7 The Dark Side of Believing: Tensions, Intolerance and Violence
Chapter 7
The Dark Side of Believing:
Tensions, Intolerance and Violence
One of the most common criticisms of beliefs is that they are divisive. It is a valid concern – beliefs can indeed lead to violence. Yet the human condition is such that we refuse to confine ourselves to what is demonstrably true, and reach beyond this limited and restrictive domain to offer sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, and always unprovable answers to the great questions of life.
Unfortunately many have failed to master the art of learning through disagreement. In a recent discussion, the head of one of Britain’s public service broadcasters suggested that many younger people seemed to lack the skills to discuss alternative viewpoints in terms other than outright rejection. Research points to the emergence of ‘Young Illiberal Progressives’ who ‘have very little tolerance for people with beliefs that they disagree with’. Their exposure to short form content (such as online videos) and ideological online echo chambers seems to create an incapacity for critical reflection and unwillingness even to consider, let alone to discuss, ideas that they find challenging.
No exploration of ‘believing’ can therefore avoid discussing how perceived conflicts and tensions arising from this basic human instinct and practice can be mitigated, or perhaps even redirected in a creative and constructive manner. How can we create a social space within which other peoples’ beliefs can be explored intelligently and responsibly, free from external pressure and influence?
Tensions: Traditional and Modern Beliefs
A classic case of conflicts of beliefs involves a perceived tension between traditional belief systems and their modern equivalents. A good example of this can be seen from early twentieth-century China. After a long period of occupation by colonial powers, China was able to begin to regain its sense of national identity following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the end of the First World War in 1918. Chinese nationalists called for a rejection of traditional values – such as those of Confucianism – and the adoption of western cultural values as the best way of modernising the bruised nation. Gradually western science came to be seen not simply as an instrument or a technique for achieving cultural and social change, but as an ideology – a way of determining values and meaning, which inevitably eroded traditional Chinese values. Western science was seen as progressive; Confucianism as regressive.
In the late 1950s, however, ‘Neo-Confucianism’ emerged as a means of maintaining continuity with older and distinctively Chinese understandings of the natural world, and offering answers to important questions that could not be answered on the basis of science alone. Neo-Confucianism did not deny the usefulness of scientific discourse, but rather emphasised the importance of complementing its ‘objective logical causal mode of thinking’ with an approach which could offer ‘a subjective, direct, and empathic comprehension of the world.’ This development was consolidated through the widespread revival of Confucianism in contemporary China, following the ending of Mao Zedong’s abortive ‘Cultural Revolution’ (1966–76). Neo-Confucianism allowed an account of the world which was attentive to both its objective and subjective dimensions, rooted in traditional Chinese understandings of the natural world.
The perception of a significant tension between traditional belief systems and their modern western equivalents has become particularly significant through the rise of post-colonial criticism of the imposition of western cultural norms and values on indigenous cultures in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Polynesia. What happens when traditional beliefs, often held as identity-giving by indigenous peoples, are not so much disparaged as suppressed? To illustrate the difficulties that arise, we shall consider issues relating to the role of indigenous belief systems in modern science education in New Zealand.
In recent decades, mātauranga Māori (Māori ‘ways of knowing’) has been included in the teaching of science in New Zealand. This has been criticised by some within the western scientific community, such as the American geneticist Jerry A. Coyne. While Coyne concedes that mātauranga Māori ‘contains “practical knowledge,” like how to catch eels, that could conceivably be inserted into science courses,’ the natural sciences are universal, and not limited to or determined by any national or tribal identity. It made no sense to Coyne that contemporary scientific understandings of the origins of the universe were being depicted as a western ‘creation myth’ and placed on an equal level with its ‘indigenous’ alternatives in New Zealand. Mātauranga Māori is important to an understanding of the cultural history of New Zealand and ought therefore to be taught in anthropology or sociology courses – but not in science.
Coyne makes an entirely fair point in stressing that the fundamental method of the natural sciences is universal. In one sense, ‘scientific’ knowledge is defined by the manner of its acquisition and validation, not the social, tribal, religious, cultural or gendered identity of scientific practitioners. To be a natural scientist is to step inside this specific understanding of human knowledge production. Yet there is a deeply problematic historical dimension to this matter which seems to have been overlooked here – namely, the role of the natural sciences in the British colonial endeavour.
