1 Believing: A Mental Experiment
Chapter 1
Believing: A Mental Experiment
To believe is to be human; it undergirds our ability to imagine, experiment, relate to others and the world. From an evolutionary perspective, our capacity for belief is rooted in our histories as primates. Although we tend to think of it as unique to human beings, it can be argued to emerge from certain primate traits, such as an ability to experience beauty and awe. This spiritual sense is part of our configuration.
For most people, ‘belief’ provides ‘a framework for explaining the way things are (or should be), and is capable of influencing our behaviour, feelings, attitudes and decisions’. Beliefs can lead to graciousness, inclusiveness, hospitality and love. Yet beliefs are dangerous, we are told. They inevitably lead to discrimination, tribalism and hatred. They certainly can. Yet it is not the category of ‘belief’ that is a problem; it is the specific beliefs which shape your way of living, whether for good or bad.
In any case, are we sure that we know what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’? Surely this involves a value judgement – a belief which lies beyond proof? What I think is ‘bad’ might be seen as ‘good’ by someone else. Food etiquette rules illustrate this point neatly. In China, it is polite to leave some food on your plate (in that this implies your host is generous); in Japan, this is seen as rude (in that it violates mottainai, the principle of respecting resources and not wasting them).
The great eighteenth-century Age of Reason proposed a universal rational framework through which humanity could objectively resolve moral, political and intellectual questions, to learn to live in peace and harmony. The frontispiece to Christian Wolff’s 1720 manifesto Rational Thoughts on God, the World, the Human Soul and All Things in General depicted a smiling sun illuminating a landscape, dispelling clouds of superstition. The Enlightenment immodestly proposed that, thanks to its unprecedented deployment of human reason, intellectuals in western Europe could see the universe objectively, as it truly is, for the first time in human history.
Yet what these Enlightenment intellectuals failed to recognise was that their idea of a ‘universal rationality’ was not universal at all, but a distillation of their own European, largely Christian, notions of morality. The evidence of such was already present in the ‘voyager’ literature of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. British travellers and explorers reported on cultures whose notions of morality and rationality diverged significantly from those of England. The empirical evidence pointed to a multiplicity of understandings of what it meant to be ‘rational’. Yet English Enlightenment writers tended to dismiss such alternative ways of reasoning as ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’, instead of questioning their own assumptions about a universal human rationality.
The Enlightenment thus failed to set out a criterion that stands above human practice, by which rival visions of rationality could be judged. If reason is the supreme judge of beliefs, how can it adjudicate authoritatively and unaided between competing views of what it means to be ‘rational’? As Hilary Putnam observed, the Enlightenment relied on an unattainable ‘God’s eye view’ of reality. In his landmark study Whose Justice? Which Rationality? the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre concluded that the ‘legacy of the Enlightenment has been the provision of an ideal of rational justification which it has proved impossible to attain’.
MacIntyre argues that prominent rationalist writers – such as David Hume, Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant – were unable to establish a firm rational foundation for their views on morality that would enable them to demonstrate the correctness of their own perspectives. For MacIntyre, philosophy rests upon commitments whose truth cannot be demonstrated and hence must be defended, based on assumptions that carry weight for some, but not for all. In the end, we are left wondering whether Nietzsche might be right in suggesting pragmatically that morality is simply the views of those in power, a herd instinct rather than a coherent rational position. ‘If there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates.’
Since there was an unacknowledged diversity of views within the Enlightenment concerning what was ‘rational’, there was no means by which these disagreements might be resolved, or how a universal rational morality might be developed. This clearly raises a problem for any suggestion that the term ‘Reason’ denotes a single universal set of norms, independent of history or culture. The dark side of the European Age of Reason was that it believed that it was in possession of precisely such a master set of cosmic rational norms, which it proceeded to impose on ‘primitive’ societies (such as India) in what are now recognised to be acts of intellectual colonialism (but were seen as ‘civilising’ projects at the time). It was an ethnocentric delusion, privileging some distinctively western beliefs as if they were universal human truths. Anyway, why should human reasoning lead to universally accepted beliefs about everything? After all, everyone has the same taste receptors, but we don’t all like the same foods.
