Us and Them: The Blog

Forbidden question #2: Does the concept of `belief' make sense?

It is often said that terror of this kind is possible only when one has first “dehumanized” some group of people—aristocrats, Jews, the bourgeoisie. In fact, what motivated the spectacle was exactly the knowledge that the victims were people, and capable of feeling pain and fear as people do. We don’t humiliate vermin, or put them through show trials, or make them watch their fellow-vermin die first.

So says Adam Gopnik, in his recent essay on the French Revolution's Reign of Terror (full text available here).

The more I think about this, the more I think Gopnik is on to something profound.

The world is chock-full of formal and informal practices that mark some kind of person as unworthy of human treatment. They're often gratuitous and sometimes even hinder those who enforce them, yet perpetrators go to a great deal of trouble to keep enacting ritual dehumanizations. I'm thinking of Nazi officials who not only dispossessed Jews of valuables, but also took the time to smash their children's toys; lynch mobs that delayed killing their victims so they could be whipped and ridiculed first; the Jacobins (Gopnik's example) who made families watch as one member after another went to the guillotine; prisons that give medical care to condemned men, so they don't escape the pain and fear of formal execution).

Gopnik's insight is that the focus of these procedures is not the supposed fact of the supposedly non-human nature of the victims. Rather, it's their transition from human-like-us to a lower, outsider status. That focus is also found in procedures that dehumanize people only temporarily, in order to rebuild them (cf. military training, fraternity hazings, training for new-minted physicians, ``rites of passage'' in tribal societies). In those cases, the ``re-humanizing'' ceremony, too, is about change. One you were in that category; now you are in this one.

People are fascinated, appalled, magnetized by such spectacles of exile from human status. We don't want to know how the heretics were costumed and abused in those autos-da-fe, yet we read on; we don't want to see the photos from Abu Ghraib, yet we can't turn away.

Indeed, the most common dehumanizing routines are so compelling that people use them in situations very far from politics, religion, rites of passage and so on. I don't have to go far in my circle of acquaintances to find lovers who declare that they're willing slaves to the beloved; couples who treat spanking as erotic, rather than punitive; apologetic people who gladly change their ways and make sacrifices to earn forgiveness.

Perhaps the power of these dehumanizing practices is so great that people circle back to them, wherever emotions are strong, even in contexts where they don't make much sense. Maybe that's why such practices are used to teach children how to behave.

Requiring obedience, physical punishment, imposing burdens in exchange for kindness, giving control and autonomy only as rewards for good conduct -- prisons and training camps use this stuff because it works. So do a lot of parents. (Do dehumanizing practices come from child-rearing? Is it because most people are parents that they understand how to shame, intimidate, shun and lord it over the neighbors, if they are declared to be of the wrong race or religion or nationality? Dunno. Seems worth asking.)

In any event, if Gopnik is right (and I think he is), then most of us have got dehumanization backwards. We've been speaking about the experience as if it were like air conditioning -- it's off until it's on, and after it's on, it's pervasive until it's somehow turned off.

But consider that the power of dehumanization is all about change: Not the supposedly stable and permanent categories, but the drama of movement from one to another. If that's so, then it's not belief that leads to abuse; it makes more sense to say abuse leads to belief. Did you help lynch the neighbors because you came to believe they are subhuman? Perhaps you now believe they are subhuman because you were involved in the lynching. More likely, what you believe about them varies a great deal in the course of a day, in ways that can be mapped but that don't boil down to a simple cause-and-effect in either direction.

Which brings me to today's forbidden question. It has been on my mind as I've been reading lately about the problem of how science and religion should interact. A lot of what I've read states, or assumes, that people have ``beliefs'' and that these beliefs make them do things. It's the air conditioner model again: If I convert to Christianity, I used to have those beliefs set to ``Off''; now they're ``On'' and because of that, I behave differently.

Marc Hauser, the Harvard psychologist, has lucidly explained why this seems a poor model of belief's relationship to behavior. (His brief essay is here, at the bottom of this web page from Edge.org

I found his critique convincing, by and large. It's not just that I notice a wide range of beliefs among members of ``the same'' religion; it's that I find a wide range of beliefs in each individual member, as their circumstances change. (A point Judith Shulevitz has explored with her customary acuity in this essay.)

The other day, for example, a psychologist friend described an experiment she'd recently run, which found that simple subliminal exposure to words like ``Darwin,'' ``natural selection'' and other evolutionary terms was enough to turn down the intensity of volunteers' self-reported religious convictions.

To speculate wildly, (what else are blogs for, anyway?) I wonder if future theories of mind will jettison the concept of ``beliefs.'' Perhaps instead psychologists will speak of persuasion and justification in an ever-changing sea of emotions and perceptions -- a world where people believe hundreds of things before breakfast, but not one in which there are static, unchanging things called Beliefs, which are either On or Off, Present or Absent, Perfect Copies or Junk.

Forbidden Question Number 1: ``Freedom for Our People'' -- is it snake oil?

Almost every polity has regional divides (north versus south, east versus west). Imagine if America's East-West differences had gotten as ugly as the North-South ones did in 1860 -- if instead of joking about Valley Girl accents and Manhattanites who wear only black, we had Californian soldiers fighting the Pennsylvania National Guard to the death.

Such is the situation in East Timor, a tiny, impoverished nation that won independence from Indonesia in 1999. The Timorese cause was popular among progressives worldwide largely because of the Indonesian government's brutality. However, another element in the cause's success was the culture of nationalism: Most of us were taught as children that nations should be free of big, bad empires.

And what is a nation? Big issue, which I'll leave for other posts. In any event, however you define it, (ethnic, linguistic, cultural, ideological) a nation is always supposed to make more sense politically than the sprawling empire that contains it. After all, what do the people of East Timor have in common with those of Sumatra, a thousand miles distant, with their different history, culture and language?

Problem is, both similarity and alienness are in the eye of the beholder. These traits are not a collection of facts; they are perceptions that people create by talking to one another. So you might find it easy to see me as an alien if I speak a different language, worship a different God, wear different clothes and eat different foods than you do. But none of that is necessary. People can be persuaded to fight others on any basis. Timor illustrates this. So does Somalia. These are both nations in which people who share culture, ethnicity, language, history and religion have nonetheless found other methods by which to divide themselves homicidally.

Perhaps, then, the homogenous ``nation'' makes no more sense as a way to organize politics than the messy incoherent multi-language superstate. In which case, we can ask if nationalism is worth giving up the superstate's virtues -- for instance, its interest in preventing itself from being sundered by religious, ethnic or culture-based violence.

So today's forbidden question is about all those David-vs.-Goliath independence movements of the past two centuries -- from the Greeks throwing off their Ottoman yoke to the Timorese: Have we been rooting for the wrong side?

Imagine the Middle East with the Ottoman Empire intact: No Iraq, no Syria, no Egypt, no Israel. No Saudi Arabia, either. For that matter, imagine Europe: No Greek revolt to inspire Byron and other poets, OK. But also no Balkan wars in the 1990's.

Or imagine a Europe with Habsburg Empire still doddering along: A giant, messy state in the middle of the continent, too diverse for language, ethnicity or even religion to be the basis of its politics. Lots of drawbacks can be listed there. But ``No Nazis?'' That one goes in the plus column.

Or, to get back to the news: What if the Timorese today were taking part in Indonesia's struggle to become a fair and democratic society? Would that be worse than the current situation?