter Rodney, and many others have argued for decades: namely that, as Afewerkie put it in 2007 after rejecting a $200 million dollar “aid” package from the World Bank, “Fifty years and billions of dollars in post-colonial international aid have done little to lift Africa from chronic poverty… [African societies] are crippled societies…You can’t keep these people living on handouts because that doesn’t change their lives.”
Of course, there are also other critical political and economic reasons for Eritrea’s pariah status in the eyes of the so called “developed world,” and especially the US. Perhaps the most obvious, and most unforgiveable from the perspective of Washington, is Eritrea’s stubborn refusal to have any cooperation, formal or informal, with AFRICOM or any other US military. While every other country in Africa with the exception of the equally demonized, and equally victimized, Zimbabwe has some military connections to US imperialism, Eritrea remains stubbornly defiant. I suppose Eritrea takes the notion of post-colonial independence seriously.
Is it any wonder that Afewerki and his government are demonized by the West? What is the history of US and European behavior towards independent African leaders who advocated self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist ideology? The answer is self-evident. Such ideas as those embodied by Eritrea are seen by Washington, London, and Brussels as not only defiant, but dangerous; dangerous not only because of what they say, but dangerous because they’re actually working.
Naturally there are legitimate concerns to be raised about Eritrea and major strides still to be made in the political and economic spheres. Social progress is an arduous process, especially in a part of the world where nearly every other country is racked with violence, genocide, famine, and a host of other existential crises. But the progress necessary for Eritrea will be made by and for Eritreans; it cannot and must not be imposed from without by the same forces that, in their humanitarian magnanimity, rained bombs on Libya and systematically undermined, destabilized, and/or destroyed nations in seemingly every corner of the globe.
Refugees should be treated with dignity and respect. Their suffering should never be trivialized, nor should they be scapegoated as terrorists. But equally so, their tragedies should not be allowed to be cynically exploited for political gain by the West. The flow of refugees is an outgrowth of the policies of the Empire – the same Empire that continues to transform this crisis into a potent weapon of destabilization and war.
Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City, he is the founder of StopImperialism.org and OP-ed columnist for RT, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
http://journal-neo.org/2015/11/21/refugees-as-weapons-in-a-propaganda-war/
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