In the end, the Wars of Religion of the seventeenth century were replaced by the Wars of Ideology of the twentieth, in which religion played a much smaller role. Religion can certainly be violent, but there is no evidence that it is uniquely and particularly so, as recent history makes clear. The First World War, perhaps the most destructive conflict to date in human history, was driven by multiple ideologies, none of them religious. The intrinsic human capacity for violence, which plays a critical role in Thomas H. Huxley’s discussion of human evolution, found new ways of expressing itself in secular ideologies such as Stalinism.
Christopher Hitchens, who believed that religion possesses a necessary and characteristic propensity for violence, argued that this evidential awkwardness shows that Stalinism was really a religious movement. Ba’athism – an absolutist Arab nationalist ideology – posed similar problems for Hitchens, who solved them by redefining this secular ideology as a ‘religion’, which seems a little pat to me. The Cambodian genocide of 1975 to 1979, in which up to a quarter of the country’s population was liquidated, was also clearly primarily motivated by a political ideology.
So, what about science? Can it offer us universal and objective accounts of morality, or settle debates about cultural and social norms? The influential philosopher of science Karl Popper introduced the term ‘ultimate questions’ to refer to the great ‘riddles of existence’, for example, ‘what is the point of life?’ or, ‘what is the good life, and how do I lead it?’ Popper declared that these questions lay beyond the scope of the natural sciences; if they could be answered, it could not be based on logic or science. Ultimate questions simply don’t find scientific answers. In the end, such ultimate questions (and their answers) lie beyond logical or scientific demonstration, eventually resting on our beliefs about the nature of life.
Albert Einstein took a similar view, insisting that scientists ought to be moral people, while pointing out that their science couldn’t determine moral values. These had to come from somewhere else. For perfectly understandable reasons, science rules out consideration of ‘value’ and ‘purpose’ from the outset of its enquiry. Science might help us illustrate or apply moral values; it couldn’t establish them in the first place. Human beings, Einstein declared, need more than what a ‘purely rational conception of our existence’ can offer.
Sam Harris disagreed. In his Moral Landscape, he argues that science can and should determine human values, thus enabling humanity to dispense with mere moral beliefs. He argued that the scientific notion of human wellbeing can easily be mapped on to traditional ideas of morality, both displacing these and offering rational certainties in their place. Suffering is morally bad and flourishing is morally good; morality is thus about abating suffering and enhancing flourishing. Yet to his critics, it seemed as if Harris had simply smuggled in moral values originating from somewhere else and pasted them on to his own preconceived ideas about human wellbeing. More seriously, there seems to be a category error here: ‘moral behaviour’ and ‘subjective wellbeing’ are planets that orbit different intellectual suns. As Harris himself concedes, it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that ‘rapists, liars and thieves’ might ‘experience the same depth of happiness as the saints’, breaking any obvious or plausible link between the notions of ‘being good’ and ‘being happy’.
A more consistent approach was developed by the philosopher Alex Rosenberg. In his Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, he sets out the view that that science is ‘our exclusive guide to reality’, offering us reliable certainties about our world and ourselves. In response to the question ‘What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad?’ Rosenberg declares that ‘there is no moral difference between them’. This alarming response needs unpacking. Rosenberg is advocating that the natural sciences are an ‘exclusive guide to reality’ – which precludes any moral values, in that these are not scientific notions. Science offers a descriptive account of how things function; it does not offer prescriptive declarations about what ought to be done. We need more than science to inform our ethics.
Happily, science can answer most of our questions about the natural world, even if it can’t give us definitive answers to moral or existential questions. Science can certainly offer explanations for why we consider morality to be so important. For example, it could be argued that our evolutionary history predisposes us towards pro-social behaviour, in that this enhances our prospects for survival. But why should science be expected to teach us moral values? Or answer existentially important questions such as ‘How should I act?’ or ‘How should I live?’ It’s science, after all, not philosophy. Science has its own distinct toolkit, which enables it to answer its own spectrum of questions with unique authority and reliability. That’s one of the reasons why I love and respect science so much. But it doesn’t mean that science can answer all our questions, or that those that lie beyond its reach can be dismissed as pseudo-questions.
Here’s the point: we feel that we need to answer moral questions – to be able to declare that certain acts are good and others bad; to name what we consider to be destructive to human wellbeing or the environment, and invest these judgements with deeper significance than a personal indication of distaste. Something deep within us whispers that these questions are important and need to be respected and answered. While modern psychological research does not (and cannot) tell us what it means to be ‘good’ or what we ought to believe about purpose or meaning in life, it makes it clear that these beliefs matter to people, and that they are integral to their wellbeing.
