Towards a Science of Belief Systems

E. Griffiths

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137346377
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

People believe in a great many things; and yet most of us know almost nothing about why other people believe what they do, or indeed about how it feels to believe it. This book presents an objective method for understanding and comparing belief systems - irrespective of whether the investigator happens to agree with them.

Introduction: The Idea of a Science of Belief Systems

§1. Even in an era of filigree-like academic specialization, the study of belief systems has not yet succeeded in winning recognition as an independent area of knowledge. Perhaps there is no need for it. After all, the undemarcated boundaries of our subject have been traversed again and again by raiding parties operating out of bases in history, theology, ethnography, biology, and literary criticism; and, when these razzias have sometimes been led by skirmishers of the calibre of Norman Cohn, Rudolf Otto, Gershom Scholem, Peter Worsley, and in our day Ronald Hutton, it is no surprise that the results have often proved brilliant. Much, then, is actually already known about belief systems, both in general and in particular, and the treasures of the discipline we are proposing to establish already adorn the museums of sundry other fields. As if that were not reason enough to look without enthusiasm on any unilateral declaration of independence, it must seem likely that a newly separate science of belief systems would at once start trying to reduce the flourishing and well-run disciplines of political science and religious studies to the status of tributary departments – and that it would further threaten to annex some of the richest provinces of psychology, sociology, and philosophy. On the face of it, the attempt to set up a science of belief systems is both superfluous and, potentially, disruptive.

§2. And yet belief systems are, on the whole, very imperfectly understood. Often they are not thought to be worth understanding at all. Countless millions of our fellow human beings believe in animal liberation, the face on Mars, Haredism, Hindutva, humanitarian intervention, the New Age, the new atheism, 9/11 Truth; and yet we are often content to assume that we believe our beliefs because they are true, while other people believe other things because other people are malicious, deceived, or mad, so there is really nothing to understand. People who were teenagers at the time of the first flying saucer craze (1947) are now in their eighties: in another decade or two, the chance to interview them about how they first heard of saucers, what they thought they were, and so forth will be gone, lost as irrecoverably as the chance to quiz the first generation that heard of angels. Something similar can be said of Albanians’ experiences in the years after 1966, when delegates to that year’s congress of the Party of Labour voted to abolish religion. Neither Stalin, nor Mao, nor Choibalsang ever attempted so much. A whole generation had time to reach adulthood in a society where they were as likely to attend an Orphic or Dionysian rite as they were a legal service in a church or a mosque. One may regard this policy as execrable and infamous, or as crudely Utopian, or even as a salutary measure of intellectual hygiene. But one cannot deny that it raises a wealth of fascinating and significant questions: the ways in which Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims maintained their faith while public expression of it was illegal; attitudes among atheists; the responses of the children of the atheist state when religious preaching was legalized. Only the absence of a science of belief systems can explain the paucity of research into one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious social experiments. The study of belief systems is so far from being a science, indeed, that the mere attempt to understand certain belief systems (racism, al-Qaeda) is sometimes labelled immoral in itself – reproaches that physicists, in recent centuries, have had to answer only when their pure research has led to potentially or actually dangerous technological applications. As a result, most of us know almost nothing about what other people believe, why they believe it, or how it feels to believe it. If these questions are to be answered, it seems we do after all need a science of belief systems: and, in view of the generalized methodological chaos that still prevails in this area, there may be some value in offering even a few simple reflections on how our field can move towards becoming an objective science.

§3. The phrase ‘belief systems’ has already been used a few times, and will occur rather often in what follows, but it is not intended as a particular term of art. The reverse, if anything: I have chosen ‘belief systems’ precisely because it is more general and less theoretically loaded than the possible alternatives. Common usage draws a firm distinction between ‘religious faith’ and ‘political ideology’: to call Euroscepticism a ‘faith’, or Pentecostalism an ‘ideology’, would sound peculiar – and would probably cause unnecessary offence. We would anyway be ill advised to start from the assumptions, first, that ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ represent two essentially different kinds of belief system, and, second, that there are no other equally important kinds. Among Marxist writers, meanwhile, ‘ideology’ is correctly used in a sense that is both broader and narrower than ‘belief system’: broader because it also includes, for instance, the arts, and narrower because it refers only to phenomena that are seen as determined in some way by a mode of production. The relationship between belief systems and the economic base is addressed in Chapter 5; for the time being, however, it remains to be proved whether any particular belief system is an ideology. I have therefore preferred a relatively neutral and uncontentious term. What I mean by a ‘belief system’, then, is simply a set of propositions held to be true, to which some emotional charge (affect) is attached and which gives more or less cogent expression to a general sense of how the world is. Some people may object to this definition, at least when applied to their own beliefs; but we do not need to take their objections very seriously. If we are told that a given belief system does not include any propositional beliefs, we shall make a careful note of that particular proposition and move on. Similarly, if people claim that their own belief system is quite uncontaminated with affect, we shall just observe the vehemence with which they claim it. Finally, a remark like I don’t have any belief system, I just accept the evidence does sound rather similar to I don’t have any false beliefs, I only believe things I think I have good grounds for believing – which is not unrespectable, but is hardly distinctive. It might be even less controversial to speak of world views, instead of belief systems; but I prefer to reserve ‘world view’ for the basic, underlying sense to which the doctrines give expression. (Towards a Science of World Views would also make rather an ungainly title.)

