Belief as a Constraint

One of the biggest categories of constraints on our behavior, on our ability to solve problems, answer questions, and generally find our way through the labyrinth of reality, is belief. I do not just mean religious (or at least supernatural) beliefs, though those are close to the core of most people's belief systems, or political and economic beliefs (though those tend to be almost as central as religious beliefs), but our fundamental beliefs of how the world works. Belief is a constraint because it filters reality for us. Let me put it this way. Whatever is out in the "real world" is accessible to us only through our senses, which represents the first level of filters, is processed by our minds (for the sake of argument, let's call the mind brain plus existing content, though that is clearly a simplification), and then brought to consciousness. Our bodies may be reacting to unconscious content, we can certainly act on such implicit understanding, as we do with most skilled or repetitive tasks, but for understanding the world, and acting with intention, we need to bring the things in our environment into consciousness. Belief acts as a filter as soon as we bring something to consciousness, because our conscious mind craves consistency and seeks to fit any new information into an existing pattern.

To start with, here is a non-religious, historical example. The notion of racial superiority was deeply ingrained into most white Europeans and Americans in the first half of the last century with a certainty that few whites could muster today. The certainty came in large part from a century of rapid and successful colonial expansion, reinforced by both Darwinism and a variety of Christian interpretations of the Bible on race. White Europeans and Americans were a much more dominant force in the world than they are today, and their form of Christianity, their systems of politics and economics, were spreading with breathtaking speed. Prior to the Second World War, there were few things to challenge this sense of superiority. 

So it was that in 1941, the United States, the British Empire and Commonwealth, and the Dutch Government in Exile (including the Dutch East Indies) got a rude awakening. The beliefs about the cultural and physical inferiority of the Japanese were so deeply ingrained that it was thought that their soldiers were far inferior to their larger, western counterparts, their eyesight was deemed so bad that their fighter pilots were assumed to be nearly unable to hit a target (something the on-going air war in China should have negated), and it was presumed that all of their best equipment was of foreign design but inferior construction. So deep were these prejudices that the US military actually assumed that the accurately reported speed and range of the soon-to-be-dreaded Zero fighter was a propaganda ploy, even though they were reported accurately. No other country possessed a fighter with those characteristics, so it was impossible that the "backward" Japanese could have created such a machine. Likewise, the early operations of the Japanese Army and Navy completely overwhelmed the defenses of the British, Americans, and Dutch because the operations were so audacious, so daring, so innovative, and so heavily predicted on the toughness of Japanese soldiers and battle-honed skills of their pilots that they seemed beyond belief. From Pearl Harbor to the Gin-Drinker's Line of fortifications guarding Singapore, the allies paid the price for their hubris, for their racist beliefs. In the long run, most in the West eventually learned the lesson, or at lest had this part of their belief system so shaken by these, and by repeated blows from later events in Malaya, Korea, and Vietnam, that the old certainty could never be recovered by most. 

The Japanese, of course, also suffered from a similar set of beliefs, built up by from their mythology, from the political manipulation of their native religious traditions of Shinto, and through highly effective indoctrination through the school system and mass media. They saw the West as too soft and indecisive, certainly as too pleasure loving. A few, such as Yamamoto, may have understood what the industrial strength of the Anglo-Saxon countries meant, or the moral effect that a surprise attack would have, but even they were willing to take the risk, for their belief system also held that it was better to go down fighting than ever surrender. The leaders understood that they had either to compromise with Roosevelt over the war in China or risk all-out war by seizing the oil-rich French Indochina and Dutch East India. Within their belief system, only the second possibility was possible. This was made so, as Ari Hatta has shown in her excellent Japan 1941 because the highest levels of political decision making emphasized unity and discredited opposition. Because they shared the same basic beliefs and values, and had grown up in a political system that severely limited frank discussion and debate, war with the West became almost inevitable, even if the form of the initial attacks was not. 

Both sides had such a strong and settled belief in their own superiority that they could not understand things as they were or as they unfolded. The Western beliefs began to crack before the Japanese (suffering from what they some called "the victory disease," a kind of collective ego inflation brought on by the lightening victories of the first six months), though it took repeated post-War blows to finish them off as mainstream ideas. The Japanese beliefs may have begun to deteriorate, but their political culture and their industrial weakness made it more difficult for them to recover than than it was for the United States and the British Commonwealth. 

One of the things about beliefs is that they tend to be self-reinforcing, so that anything that seems to confirm them, no matter the real cause, strengthens a given belief, while those things that contradict them are explained away or ignored, sometimes even when the evidence is overwhelming. I suggested above that the European and a American experience of colonialism had served to reinforce white racism.  The coincidence of European technical advances and the senescence of the Chinese Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and several other Asian states gave Europeans a false sense of superiority.  Indeed, superiority of Victorian technology, and the comparative stability of Europe's governments in that era, were simply seen as manifestations  of racial and religious superiority.

The blindness of belief to other causes and forces in the world is itself an important constraint on belief that both allows it to grow unchecked while blinding believers to alternatives. In some cases, the constraints on our thought and behavior are nested. Both the nesting and the mutual reinforcement of constraints for future posts.