And what about philosophy? Does it allow us to reach secure and certain conclusions, or should we think of it as offering us a critical tool for evaluating and calibrating our beliefs? Most philosophers are somewhat pessimistic about the ‘persistent and intractable disagreement’ within their discipline, often reflecting the difficulty in finding undeniable premises for philosophical arguments. The diversity and disagreement within the field is such that ‘most philosophical views are minority opinions,’ and there is typically ‘nothing approaching a consensus on the correct alternative’.
Yet these concerns do not detract from the role that moral philosophy plays in forcing us to think critically about our beliefs about right and wrong. It confronts the metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions and commitments of moral thought questions, such as ‘Is morality more a matter of taste than truth?’ or ‘Are there moral facts?’ It helps us engage grand theories about the origins of morality – such as Thrasymachus’ view, reported by Plato, that morality was invented simply to keep elites in power.
It also helps us reflect on questions about the nature of morality itself. In asserting a particular ‘moral truth’ was A. J. Ayer right in suggesting that I am doing no more than expressing my own individual feelings and attitudes? Or should I concur with Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot in asserting that there are standards independent of my attitudes and feelings, by which I may judge whether a certain course of action is ‘good’?
Moral viewpoints lie beyond proof and verification. They may be well-founded beliefs, developed in a full knowledge of the criticisms and objections that could be raised against them – but they are still beliefs, part of the necessary fabric of motivated and informed judgements that underlie much of human culture.
Philosophy, in my view, remains a useful tool in developing and critiquing our beliefs. But can we dispense with beliefs – whether philosophical or otherwise? It is a tempting possibility, perhaps opening the way to metaphysical and moral certainties that eliminate the uncertainties of human judgements and reasoning. Or is belief something that is forced upon us by the limits of our nature and the complexity of our world? Perhaps the best way to explore this question is through a thought experiment.
The Experiment: Inhabiting a Realm of Certainties
Albert Einstein, probably the most celebrated scientist of the twentieth century, used mental experiments to help him to explore some major scientific issues. In an autobiographical reflection written shortly before his death in March 1955, Einstein recalled an experiment of this kind that had intrigued him while he was a high school student in the Swiss city of Aarau. What would it be like to move so quickly that it was possible to catch up with a beam of light? As Einstein played around with this imaginative scenario, he realised that surfing a beam of light seemed to raise difficulties with prevailing understandings of the nature of light, laying the ground for his own pioneering contributions which transformed physics in the early twentieth century.
My own thought experiment has three parts. First, I would like you to imagine a world in which we only accept truths that can be proved – what ancient Greek philosophers termed epistēmē (knowledge) rather than doxa (opinion) – and work out what this world would look like. Second, we will reflect on what convictions would not be allowed into this world. And finally, I will invite you to step into this world of certainties and ask whether you think it is fit for meaningful human existence. Can we flourish in this environment? Is it existentially habitable?
Let’s begin this experiment. Imagine a paradise of certainties, a realm populated only with ideas that can be proved to be true, and are thus devoid of intellectual risk or damaging controversies. What convictions would be allowed into this imagined world of secure convictions? Here are four statements that I think rightly belong there:
1. 2 + 2 = 4.
2. The whole is greater than the part.
3. The atomic mass of chlorine is 35.453.
4. The British monarch Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901.
These four examples are taken from the worlds of mathematics, logic, science and history; more could easily be added.
I would consider these four statements to be facts – that is to say, statements that can be shown to be true by publicly acceptable norms and are not dependent on my own prejudices or biases. I can see no good reason to doubt any of them. I’m sure that my readers can easily add more truths of this kind, thus expanding the very basic contents of this world into a kaleidoscope of certainties.
But here’s the point we have to face up to: So what? What difference do they make to anyone? Something can be true without being relevant; that is, something can be right, without having any traction on our hopes and fears, our attempts to live our moral lives in a strange and dangerous world, or to flourish amid adversity and uncertainty. These are shallow truths, easily proved yet nevertheless disconnected from the ultimate questions of life. Would it make any difference to the serious business of working out how to live authentically in this strange and confusing world if Queen Victoria died on 22 February 1901?