To appreciate the problem, let us consider a lecture delivered to the Anthropological Society in London on 1 March 1864 by Charles Darwin’s colleague (and occasional rival) Alfred Russel Wallace. Alluding to the subtitle of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), Wallace made the following statement:
It is the same great law of ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life,’ which leads to the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come in contact. The red Indian in North America, and in Brazil; the Tasmanian, Australian and New Zealander in the southern hemisphere, die out, not from any one special cause, but from the inevitable effects of an unequal mental and physical struggle. The intellectual and moral, as well as the physical qualities of the European are superior; the same powers and capacities which have made him rise in a few centuries from the condition of the wandering savage with a scanty and stationary population to his present state of culture and advancement, with a greater average longevity, a greater average strength, and a capacity of more rapid increase, – enable him when in contact with the savage man, to conquer in the struggle for existence, and to increase at his expense.
This statement raises difficult and disturbing questions about how Darwin’s evolutionary ideas were interpreted within British colonial thinking and practice concerning the role of ‘favoured races’ in Australia and New Zealand. Wallace concluded his lecture with some significant reflections on where accepting ‘natural selection’ as a biological and cultural metanarrative pointed, including his suggestion that ‘it must inevitably follow that the higher – the more intellectual and moral – must displace the lower and more degraded races.’ Wallace’s lecture creates the impression that there is scientific justification for the historical inevitability of the triumph of intellectually and morally superior Europeans over ‘mentally undeveloped populations’ or ‘savages,’ thus improving the human condition.
Darwin himself entertained similar ideas. In a letter of 1862 to Charles Kingsley – to which the Darwin Correspondence Project wisely attaches a ‘Content Warning’ on account of the unsettling views it expressed – Darwin concurs with Kingsley’s remarks (which appear to have been widespread in educated British circles of this period) that in 500 years ‘the Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.’
Most evolutionary biologists today would reject these historically specific interpretations and applications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. It is, however, important to note the intellectual plausibility and cultural prominence of these interpretations in the 1860s and 1870s, and the perception that they created or encouraged – namely, that colonialism would lead to the improvement of the human race. Wallace’s specific (and demeaning) references to ‘the Tasmanian, Australian and New Zealander’ can hardly be overlooked.
What can be learned from this? For Coyne, the integrity of the natural sciences is at stake; for others, there is a real problem arising from the abiding historical memory of the way in which science was deployed as a legitimating resource by British colonial administrators and educationalists to suppress indigenous beliefs and peoples in New Zealand (and elsewhere) in the late nineteenth century. Anyone concerned with the public understanding of science needs to confront the ways it has been exploited, abused and distorted in the service of political and social agendas. To indigenous populations, Darwinism turned out to be yet another aspect of the western colonial attempt to deny or eliminate ‘the knowledge and cultures of these populations, their memories and ancestral links and their manner of relating to others and to nature.’
For these people, mātauranga Māori was identity-giving, essential to their future survival and flourishing, and part of their self-understanding as a distinct people group. It is not a ‘fixed’ form of detached knowledge, but is a form of embodied knowledge, understanding, wisdom and practices which is intergenerational, being expanded as it is passed on. Yet there are clear possibilities for dialogue with other approaches here – for example, in the emerging discipline of ‘ethnoastronomy’, which allows dialogue between the ancestral Polynesian astronomical knowledge systems and their western counterparts.
Wisdom: Holding Beliefs in Creative Tension
How can we integrate the multiple elements of human understanding? Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience (1998) is an important, though flawed, attempt to offer a unified account of human knowledge, which sets out to make connections across disciplines in the quest for meaning and a proper understanding of the human situation. ‘We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.’ Stephen Jay Gould argues that while the differences between the sciences and humanities must be respected, they have a genuine potential for synergy. Why should we not acknowledge and respect the differences between these disciplines, and at the same time ‘find some meaningful order in the totality?’ Both Wilson and Gould point to the concept of ‘wisdom’ as a means of coordinating and holding together a rich and diverse range of insights. So, what are we to understand by ‘wisdom’?
Recent empirical studies of the nature of human wisdom suggests that one of its core capabilities is to hold potentially conflicting ways of thinking together in a creative tension. While there is no consensual definition of wisdom, it is clear that a common theme is a deep knowledge base that enables meaningful living, particularly coping with complexity and ambiguity. Where some would see diversity of beliefs as intrinsically incoherent and self-contradictory, a wise person recognises that have to learn to see our world and frame our experiences from multiple perspectives, rather than from within a single limiting perspective or controlling paradigm.
