For a handful of years during the aughts, NPR ran a regular segment called This I Believe, a revival of something that Edward R. Murrow used to host on CBS radio during the 1950s. Listeners were invited to submit brief essays describing "the core values that guide their daily lives," and each week producers picked one of these and recorded its author reading it aloud for broadcast.
"Much more interested in seeing what you do than hearing what you believe." I noticed this tagline in someone's Twitter profile not long ago, and although it seemed to indicate that he had missed the entire point of Twitter, it is a sentiment that comes to mind now as I try to express what it was about This I Believe that always made me roll my eyes and wish I had some way to fast forward.
When someone tells you what they believe, you have no way of knowing what to believe about what they just said. I don't just mean that they might be lying, although that's always possible. I mean it's hard to even be sure how to define "lying" in this context. If we claim/think we are against X but do X anyway one day, does that mean we aren't against X after all? Or does it mean we are imperfect people who necessarily cannot always live up to the standards we set ourselves but nonetheless definitely still believe in?
Getting my basic facts straight just now by reviewing the Wikipedia entry about This I Believe, I found the following quote about the 1950s version of the program from the novelist Kathleen Norris, apparently contained in her negative response to an invitation to contribute: "It's either a mawkish sermon, or it's indecent exposure."
I agree wholeheartedly with the first part of that quote even as I recognize, concerning the second, that Norris—whose career spanned the first half of the 20th century—would probably have had standards concerning personal discretion and reserve that would be difficult to understand for many of us denizens of the current exhibitionistic era. The 1950s were famously a time of conformity—the decade of loyalty oaths and a newly repackaged Pledge of Allegiance and red scares and all-White suburbs and so on.
In such a time, a lot of people may have assumed that what everyone else believed started and stopped with what they heard from Sunday sermons, mainstream politicians, and whichever of the three major networks' nightly news programs they watched. Murrow launched This I Believe, he said, because he was curious what would happen if he prompted people to look within themselves and express more personal sentiments. "The only way of discovering what people believe," as Murrow was quoted in the introduction to a 1950s book collecting these essays, "is to ask them."
Isn't it fun to imagine a time when this was true? Nowadays, one can hardly turn around without learning what other people believe, no matter how much one might wish to avoid doing so in certain cases.
A few days ago, for example, thanks to the boil on humanity's ass known as Facebook, I was forced to learn that someone I considered a friend in high school is now something of a vaccine denialist.
"Bryan," as I'll call him, was, like me, something of an outsider at our high school, the kind of private institution to which the adjective/pejorative "elite" is often applied and from which many graduates go on to the very best universities and then positions of prominence in medicine, law, science, and business.
Back in ninth grade, Bryan and I used to organize group outings to the movies on weekends, but we grew apart over the next few years and, to the best of my recollection, the last time I ever spoke to him would have been around graduation day. It was only because of Facebook that I knew that Bryan had gone on to build a career blending music, environmentalism, and spirituality; looking back, I suppose he was a sort of lifestyle influencer (niche: shamanic guru variety) even before that term became common.
Our class naturally has a Facebook group, which is usually reserved for information about official reunion events, coordination of and reports on more informal get-togethers, and announcements of personal news that the rest of the class might be interested in. A few days ago, a classmate posted a selfie in which he was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the neologism "provax." Bryan was quick to comment that he found it "disgusting to see vaccines turned into a religion on a t-shirt," and the conversation went sideways and downhill from there.
I'll admit I found the t-shirt off-putting or at least somewhat perplexing. The lowercase typeface and lack of a hyphen seemed to make it easy to miss what it actually meant, putting me somehow in mind of someone who agrees to get a tattoo of a partner's name—but in the characters of a foreign language, for future deniability in the event of the inevitable breakup. The first time I saw it, I registered the word as some sort of brand name, perhaps that of a drug, although I figured it out pretty quickly and I'm sure it would be instantly comprehensible to the kind of person who might, say, wear a shirt reading "antivax."