Factuality, it seems, is not in itself a guarantor of existential traction. Some facts, however, seem to occupy an intermediary zone. These take the form of observations that hint at a deeper order or interconnectedness in the world, possibly pointing beyond themselves to significant truths awaiting our discovery. Why is the sky dark at night? Why do the fundamental constants of our universe seem fine-tuned for life? These are like clues calling out for interpretation. Their importance lies not simply in their observational actuality, but their theoretical potentiality. When rightly understood, these facts might turn out to be gateways to a richer understanding of ourselves and our world. Yet they might equally turn out to be dead ends.
Let’s move on to the next stage of my mental experiment. We’ve already explored what might be included in this imagined world. But what convictions would be excluded from this world of certainties because they are beliefs? Because they cannot be proved to be true? In my view, a list of such excluded beliefs would (unfortunately) include the following:
1. All people are created equal.
2. It is wrong to torture people.
First, we must exclude the statement that ‘all people are created equal’. This is clearly a belief, not a fact, perhaps reflecting a profound human desire that it should be true when accidents of birth clearly continue to shape our social status and prospects. It is for many a deeply attractive belief, calling into question social constructions of value, significance and intrinsic merit. For Christians, for example, the belief that all are created equal is a social leveller, demanding that we look beyond how society values individuals and discern something deeper, more significant beneath the surface. Yet the statement that ‘all people are created equal’ is ultimately a belief, not something that can be publicly demonstrated to be true.
The American philosopher and statesman Benjamin Franklin would disagree with my judgement. He confidently declared that this was a ‘self-evident’ truth – most famously, in his landmark statement in the American Declaration of Independence. But why is this view ‘self-evident’? After all, Thomas Jefferson’s original version of this statement, which was modified by Franklin, spoke more cautiously of holding certain truths to be ‘sacred and undeniable’.
A ‘self-evident’ truth is basically an intuition, in which someone just ‘sees’ or ‘senses’ that something is right, without relying on evidence or argument. Yet these ‘intuitions’ are self-evident only within certain cultural contexts and because of those cultural contexts. Franklin’s assertion that this belief is a ‘self-evident’ truth is little more than an intellectual ploy, designed to fend off criticism or critical evaluation of this decidedly under-evidenced assertion, no matter how culturally desirable or politically convenient it might be. It is a defiant assertion, not an evidenced conclusion, a decision to present a belief in such forceful terms that it will be treated as if it were a fact.
Why have I excluded the conviction that ‘it is wrong to torture people’? Surely any right-minded and liberal person would affirm this without reservation? I happen to believe this is true, but that’s not my point. This ethical conviction has the status of a moral judgement, a belief rather than a statement of fact. It is contestable in theory and is contested in practice. For example, Sam Harris argues that ‘some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them’. Killing such people, he tells us, could be regarded as an act of self-defence. As part of his overall argument, Harris offers a defence of torture, based on his assessment of the relative demerits of collateral damage on the one hand, and torture on the other. Now many people (and I certainly include myself here) will disagree with Harris and the arguments that he sets out in support of his view. Yet while I think he is wrong – in fact, I believe passionately that he is wrong – I cannot prove this.
Now, some might suggest that my belief that torture is wrong is a blind faith, as I cannot prove it to be true. If this were the case, we would have to write off humanity’s richest and most noble statements about the meaning of life, the nature of good and how to live meaningfully. Yet this disparaging category of ‘blind faith’ is simply a rhetorical device, increasingly used to limit human thought to the rationally demonstrable by ridiculing those who realise we need to go beyond what reason can prove in the quest for human flourishing. It needlessly and irresponsibly limits the human quest for truth, beauty and goodness to a highly desiccated and impoverished set of rational certainties.
My view that torture is wrong may be held by many well-regarded people, whose social influence places them in Aristotle’s category of the ‘wise’ – a group of people whose beliefs were considered exemplary and hence culturally determinative. Yet Aristotle invented this category primarily to lend social approbation and moral force to what he knew could not be proved to be true. The assertion that it is wrong to torture people is an opinion, a belief and not a fact. No matter how many intellectual luminaries pile in to support it, it remains a belief – even if it might be a particularly influential or widespread belief, or one that is enforced by social controllers. Sadly, it has to be excluded from our imagined world of certainties.