At the very least, we need to be able to create a map of insights that we cherish, whether we can integrate them or not. A patchwork quilt of beliefs and values can begin to form building blocks of wisdom, even if the question of how they are to be coordinated remains open. In my view, Socrates was right in suggesting that a wise person is aware of their own ignorance, and thus is open to learning from others; who has realised that reality is complicated, and does not try to force everything into a preconceived mould; and who has conceded the finite capacity of the human mind, and does not limit reality to what we can rationally demonstrate.
Acceptance of ‘divergent perspectives’, which entails the virtue of intellectual empathy and willingness to embrace and learn from others, is now regularly cited as a key aspect of wisdom. So how might this be correlated with beliefs? A key point here is that intellectual empathy enables us to gain insight into other people’s emotions and beliefs – to understand why they believe certain things, the difference that this makes to their lives, and whether this belief, when properly understood, is something that we might wish to appropriate and incorporate into our own ways of thinking. Wisdom requires humility, realising our own perspective is not the only one, and coming to understand how much we do not know. It is by engaging rival perspectives and worldviews that we arrive at wise judgements about how best to make sense of this world and live accordingly.
The issue here is being willing to see things in a new way and explore the quality of the intellectual vision that this alternative belief system enables. C. S. Lewis is one of many writers to note how literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt. ‘My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others… In reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.’ Reading literature, Lewis suggests, enables us ‘to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own.’ In using this image of multiple eyes, Lewis is urging us to learn from others, who may have seen something that we have missed. We expand our own vision of reality through borrowing someone else’s eyes and trying to grasp what they have seen.
The Problem of Dogmatism
Charles Taylor once remarked that ‘understanding the “other” will pose the twenty-first century’s greatest social challenge.’ I think he is right. Yet one of the biggest challenges facing this manifesto of understanding is a disturbing human personality trait – dogmatism. While the term ‘dogmatism’ can be defined variously, its two central themes are an excessive confidence in a belief or belief system which is not adequately grounded in the evidence, and an authoritarian style of discourse that is used in the defence of such beliefs or systems.
The term ‘dogma’ has a neutral sense of a belief that is seen as being of critical importance for a belief system or scientific theory. Early Christianity, for example, recognised two such dogmas – the two natures of Christ, and the Trinity – which gave Christianity its coherence and focus. This terminology is also regularly used in the natural sciences. The ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology, for example, concerns the asymmetry between genomes and enzymes: informational asymmetry, in that information flows from genomes to enzymes but not from enzymes to genomes; and catalytic asymmetry, in that enzymes provide chemical catalysis, but genomes do not.
Dogmatism, however, designates a different category of discourse, which can be framed as a tendency to regard the beliefs and principles of a specific individual or community as objectively and self-evidently correct, despite their deficient evidential foundations and the existence of viable alternatives. Whereas ‘good thinking’ leads to a confidence that is proportional to the evidence available, dogmatic beliefs are held and asserted with a confidence that masks their being grounded on inadequate or biased thinking. Although some suggest that dogmatism is characteristic of religious people or beliefs, the evidence clearly indicates that it is linked with a wide range of domains, situations, topics and issues – particularly politics.
While the Enlightenment project of the eighteenth century emphasised the importance of open-mindedness and the destructive nature of dogmatism, the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a new authoritarianism, made tangible in the rise of Fascism and the cult of submission to strongmen such as Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin.
Our concern, however, is not so much with an ‘authoritarian personality’ (someone who prefers a social system with a strong ruler) as with dogmatic beliefs or hardened belief systems – ideas that clearly cannot be shown to be true, but which are asserted and enforced as if they were absolute certainties. A dogma is a belief which commands acquiescence and assent as a matter of obedience to a charismatic individual or a controlling community – such as the Soviet Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s. Though having the epistemic status of a belief or opinion, a dogma is treated as a truth whose denial constituted irrationality or mental illness. It is worth recalling that Pravda (the Russian word for ‘truth’) was the official organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1991, which informed its readers what they ought to think. This was the ‘truth’ that Party members were required to acknowledge.
The psychologist Judy K. Johnson argues that dogmatism is ‘the arrogant voice of certainty that closes the mind, damages relationships and threatens peaceful coexistence on this planet.’ For the philosophers Richard C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, dogmatism represents a ‘disposition to respond irrationally to oppositions’ to certain tenets of their beliefs, often leading to ridicule rather than engagement, evasion rather than discussion. Dogmatism can be seen as an epistemically unjustified certainty arising from the confluence of cognitive, emotional and behavioural characteristics that lead to prejudicial closed-minded belief systems. A ‘dogmatic’ person is likely to be intolerant of ambiguity, to encourage an in-group vilification of out-groups, and to develop a form of mental compartmentalisation which protectively encloses its own declarations in barbed wire, while sealing off contradictory beliefs in such a way that they do not pose a threat.
