Belief's Power and Fragility

Published in New Braunfels’ Herald-Zeitung January 22-23, 2021.

What has surfaced and demanded attention in this period of our national history is the crisis of belief. I was impressed with Jim Sohan’s letter in “Voices” (Dec. 12-13, 5-A) in the Herald Zeitung, “Time to Stop Being Silent.” Referencing fledgling democracies in the world, he wrote: “The foundation of those democratic institutions is the belief of the public that elections are free and fair. . . .” Belief as foundation, belief as base line. We have a natural impulse or instinct to believe in something. Why? Is a fascinating question.

It seems, in the period we are slogging through today, that a belief rests less on its being true than on its level of emotional value and persuasion for an individual or a people. Whatever each of us accumulates in our storehouses of beliefs will in fact shape the story we live by. In other words, our personal narrative, regardless of how much or little we reflect on it, is an amalgam of what we believe, sense, intuit, assume, accept, and reject about what we loosely call “reality.” The efficacy of a belief is highlighted most often by how much affect or emotional response it elicits from its adherents.

When any of our beliefs calcify into an ideology that “this is the truth,” rather than “this is my perception of what is true,” then out of that stance often arises resentments, denials,  and violent responses to what others have settled on what is true for them. Acceptance, or even tolerance of another’s angle on “reality,” transports us in a different direction.

Things become more complex when the phenomenon of fact is introduced into the argument over what is true. In his insightful book on revising education, Unbinding Prometheus: Education for the Coming Age, physicist Donald Cowan writes of “the myth of fact,” which he claims has been “the prevailing myth of the modern age.” Fair enough. But he then points out an historical move that I think may be responsible for the conspiracy theories enjoying a heyday today.

He suggests that the myth of fact shifted in the early Renaissance [14th century Italy] in a substantial way: “In it the observable objects of the world came to exist in their own right. Rather than taking their meaning from a context. . . in order to participate in a larger reality, facts began to be considered the unchallengeable substance of life. . ..”

What evolved has come down to us as “facts speak for themselves.” They can be measured and verified and trusted as entities to believe in. But we have entered a different mode of our relationship to facts. “Fact-checking” has become necessary to counter the dizzy world of “alternative facts.” Facts are then weakened in their ability for many to believe in.

When facts lose their contexts, their veracity diminishes; facts in large measure help us to construct our narratives that shape our identities. But if facts are relativized, so at its core is reality itself. If individuals and groups or nations are no longer certain what or who to believe in, their identity as a coherent and cohesive body with shared senses of purpose and ideals to pursue are orphaned.

May the new year allow us to find a tolerant, accepting level of accommodation for one another as we struggle through the pandemic and the pandemonium of our recent past in order to forge a future we can all believe. Through communal generosity we can retrieve it. Only then can we each participate in a shared myth that bequeaths us a formed set of facts to embrace as our image of the real.