At this point, it becomes clear that this realm of certainties that we have been exploring in our thought experiment might be rather small and emaciated, populated with pedestrian simplicities. A world that is free of beliefs excludes an alarming number of views about the nature of the good life and, crucially, respect for our fellow human beings. It’s like a tone-deaf person writing a treatise on the significance of music for humanity that limits itself to the physics of musical instruments. Human beings deserve better than this.
What is ‘The Purpose of Philosophy’ (to borrow the title of Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated essay)? Berlin argued that human convictions can be placed in three kinds of ‘baskets’: those that can be established by empirical observation; those that can be established by logical deduction; and a third basket ‘in which all those questions live which cannot easily be fitted into the other two’.
The third basket hence contains the moral, political, social and religious values and ideas that have shaped human culture and given human existence direction and purpose. Berlin writes:
There is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments. I am not a relativist; I do not say ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favour of kindness and you prefer concentration camps’ – each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false. But I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ.
One of the reasons why Berlin was so respected as an intellectual historian and philosopher was his willingness to acknowledge ambiguity and uncertainty – notice his use of the term ‘believe’ in the last few lines of this statement, where lesser philosophers or ideological activists might present these views as truths – something we know. The intelligent application of reason leads people to a plurality of defensible – yet unprovable – ideals or moral values, not to a single universal concept of ‘the good’.
Berlin rejected the monist view that ‘all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors’. This, he believed, simply gave a spurious intellectual legitimacy to some form of totalitarianism: ‘To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity.’ Berlin’s criticisms offer a powerful criticism of blind faith or obedience demanded by institutions, ideologies and charismatic individuals – including some that are clearly religious, but claim not to be.
We have a further question to explore in conducting our mental experiment, which is perhaps the most important: are human beings capable of meaningful existence within this imagined world of certainties? Suppose we limit ourselves to such certainties: can they provide a basis for a good life?
Shallow Certainties Don’t Allow Humans to Flourish
Many philosophers argue that the best way of assessing beliefs is to consider their rationality. Do they make sense? Are there good reasons for thinking they are right, or at least defensible? This is entirely reasonable. But as I suggested earlier in this chapter, being right does not necessarily mean being relevant. Let me return to one of the certainties of our imagined world, noted earlier: ‘The whole is greater than the part.’ I can be absolutely sure of this truth. This is something that is right and therefore can be relied upon. There can be a universal consensus about this unassailable truth, where mere beliefs might lead to social division and tension, or the incitement of hatred.
Yet truth cannot be directly correlated with relevance. I must confess I struggle to see how this truth might give me a reason to get up in the morning, or yearn to make the world a better place. It is rationally incontestable yet existentially irrelevant. As Wittgenstein noted, you can be certain about it, but it seems rather pointless. ‘Nothing would follow from it, and nothing could be explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life.’
With this point in mind, I want to suggest that we reclaim an older concern – namely, considering the existential vitality of a way of thinking, asking how a belief or worldview enables human flourishing and fosters wellbeing. Is this way of thinking liveable? Does this worldview create a satisfying ‘way of life’? Does it account for our deepest longings and desires, and help us achieve joy and peace? Does it help us to find meaning in life? Or happiness? Or does it repress and limit us, trapping us within a constrained and impoverished account of human existence? In our own time, many people choose to abandon their commitments to worldviews, whether religious or secular, because they find them oppressive in their outcomes, rather than deficient in their intellectual foundations.
For instance, when many sought to challenge the moral philosopher Peter Singer’s argument that it is permissible to euthanise severely disabled infants, they honed in on its consequences: the murder of disabled people. Singer’s conceptualisation of the value of a human life – founded upon rationality and autonomy – went largely unquestioned, as did his figuring of severely disabled people as a moral category apart from ‘normal human beings’. Disability advocates, however, protested his lectures – arguing that disabled people, like all people, are capable of being loved and finding meaning in life. Our revulsion at particular outcomes, in other words, can’t be separated from what we think human life is about. And for most of us, intuitively, it doesn’t come down to reason alone.
There is now a substantial body of scientific studies that has established links between finding ‘meaning in life’ in lessening anxiety and enhancing wellbeing. Individuals need to feel that their lives and their existence are of importance and value (a condition now known as ‘existential mattering’). We do not know why this is so; the evidence simply indicates that it is so – and is thus important to us. As the writer Jeanette Winterson observes, human beings are clearly meant to do more than just survive; they need to flourish.