Such people tend to think in highly polarised terms, preferring reductive simplifications over acknowledging the complexity of the world and life, and adopting an ‘arrogant, dismissive communication style’, talking at others rather than with others, and preferring personal disparagement to serious engagement with the issues – precisely because such an engagement is seen as threatening. As Johnson points out, this sort of ‘defensive cognitive closure’ leads to rival or conflicting ideas being judged immediately and automatically as ‘ridiculous’. People holding rival views are not simply wrong; they are often denigrated as ‘stupid’ as well.
What can be done about this? My training as an academic immediately suggests a set of solutions. Go where the evidence takes you – and be honest if you are going beyond it. Be willing to confront ambiguity and live with uncertainty. Talk to people with opposing views, partly to ensure you have grasped their positions, and partly because of the importance of maintaining personal relationships in the face of disagreements. As a scholar, I make a point of reading works advocating alternative perspectives and talking to those who hold such views, partly to ensure I have understood them properly – but more importantly, to ensure I can hold my own views with integrity in the face of rival beliefs.
But this won’t work in the face of dogmatism because the problem is ultimately psychological, not evidential. The issue is an ‘intolerance of ambiguity’, which leads certain individuals to perceive an ambiguous situation ‘rigidly in black or white’, often leading to rapid evaluations and unreliable foreclosures of complex issues – such as medical diagnosis. An ability to tolerate ambiguity is increasingly being linked with wellbeing. Perhaps we shall see more research on how to confront and cope with dogmatism in the future, as a way to help us understand others and achieve greater social cohesion.
When Worlds Collide: Believing and Violence
Growing up in Belfast during the late 1960s, I was surrounded by sectarian tensions arising from Ireland’s complex and troubled political history, which often involved religion. It was not difficult for me to frame these persuasively within my early atheist worldview: if there was no religion, there would be no religious violence.
I never gave much thought to the consequences of my emerging teenage belief that religion was evil, and thus ought to be eliminated or excluded from society. The idea that this might violate human rights never entered my head, partly because I was inclined to think that a religion-free world was itself a basic human right. Where some argued for freedom of religion, it seemed obvious to me that an ideal world involved freedom from religion.
I would have been shocked to read of what I now know happened in the Soviet Union during the 1920s as a state-sponsored programme of the suppression of religion took place, using execution squads, prison camps and protracted social violence to create a religion-free world. Because religion was evil, its elimination justified any means that this required.
At Oxford, I discovered Isaiah Berlin and the intensely serious tradition of reflection on diversity and its implications that his writings stimulated. For Berlin, individuals, communities and nations have divergent visions of what is good and right. Back in the 1960s, some visionaries dreamed of diverse communities of individuals who each pursued their own goals and visions of personal fulfilment independently and harmlessly. Today, we are perhaps more realistic, recognising that one community’s exercise of freedom may impact on another’s identity, wellbeing or freedom – and thus lead to conflict and the possibility of violence.
In this section, we shall consider the ways in which the human propensity for belief can create tensions and violence, and reflect on its implications for our understanding of the place of belief in life. I have no doubt that religion can generate tensions and violence. But it’s not alone in this. As writers as diverse as Aristotle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau make clear, viable accounts of the origins of division and conflict can be offered that neither require nor exclude a significant religious element. Racial and political ideologies are human belief systems with a particular propensity for violence and extermination. In Latin America, millions of people seem to have ‘disappeared’ in ruthless campaigns of violence by right-wing politicians and their militias. In Cambodia, Pol Pot eliminated millions in his relentless pursuit of an elusive communist paradise.
Any form of ideological exclusivism inevitably leads to social and intellectual tensions, in that it divides the world into in-groups and out-groups – ‘friends and enemies’, ‘good and evil’, ‘us and them’, ‘human and subhuman’, or ‘enlightened and irrational’. All these value-laden categorisations provide an impetus to demonise and dehumanise the ‘other’ which can lead to discrimination, hostility and violence. The Nazi ideological recategorisation of certain human communities as Untermenschen (sub-humans) allowed their elimination to be framed as socially therapeutic and morally unproblematic.
Violence against women is widespread, with extensive research suggesting that men’s controlling attitudes and behaviour towards women often rest on underlying traditional gender norms – a set of beliefs about the place and roles of men and women in society, such as ideologies of hegemonic masculinity which are internalised as normative by both men and women. This framing ideology leads women to blame themselves for being the victims of violence by men, so that they are less likely to disclose it or seek legal support.