Embeddedness

We were so fixated with the big threats of war and annihilation in the last century, of titanic conflicts and threats of conflicts, that we missed much of what was happening below the level of Great Power and Superpower conflicts. We were blinded not just by the global threats, but also by advertising and propaganda, and by our unwillingness, at least in America and Western Europe, to look at certain trends. Our liberal ideologies divided politics and religion more or less cleanly. Unless a politico-religious movement obtruded too sharply, we ignored it. We failed to recognize not just that such movements were brewing under the surface and gaining strength until late in the century. We also failed to recognize how much both religion and politics in America were splitting and fragmenting. Theology and ideology were both fragmenting and influencing one another in ways we rarely and dimly glimpsed. The interactions should have troubled us, but, we were so committed to them being separate spheres that we were blind.  Karen Armstrong calls this mutual influence, "... the 'embeddedness' of religion and politics, which works two ways: not only does religion affect policy, but politics can shape theology." (Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood, 2014, p. 127.)

Before I proceed, let me note that this is not merely a few bad people corrupting religion or politics. This has been a very broad phenomenon. Likewise, I am not limiting this to one religion or ideology, it has happened across the board. It has affected the "new religions" as well, and we find it just as much in the New Age communities as in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Hinduism. 

Theology and ideology are two of the main keys to our understanding of the world and reality. As we move away from having two or three broad consensus versions of religion or politics, we move also away from consensus reality. We move into a field of realities more fragmented than any we have seen in centuries, but their effects are magnified more than ever before by our large populations and communication technologies. Even at the time of our Civil War were we so fragmented, for the religious and political divides were divided into two or three big blocks. 

Religion and ideology, whether inherited or adopted later in life, not only reflect our values, our understanding of causality, and our attitudes toward authority, but they are central in shaping them. And it is those three things, plus our experiences (especially our social ones) that shape our sense of reality, that is to say, of how the world works and what we expect from it. 

Constraints

In our present multi-crisis, a systemic crisis that seems to penetrate every sphere from the personal to the global, we are apt to ask what caused it or how to fix it, but are soon compelled to settle for a too simple answer to either question, or just give up and place our faith in God or authority (which comes down to much the same thing in practice). In the past two years, I have heard a lot of questions asked, but I have not heard anyone ask a very basic one: what factors have constrained the paths that led us here and continue to keep us from finding answers and solutions. In other words, we need to ask not why and how, but why not and how not. 

Some factors are very big and beyond our control. One set of constraints is environmental and ecological. Along with the laws of physics, these are things we cannot control or transcend. These are things like the amount energy available in the Solar System and Earth, the quantities of minerals and gases there, and the amounts of all of those that are available to sustain life. For a subset of them, we may be able to manipulate nature to work around the limits for a while (as we have done with so many diseases), but need to recognize that nearly every one of those work-arounds has had unintended consequences, some of which are beyond our abilities to cope. 

There are also a huge set of technological constraints. A few of those are beyond our capacity to change, such as the amount of energy required to move a given quantity of freight by a given means, but most of the technological inevitabilities in which we believe simply are not. Too often we are made to believe this by those who have a vested interest in those "inevitabilities." We can say no, or a qualified yes, or explore alternatives, but we have to be aware of the possibilities and the paths we might take, and there is where the main set of constraints on our finding answers comes into play. 

Most of our constraints are built into our behavior and thinking by the societies and cultures in which we have lived our lives, and in which our parents, grandparents, and ancestors back to the dawn of behaviorally modern humans have been confined. There has been change and evolution over time, generally much more than we are willing to admit, but they constrict us and keep us staring at the wall of Plato's Cave. 

Let us ignore the personal ones, for the moment, and look at some of the bigger ones that entrap large groups, whole countries, and entire civilizations. These are mostly at the level of religions and ideologies. Has it ever struck you that virtually all of these are based on one of three things (or, more usually, a combination thereof): attitudes towards the supernatural, attitudes towards money, or attitudes towards race and gender? Anyone who tries to push against these constraints is a dangerous heretic, radical, or deranged person. Why are our political ideologies constrained by these things? Can we think of nothing else to use as a basis for society than shared beliefs, economics, or prejudice? How about a society based on celebration of difference, on ecological principles, and mutual admiration? (Sounds utopian, does it not, but what have we to lose when the alternative is increasingly dystopian?) All of these are human creations. Humans create theologies to explain how they feel about their gods and the supernatural. Humans created money about 5000 years ago (which is also when they seem to have begun codifying sophisticated theologies) and coins only about 2700 years ago. As to racial prejudices, while those have always existed, our modern "scientific" racism is only a couple of centuries old. Gender roles have fluctuated a great deal over time and space. Most aspects of how we thinking about gender is clearly within our control. 

There are a lot of lower-level obstacles to change, from gerrymandering to skewed media, to lack of education. All of those were put in place either intentionally or unintentionally by humans. There is a lot to undo, but it can be undone, it is humanly possible. And there are lots of things at the personal level too. Asking ourselves about the forms we follow in our daily living or the ways we think about reality. We need to start asking ourselves every day why we do the things we do and think the things we think, but, even more so, ask ourselves what keeps us from doing and thinking things differently. It is hard, never easy, but necessary. These are things that are very deeply ingrained in us, much of it from infancy, but often, as in the case of phobias and prejudices, based in multigenerational patterns of thought and behavior within a family or group. Perhaps some of it is even epigenetic.

If we are to find our way out of all of our messes, political, environmental, diplomatic, etc. we have to begin thinking about all of these things that constrain us, that keep us from taking other paths, or even knowing that other paths are there. We have to do it on multiple levels at once, but we have to start with the personal and the group, simply to find the most basic changes we can make, even if each of us has to start with the tiniest of steps.