A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce – we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives – money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.
Winterson is surely right here. The cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz earlier suggested that human beings are ‘symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animals’, who are driven to ‘make sense out of experience, and give it some form and order’. Humanity ‘cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.’ Nobody is sure why human beings find the concept of ‘meaning’ to be so significant; what we do know is that humans flourish when they have it and wither when they don’t.
As mentioned, I discovered Marxism in the late 1960s. It was exhilarating, offering me precisely what Winterson identified as central human needs – ‘some higher purpose, some point to our lives’. So let me tell you a little more about my own teenage longings for certainty, how I once believed these were met in Marxism and what I learned from my encounter with this worldview.
Reflections of a Lapsed Marxist
I was a nerdy scientist during my teenage years, studying at the Methodist College Belfast, one of Northern Ireland’s largest schools. I loved the natural sciences for two reasons: first, they allowed me to engage with the beauty and mystery of nature in an intellectually rigorous way and, second, because they seemed to offer me evidence-based certainties about life. My growing fascination with chemistry helped me grasp how a good scientific theory could organise and explain what otherwise was a jumble of observations. Dmitri Mendeleev’s brilliant analytical tool of the Periodic Table of the Elements (1869) organised chemical elements in a way that both accounted for their distinct properties, while suggesting (correctly) that there were gaps in the scheme that would be filled with as yet undiscovered elements.
It seemed to me that, just as Mendeleev had found a way of bringing theoretical order to the otherwise puzzling habits of chemical elements, Marx had developed a way of thinking that brought order and meaning to the historical process, enabling not merely its comprehension but its acceleration through informed human intervention towards its inevitable goal. Marx’s theory was my first experience of a big picture approach to reality and I found it deeply satisfying, even inspiring.
Marxism seemed able to make sense of the social world but, more importantly, it created space for me. It was not like a scientific theory, which offered a detached and spectatorial account of how the world functioned; it was a participatory account of things. Marxism invited me both to appreciate its rendering of reality and to locate myself within that account and live accordingly. It was not simply a set of beliefs to be affirmed but a promise of participation in a new kind of existence. On this reading of things, I was part of something bigger. My life had a meaning.
Empirical studies of meaning see this as ‘the extent to which one’s life is experienced as making sense, as being directed and motivated by valued goals, and as mattering in the world.’ Marxism offered me all of these. As far as I was concerned, without such an informing and interpretative framework, it was impossible to discern or construct meaning in life.
Marx also played an important role in solidifying my increasingly trenchant teenage atheism. I had embraced atheism partly because of books I had read suggesting that religion was the enemy of science. Yet as I look back on that fascinating but long-vanished world of the late 1960s, I can see that Marxism allowed me to reinterpret what was probably little more than a cultural distaste for the kind of religion I encountered in Belfast as an intellectual and moral crusade against an alien and oppressive ‘other’. I could reimagine myself as a noble hero in a culture war, part of a brave intellectual elite advancing human dignity by eliminating enemies of freedom. It made me feel good about myself, for a while.
I subsequently read Karl Popper’s Poverty of Historicism. Popper, like me, had been drawn to Marxism as a teenager on account of its apparent explanatory power. And gradually I found myself unable to overlook his exposure of Marxism’s evidential deficits (it consisted mainly of unfalsifiable claims) and its alarming capacity to incite violence and intolerance. But I had learned something important – the imaginative and intellectual appeal of a big picture account of reality. If I were ever to embrace another worldview, I told myself, it would have to be one that developed a framework of meaning that would allow me to be an active participant rather than a passive observer.
Let’s return to our imagined world, populated only with convictions that can be proved to be true. Could we live meaningfully in this environment from which beliefs about existential meaning and moral values have been excluded? The psychologist William James didn’t think so. In a lecture entitled ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ given at Harvard University in 1895, he gave his audience this piece of advice: ‘Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.’ Yet James was clear that ‘scientific proof’ of this conviction was simply not possible. Life is only worth living if there exists ‘an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained’ – and this is a belief which cannot be confirmed scientifically, even though James considered it reasonable and defensible.