Overcoming such traditional beliefs and ideologies is not easy, not least on account of the social pressures to conform to dominant local accounts of human identity. It is, however, necessary to challenge certain understandings of being human and the illusions that are employed to sustain them. It is helpful to remember that an ideology is a human construction, not some eternal truth characterised by a mathematical or logical certainty which demands our assent.
And what of religion? Surely religion is implicated in the violent history of human culture? Of course it is. But things are more complicated than its critics suggest – not least because religion is not a catch-all. For a start, some secularist critiques of religion are highly selective, presenting religions as a monolithically violent and oppressive reality, and failing to respect its complexity and depth, which makes such generalisations questionable.
Michael Shermer, President of the Skeptics Society, made the significant point that while religions were implicated in some human tragedies, such as holy wars, there is clearly a significant positive side to religion that has to be acknowledged:
However, for every one of these grand tragedies there are ten thousand acts of personal kindness and social good that go unreported… Religion, like all social institutions of such historical depth and cultural impact, cannot be reduced to an unambiguous good or evil.
Shermer’s point is given added weight by atheist violence against religion. Some New Atheist writers insist that there is no evidence that atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. Others might beg to differ, noting that neither the Bolsheviks nor New Atheists consider atheism to be the mere absence of belief in God, but make a normative judgement that religious faith is evil. Following the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, the forcible elimination of religious belief came to be an increasingly important element of their revolutionary programme. Religion was believed to be evil and counter-revolutionary, and hence had to be neutralised. In their efforts to enforce this atheist ideology, the Soviet authorities systematically destroyed and eliminated large numbers of churches and priests during the period 1918–41.
As Bertrand Russell noted in his remarkably perceptive 1920 account of the Soviet Union, Bolshevism ‘is to be reckoned as a religion, not as an ordinary political movement.’ Why? Because it transcendentalised its ideals, leading to the Soviet state and its institutions being seen as God-surrogates. Recognising the need for a religious revival within Russia after the catastrophe of the First World War, Bolshevism presented itself as a new religion – a ‘combination of the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam.’
What matters here is that worldviews and their associated institutions are demonstrably prone to intolerance, violence and dogmatism. It is pointless to argue for the elimination of individual beliefs or extended belief systems, which are part of the human condition. It is, however, entirely right to ask what can be done about mitigating the risks of beliefs leading to violence. Some might suggest that the obvious way ahead is to criminalise what are seen as dangerous beliefs, given that these cannot be proved to be true and can be the cause of social tension and personal distress. Belief in God is often singled out as an especially appropriate target for suppression.
Yet when a society rejects the idea of God, it tends to transcendentalise secular alternatives and allow them to function as alternative gods. Emilio Gentile’s studies on fascism and totalitarianism show how worldviews emerge which, though secular in their outlooks and foundations, nevertheless take the form of ‘a more or less developed system of beliefs, myths, rituals, and symbols that create an aura of sacredness around an entity belonging to this world and turn it into a cult and an object of worship and devotion.’
A good example of this phenomenon can be seen in a later phase of the French Revolution. Doctrinaire disputes between the Jacobins and Girondins claimed thousands of lives through mass executions of ‘enemies of the revolution’ in one year. Safeguarding the Revolution justified whatever means were deemed necessary to this end. Marie-Jeanne Roland, a Girondist revolutionary activist who now found herself out of favour, was brought to the guillotine in 1793, where she spoke her famous final words: ‘liberty, what crimes are committed in your name.’ Liberty had been transcendentalised, becoming a sacred entity which justified such extreme violence in its defence.
The historian Martin Marty identified five ‘features’ that he holds to be characteristic of religion; all five, he pointed out, are equally characteristic of political movements. Politics thus often morph into forms of religion, claiming the right to define the fundamental purpose and meaning of human life. The result is inevitable – a tendency towards intolerance and violence when these secular ‘objects of worship and devotion’ are challenged or threatened. Ontologically, they are secular; functionally, they are divine – and divisive.
On Coping with Difference
I noted earlier Charles Taylor’s remark that ‘understanding the “other”’ is the greatest social challenge that we face today. While I think he’s right, I’m not sure he offers us a solution to this problem – more a way of understanding how it arises, and how we might learn to live with it. It’s better than nothing. But dare we hope for more?