I have become hesitant to use the term "virtue signaling," which nowadays mostly crops up in facile right-wing dismissals of liberal policy ideas, but if we define it as a performance intended more to confirm one's commitment to the beliefs of one's in-group than to change the minds of anyone outside that group, this t-shirt certainly qualifies. What could the ostensible reason be for wearing such a thing, other than to convince more people to get vaccinated, especially people who—like Bryan—may feel reluctant to do so?
But after that initial somewhat hot-tempered comment, Bryan held his ground firmly no matter how many people tried to get him to reconsider, and no matter that the people trying to do so included something like a dozen doctors and scientists and even the former head of NIH's pediatric infectious diseases unit and a past dean of Stanford Medical School, whose comments were transcribed into the discussion thread by his daughter, our classmate, in whose kitchen this man happened to standing when this discussion lifted off.
The "conversation" eventually grew to more than 130 comments. Completely unsurprisingly, it did not change my friend's mind and, in the end, he left the group. It was almost enough to make one wonder if t-shirt-ized slogans and the presentation of a few strategically chosen facts might not be effective ways to change someone's mind (they're not)—to wonder if, in fact, encountering opposing viewpoints might only make us cling even more tightly to our own (it does).
Another recent bit of unwelcome news concerning the beliefs of others came in an email from a relative—I'll call him Frank—sent on the Friday after the riot at the U.S. Capitol. This email, entitled "My Predictions," presented a list of bullet points describing what Frank claims to believe will happen "now that Democrats have won the presidency and Congress."
"Abortion will be legal at all ages," Frank predicted in the first bullet point of his email. "Babies will be allowed to be killed at birth." The list continued: "marriage and family life will be greatly degraded"; "our religious freedom will be greatly curtailed"; and, of course, "taxes will significantly increase."
"This will be the end of American democracy as we know it!!!!!" he concluded. "I am scared!"
Although I know better than to take such an email personally—it was transmitted to a large number of Frank's relatives and friends, and I assume he doesn't think that I and the other liberals in the family will be personally assisting in, say, the slaughter of newborn infants—it is nonetheless discomforting to be reminded so casually of the wide gulfs of belief and understanding that separate so many of us.
Frank had to know that there would be those of us among his recipients who felt we had just witnessed an actual and disturbingly successful attempt to at least subvert the country's democratic process, but his email doesn't acknowledge this even briefly.
On the other hand, nowhere in Frank's email is there the merest reference to the claim, advanced by the president and many other GOP leaders and which pollsters tell us that nearly three quarters of Republicans accordingly believe, that Democrats somehow "stole" this election with wide-ranging, complex machinations executed by what would have to have been hundreds of thousands of disciplined, well-coordinated conspirators.
In the minds of something like 50 million American voters, the ranks of election-stealing malefactors are supposed to have included not only random voters and rank-and-file Democratic Party workers but also a huge number of state and federal government officials (among whom are not only the obvious Democratic suspects but also the Republican governor and secretary of state of Georgia, who would have to have been operating as part of some sort of Deep State sleeper cell throughout their entire political careers) and even Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela, who died in 2013.
I know, I know, I'm not being entirely fair. Just because 70 or so percent of Republicans believe the election was in some way illegitimate doesn't mean all of them subscribe to the more baroQue [sic] theories I just sketched. There is also the belief—implicit for and unexamined by some but explicitly expressed by others, including the president himself—that pandemic-related changes to voting rules and procedures essentially enabled too many of the wrong sort of people to vote, and that if this hadn't happened, the right guy would have won.
Again, though, Frank's email doesn't make recourse to any of this. Indeed, the very first sentence, which I quoted earlier, appears to concede that Democrats "won" not only the presidency but control of Congress. Then again, his email also suggests that the wholesale slaughter of infants, the contra-constitutional restriction of freedom of conscience, and the degrading of family life are among this victorious political party's fondest policy objectives.
Frank's accusations against Democrats are relatively mild, or maybe what I mean to say is that they sound like nothing new, just the latest repackaging of some of the same old proto-fascist fears that always plague free societies. In that Frank's allegations paint Democrats not as fellow Americans with whom he happens to disagree on certain policies but, essentially, evil enemies of the state, they probably shouldn't be considered "mild" at all, I suppose.