James’s point is that it is not enough to believe that a big picture of reality, or an unseen order of some kind, simply exists – you have to step into this, becoming part of it, and allowing it to shape and inform your life and thought. We both discern and create meaning, recognizing it as an external reality that needs to be internally appropriated and assimilated. We don’t observe it with a cool indifference from outside, but step inside this world of meaning and experience it. As many ancient Greek thinkers recognised, we are not simply passive observers of some grand theory of the world; we are called to become active participants within this theoretical framework, and thus create meaning in our lives through enacting this theory.
I will come back to theories of meaning and their importance, as there is much more that needs to be explored. But let’s reflect on where our mental experiment has taken us in thinking about the place of belief in life, and setting up the agenda for the rest of the book.
The Gradgrind Paradox: Why Facts Aren’t Enough
What does a world without belief look and feel like? For some, this world might be a rationalist paradise, in which we have left behind the debilitating notions of belief and faith, suitable only for the feebleminded who are unable to grasp the certainties of pure reason and the natural sciences. For others, however, this world of factual certainties is a limiting domain. It constitutes a segment of the spectrum of human knowledge, rather than defining this in its totality. Human beings yearn to go beyond the factual, opening up new worlds of meaning and values. As I see it, this move from observed facts to beliefs about life is both natural and necessary if human beings are to transition from mere physical survival to mental, social and relational flourishing – which is what our evolutionary history, both biological and cultural, suggests has happened.
What exactly is ‘flourishing’? Although some treat this as equivalent to finding happiness or experiencing wellbeing, it is a much richer concept, which has come to play a major role in the Positive Psychology movement. It is often described using the PERMA model which describes human flourishing in terms of positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and achievement. Flourishing is about people growing as human beings through both good times and life struggles. This rests on seeing ourselves and reality in certain ways that go beyond observable facts.
One of Charles Dickens’ more memorable literary creations is Mr Gradgrind, a schoolteacher whose educational philosophy is as simple as it is misguided: ‘What I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.’ For Gradgrind, facts alone give rise to intellectual certainty. Yet Gradgrind’s philosophy simply leads to an overload of information and an absence of wisdom. Gradgrind’s vision of a rational paradise is a joyless world of factual fetishes and cold actualities which bypass the human imagination and emotions.
Dickens adroitly brings out the utter lifelessness of this purely informational world through the lens of Gradgrind’s daughter, Louisa. She is portrayed as having a ‘starved imagination’, being inclined through her father’s influence to view everything from the standpoint of ‘reason and calculation’. Sadly – but perhaps inevitably – having been indoctrinated into her father’s creed, Louisa finds herself trapped in a loveless world, unable to find happiness and security. She needs something deeper to bring stability and joy to her life.
That’s the paradox which stands at the heart of this book. Facts are epistemically safe and reliable, yet frustratingly inadequate for engaging the serious issues of life. In going beyond them, we embark on a journey that is both risky and exciting, and to be fair, this is a journey of discovery which can indeed go wrong. It involves making choices and judgements that do not necessarily go against reason, but often go beyond reason. And sometimes we make bad choices, ending up trapping ourselves within intellectual prisons of our own making. But it doesn’t have to be like this.
What we cannot do, however, is pretend that we exist in a purely factual, belief-free world. Christopher Hitchens clearly believed he occupied such a world, allowing him to deliver privileged thunderbolts of rationalist wisdom from on high to lesser mortals, whose failure to grasp the core ideas of the Enlightenment locked them into a superstitious darkness: ‘Our belief is not a belief.’ Hitchens’ professed world is a world of certainties, from which beliefs are excluded. Yet Hitchens’ actual world is clearly a world of belief, in that his arguments and assertions are based on a network of unacknowledged and unevidenced moral values (such as ‘religion is evil’) which he is unable to demonstrate – and hence tends to assert verbally rather than defend evidentially. To be human is to believe – that is, to refuse to be confined to a limited and limiting world of facts, and instead search for a larger vision of the world enfolding the good, the true and the beautiful.
You might have noticed that I have not even touched on religion, other than indicating my ephemeral teenage distaste for this cultural phenomenon. My reason for postponing discussion of religion is that I want to show that belief is a normal, integral aspect of human existence in general, rather than being something weird, abnormal or limited to religious people. Humans are creatures who believe – and by believing, find they can make more sense of their world and themselves. From a psychological perspective, beliefs are a fundamental aspect of human cognition that fulfil important individual and social functions – not least in providing meaning, comfort and communality. We will come to religious belief in a later chapter, but first, we need to explore the importance of finding a ‘big picture’ in life.