The central problem is this: our defining beliefs – especially about ultimate questions, such as the nature of justice or the question of meaning in life – remain obstinately resistant to philosophical or scientific justification. There is no Archimedean point from which such beliefs can be evaluated. The modern period has witnessed a surge of alternative beliefs (often carefully packaged and presented as reliable certainties), rather than a solution to how we live with a plurality of informing and controlling beliefs, and cope with the social tensions that inevitably arise from this.
Belief systems are often an extension or an essential component of what Hélène Cixous describes as ‘the battle for mastery’ that rages everywhere between social classes and people groups. Paradoxically, many of those who challenge their social, political or intellectual ‘masters’ simply propose an overcoming of those specific masters and their replacement with alternatives – a process that Julietta Singh describes as ‘an overcoming, a mastering of that which masters’. Singh’s concern is that this appears to concede ‘the inescapability of mastery as a way of life’.
A similar pattern underlies critiques of beliefs. The problem, we are told, is that we have the wrong set of beliefs; once we adopt the right set, everything will be just fine. For reasons we have explored, there are good reasons for accepting the ‘inescapability of belief as a way of life’. Yet this does not resolve the question of how we cope with such diversity and learn to live with the ensuing uncertainty.
Individuals often find a sense of intellectual achievement and inner stability when they feel that they have found a way of holding together multiple aspects of their lives and when they can accept the tensions between their and others’ views. Yet when confronted by the fact of an irreducible plurality of beliefs, a liberal society needs to navigate a set of shared public values. Or so John Rawls argued in his impressive manifesto of egalitarian liberalism A Theory of Justice (1971), demanding that we find and impose principles of fairness that are independent of people’s different and contestable conceptions of what is ‘good’.
Rawls explicitly recognises the concern we have been exploring throughout this chapter – that free societies are necessarily divided by ‘reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines’. Rawls argued that each individual citizen has a distinct and reasonable ‘comprehensive doctrine’ – such as a religious faith, or some other way of thinking about God, the nature of life, what is right and what is wrong. Yet they are unwilling to impose these ‘comprehensive doctrines’ on other people, and instead are willing to find mutually agreeable rules that permit fairness in public life.
Rawls suggests that while each citizen may believe they hold reasonable political and moral views, they will not wish to impose these on others. A negotiated settlement of the role of individual beliefs in public life is needed, which will be publicly accepted as fair and right. The issue is thus not the intellectual resolution of a plurality of beliefs, but their political accommodation in the public square by adopting ‘principles of justice that are neutral among competing conceptions of the good life’. Rawls advocates adopting a ‘freestanding’ political conception of justice that does not itself depend upon any particular ‘comprehensive doctrine’.
Yet Rawls’ appeal to such neutral principles has been criticised by Michael Sandel as ‘a hollow view of the world, one that refuses to take up discussions of the best way to live.’ While Rawls conceded that ‘comprehensive doctrines, religious or nonreligious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time’, he did not see these as foundational to this discussion. Sandel’s concern is that Rawls offers a strategy of accommodation rather than a serious discussion about the nature of ‘good’, and particularly ‘the public good’. The focus is on what is fair, rather than what might be true.
While Sandel makes a fair point, Rawls nevertheless gives us a workable framework for engaging the concerns highlighted in this chapter. Rawls uses the notion of a ‘reasonable comprehensive doctrine’ to organise and arrange our beliefs so that they can ‘express an intelligible view of the world’, which involves the recognition of judgement in balancing conflicting values. The political task is to work out a conception of justice that ‘a plurality of reasonable comprehensive doctrines’ are able to endorse and support, while recognising that many of the ‘comprehensive doctrines’ are incompatible with each other. Disagreement over beliefs is not necessarily a barrier to agreement about social and political outcomes.
Yet the studied neutrality of Rawls’ analysis raises difficult questions. One difficulty concerns the increasingly polarised nature of American political discourse since the 1970s. An ideological polarisation, resulting from divergent viewpoints, is increasingly being supplemented with an affective polarisation, expressing distaste and dislike for the people holding these views. It is not simply that American culture has become more polarised; the nature of that polarisation has become more complex, involving often trenchant views about the morality, intelligence and integrity of those who hold alternative viewpoints. It remains unclear whether Rawls’ views regarding finding agreement about fair outcomes can be sustained when there is such personal distrust within and across the political spectrum.
Beyond the difference that believing makes to individuals, we have begun to contemplate how these shape public life and debate. In the next chapter, we shall focus on the question of the relation of beliefs and communities, focusing particularly on how ‘communities of belief’ come into being, function, and are prone to losing their way.