Perhaps the best we can say about Frank's beliefs about the Democratic Party are that at least they pale in comparison with what many Americans claim to believe has been revealed by someone with a "Q" level security clearance through a series of runic anonymous posts on various internet discussion boards, all gathered under the shorthand heading "QAnon," to wit: Donald Trump is secretly working to defeat a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles that includes not only Democratic politicians but also some Republicans, many outspoken liberal celebrities, and agents of the Deep State, with senior leadership roles played, of course, by Hillary Clinton and George Soros. (I could go on, such as by mentioning that a subset of QAnon believers claim Clinton and others are human/reptile hybrids created by a race of extraterrestrial invaders who long ago made common cause with the Rothschilds and the rest of the Jews who control everything, but you get the idea.)
I'll just note that Frank and the QAnoners share a belief that American infants are on the chopping block as long as liberals are allowed to operate freely. There can be no such thing as a "free and fair" election, of course, if the outcome is the end of the society that mounted the election, even as the floor grows slippery with baby blood.
We are a nation full of people wondering how to change each other's minds just now. At least I hope that's an accurate statement—that only a tiny minority have given up on this possibility and decided that, yes, civil war is the only answer.
But what can we do about beliefs that feel so impossible to reconcile?
A massive chunk of the country believes an election was just stolen in plain sight; another massive chunk believes that those people are the ones trying to steal an election.
Then there are those who, like my old friend Bryan, are worried that the new vaccinations against the COVID-19 virus are not only unsafe but part of a corrupt program of profit-mongering enabled through the collusion of pharmaceutical companies and untrustworthy public officials. The group of people that believes in this conspiracy overlaps strongly with people who believe that the entire pandemic has essentially been a hoax, perpetrated in advancement of dark, anti-democratic sociopolitical goals.
Social science research tells us that, when people express hyper-polarized political and social views, it's not necessarily an indication of real belief. It may be that they want to make their "side" look good or that, in a certain context, they obtain some kind of social value from appearing to think in such an extreme way.
Certainly it is uncontroversial to assert that many people do not always act in accordance with what they say they believe. Does this mean they are lying hypocrites? Or should we even pay attention to what people say they believe, as opposed to what they actually do? If we don't act, or only act sometimes, on the basis of what we say we believe, can we really claim to hold that belief? If we say we hold a certain belief that we never or hardly ever act on, does this so-called belief even matter?
I have wondered this about myself. Let's take the example of climate change. I believe—at least, I believe I believe—that, because of our endless dilly-dallying and prevaricating, the planet is by this point in for an unavoidably hellish ride. I believe that the scientific consensus is that, even if we could achieve worldwide carbon neutrality overnight, tonight, the carbon dioxide we have already emitted is sufficient to cause substantial continued warming over the next century. This warming will be sufficient to cause catastrophic sea level rise, massively alter the course of or even break the jet stream, and trigger the widespread collapse of ecosystems.
The resulting mass migrations of climate refugees, both between and within nations, will tax governments to the breaking point. There will be wars over water and other crucial, fast-dwindling resources. Democracies will increasingly give way to authoritarian governments. My children won't be able to walk on the beach with their grandchildren, because all of the beaches will be underwater by then.
But do I really believe any of this? If you judge me by my actions, I must not. If I really believed that the future awaiting my children would be one of deprivation, fear, and danger—and again, it feels like I do believe this, or at any rate I can't convince myself intellectually that this isn't true—shouldn't I be training them to hunt, fish, farm, defend themselves, resist? If I really believe that their future, or at least their children's future, will resemble the setting of the Mad Max movies, I sure must be a selfish, lazy asshole, because I can't really say I'm doing anything to prepare them for it.
Heck, I can hardly be bothered to rinse out a soup can and toss it in the recycling bin. It certainly doesn't feel like household-level recycling can accomplish a damn thing at this point. "It's too late to save the polar bears," I have been heard to say.
Or wait, doesn't that mean I do believe the planet is doomed? So what do I believe? Sometimes I wonder if I have the slightest idea. Do you?
Are you sure? (I hope not.)