§4. In the interest of avoiding possible misunderstandings, it should perhaps be made clear that the word ‘science’ is not being used here in the special Anglophone sense where it is synonymous with ‘natural science’ – or perhaps with ‘activity undertaken in a lab coat’. I have no intention of accelerating Calvin’s Institutes round a supercollider underneath Geneva in the hope of re-creating the conditions that obtained just after the Swiss Reformation; I shall not be inviting rats to find their way through the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur; and I shall even resist the urge to concoct a quasi-Darwinian ‘Just So’ story that would account for evolutionary psychologists’ propensity to believe in evolutionary psychology. By a science I mean nothing more than a certain kind of knowledge – one that aims to be rigorous, objective, and general, and to argue from observable fact on the basis of an explicitly stated methodology.

§5. Science is neither the only kind of knowledge in existence, nor the only valid kind. Art (as distinct from entertainment) is another kind of knowledge, as complex and as important as science, even though the knowledge we acquire from it is not always straightforwardly commensurable with scientific knowledge. If belief systems were being copiously and thoroughly explored in fiction and the drama, the need to approach them with the chillier and more pedantic methods of science would perhaps be less urgent. Readers of The Magic Mountain will learn things there that they could not easily discover from a scientific treatise. But questions related to belief systems do not now very often receive extended treatment by our most prominent creative artists; and, when they do, the treatment they receive sometimes disappoints. Parts of Ghostwritten – a 1999 novel by the author of Cloud Atlas – are written in the first person from the perspective of a character, Quasar, who belongs to a group modelled on Aum Shinrikyo (the organization that released nerve gas on the Tokyo underground in 1995).¹ But, instead of offering a living imaginative insight into how it might feel to hold a very alien belief system, David Mitchell contents himself with showing us a blatant psychotic who has been duped by a gang of cynical and self-serving shysters. He thereby comes uncomfortably close to endorsing the assumption that anyone who professes to see the world very differently from the way the author and the likely reader see it must be either insane or lying.

§6. There is a third kind of knowledge: knowledge that remains closely associated with deliberate practical activity, like the knowledge of rock formations possessed by an experienced miner. (It is only by analogy that one might call this knowledge either ‘science’ or ‘art’.) In the field of belief systems, knowledge of this kind (sometimes very subtle and nuanced) underpins the craft of every competent preacher, stump orator, pamphleteer, door-to-door missionary, dean of a theological college, editor of an obscure political newsletter, spiritual leader of an armed militant group, or manager of a New Age shop. Some historians and other scholars may possess a rather similar craft knowledge, to the extent that their experience with belief systems tells them what to expect and suggests questions to ask. And we all have at least some such craft knowledge, acquired in our capacity as believers (in some things) and sceptics (towards other things). Wherever a mature craft knowledge exists, meanwhile, science – especially a science that is still in its infancy – can sometimes appear unnecessary: the efforts of the scientist risk looking like a clumsy and laborious attempt at proving things that the craft specialist knows at a glance, or else a boring scholastic insistence on fitting facts under the right rubrics rather than getting on with the work in hand. It would be naïve to hope that the science of belief systems could escape these accusations. My Chapter 1 – taken up, as it unavoidably is, with whether it is even possible to understand someone else’s beliefs – may even seem calculated to provoke them. But the most rudimentary science still attempts things that craft never can. Craft knowledge finds its natural expression in rules of thumb, in practitioners’ reminiscences, but chiefly in competent practice: it does not generalize, it does not state its assumptions and methods explicitly, and it does not compare. Above all, it can only be acquired through long years of diligent apprentice work, and even then there is no guarantee that what has been learnt will be equally useful when one turns one’s attention from the South Wales anthracite district to a diamond field in the Sakha Republic, from the early Caliphate to the ‘rightly guided’ first four congresses of the Communist International.

§7. A science of belief systems, then, must be general. Precisely for this reason, it must steer clear of a priori constructions or premature generalizations. Althusser remarks, in his essay on ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’,² on the ‘rather astonishing paradox’ that Marx nowhere elaborates a theory of ideology:³ it is perhaps also slightly astonishing that Althusser himself, in this single short work, should present not one such theory but two. On the one hand we are to approach ideologies in rigorously institutional terms, discarding the word ‘ideas’ altogether and speaking instead of ‘practices’, ‘rituals’ (undefined), and ‘ideological apparatuses’.⁴ On the other hand, Althusser boldly announces that

the category of the subject [ ... ] is the constitutive category of all ideology, whatever its determination (regional or class) and whatever its historical date [ ... ] the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.⁵

As it happens, the first of these approaches – though one-sided – has the potential to be a fruitful and illuminating adjunct to the science we are proposing; but the second can only lead to grossly forced interpretations, like Althusser’s own unfortunate attempt to sum up the content of Christianity:

It says: I address myself to you, a human individual called Peter (every individual is called by his name, in the passive sense, it is never he who provides his own name), in order to tell you that God exists and that you are answerable to Him. [ ... ] It says: this is who you are: you are Peter! This is your origin [ ... ] if you observe the ‘law of love’ you will be saved, you, Peter [ ... ]⁶

But if we cannot without embarrassment say with Althusser that all ideology constitutes individuals as subjects, no more can we say with Tillich that faith is ‘ultimate concern’⁷ – not when there are whole categories of beliefs (see Chapter 6) that are not even supposed to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Idea of a Science of Belief Systems (§§1–15)
• 1 You Don’t Know What It’s Like! (§§16–29)
• 2 A Descriptive Science of Logic (§§30–51)
• 3 Some Notes on Affect (§§52–71)
• 4 Elements of Comparative Method (§§72–99)
• 5 Belief Systems and the Materialist Conception of History (§§100–116)
• 6 Beliefs That Are Not Supposed to Be Wholly Believed (§§117–128)
• 7 A Theory of Superstition, in Thirteen Paragraphs (§§129–141)
• 8 Believing in Fictional Beings (§§142–159)
• Instead of a Conclusion (§§160–169)
• Appendix: The Use of Symbolic Notation in Descriptive Logic
• Bibliography
• Index