The Middle Way

Yesterday my wife and I had brunch on our back porch with a lovely couple half our age who are both committed to helping people and making the world a better place. Each has a master's degree in social work. He also has a master's degree in divinity (and is an ordained minister) and she plans to pursue a doctorate in women's studies after completing her final year of law school.

After we'd eaten all of the pastries and drunk all of the coffee, the girls went to sit on the glider with Wally and we boys remained at the table and talked about what he was doing as a social worker in children's protective services. The cases he described were harrowing to me, young children who have already been so sexually damaged either from abuse directly suffered or from just being in a depraved environment that their prospects for ever attaining a more or less normal life seem bleak indeed.

I can't quite remember, alas, how we sequed onto religion, but I guess, given our backgrounds, that it was inevitable. I summarized for him my metaphysical principle that the seminal contradiction at the heart of the cosmos (God's freedom) makes all things possible, in particular miracles that contravene the laws of nature. And I recounted the walk on which my learned poet friend had stated that he "believed all things but held onto none." We agreed in endorsing "believing all things" as a necessary expression of what we might call religious humility. We don't know whether or not what we take on faith is so, nor do we know that what others take on faith is not so. Therefore, neither should we hold onto our articles of faith, nor should they hold onto theirs—"hold onto" in the sense that we or they combine forces and go into politics in order to force beliefs and practices onto anyone else.

Of course, that holding onto is happening to a very great extent in the world today. We've got the fundamentalist Christians in America banding together to help put an abomination like George W. Bush in the White House and Tricky Dick Deuce (as Maureen Dowd calls Dick Cheenie today in The New York Times) in the chair of the President of the United States Senate. We've got so-called Islamic jihadists blowing up things, including not only Americans who believe they're trying to help but also mosques and members of other Muslim sects. We've got imams provoked yet again by Salman Rushdie—this time by his being knighted—to call for reprisals against those associated with his knighting. Holding on, holding on. And believing nothing but that they and they alone are right.

You know already (if you've been reading me) that I don't agree with Christopher Hitchens that "religion poisons everything." But if any one thing does poison everything, I submit that it's that unwarranted holding onto things that we only believe but do not know. Hitchens attacks religion as being the primary repository of such beliefs. He may be right in that, but it's the holding onto (the trying to foist onto others) that is the problem, not the beliefs per se.

I told my young friend that I was reminded by this of Jesus's advice to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's." In other words, keep your religious beliefs and practices out of politics. Yes, said my young friend. "For me, Jesus stands for a balance of the spiritual and the physical." He explained that the fundamentalist "hangers onto" are just one end of the spectrum.

At the other end of the spectrum are the mystically oriented individuals who jump off into the spirit world and maybe even believe that they are "one with the universe." My friend knows about that, for he tried to swim out there for a couple of years himself. He said it's a dangerous place. The universe includes the food chain, "Nature red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson), and the death of suns and of any life on the planets in their orbit.

Pursuing the spiritual alone, he said, is like wading into quicksand. You'll be lost if you persist in going it alone. You need at least one friend (he recommends no fewer than five^*) to keep you from going under. He now takes the middle way. As a social worker, he's helping individuals in dire need, recognizing that such victims will be produced in perpetuity unless there be a radical reformation of the cultural, educational, social, political system that now produces them.

I told him I doubted that such a reformation would ever happen. He reminded me, I said, of Loren Eiseley's "star thrower"—the man who rescued individual starfish stranded on the beach by throwing them back into the ocean. A scoffer told the man that there are millions of stranded starfish in the world and throwing one back into the ocean isn't going to make a difference. The man said it made a difference to the one starfish he threw back.
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* Five may have been the minimum support group number recommended also by Paul Goodman in that 1960's debate I've described between Goodman and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr. at Yale. [June 25, 2025: I can find no mention of Goodman’s debate with Coffin anywhere on this blog.]

One thing Freud knew for certain

Over the years I've seen so much evidence, not only in others but also in myself^*, of people's tendency to believe what they want to believe that I now consider it virtually an axiom of what we might call the psychology of belief that people generally do believe what they want to believe—and selectively seek out reasons to support their beliefs.

So with some pleasure I discovered this morning, in reading George Prochnik's May 6 New York Times essay, "Hail to the Analysand," that Sigmund Freud knew this too—knew it for certain, he said. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he wrote:

One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness—that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.

I say "Freud knew it too," but of course he knew it first and, because I read his book many years ago, his statement may have lodged in my mind waiting for me to corroborate it in my own experience.

If Freud's "certain knowledge" is a veritable straitjacket always and ever constraining people's beliefs (or their "judgments of value," as he says), how can people with different "wishes for happiness" ever come together in accord? That may be one of the central questions mankind must answer if world peace—or, at least, concord among bloggers—is to be possible.

But I wish to believe that there are ways to escape the straightjacket, that my "axiom of the psychology of belief" doesn't condemn us to wear it. In order to escape it—or at least to free oneself from a particular belief—certain conditions must obtain. It's time for me to start investigating what the conditions might be.

One happy thought is that there may be a seminal contradiction in Freud's understanding. For what if one's wish is that man's judgments of value need not always follow directly his wishes for happiness? What conditions must obtain for us not to believe something simply because we wish to believe it?
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* Ironically appropriate to the theme of selectively seeking out reasons to support our beliefs, I read Prochnik's article because I expected to find yet more material condemning George W. Bush. The title of his article implies that the "analysand" (or person being psychoanalyzed) is someone we officially address with a "hail to" (as he swaggers awkwardly into the East Room or the Rose Garden accompanied by music supplied by the Marine Corps band or somebody). Prochnik takes off from the fact that another president had been a sort of analysand to Freud, who wrote a chapter titled "Thomas Woodrow Wilson" for a book by diplomat William C. Bullitt about the peace negotiations in Versailles following World War I.

Second solution to the paradox of "believing (and disbelieving) all things"

I like the "alternating solution" to the paradox of "believing (and disbelieving) all things." It seems to capture reality. One's belief can and does waver, alternating over time. But, while I like it, it strikes me as legerdemain insofar as a way to avoid the stronger paradox of believing and disbelieving at the same time—an adroit maneuver to reframe the problem so as to escape.

The stronger paradox resembles a mirror. You look into a mirror and see the right side of your face as the left side of the image looking back at you. But the image looking back at you is you. The right side of your face is on the right at the same time it is also on the left.

My second solution to the paradox begins with the fact that when we know that something is so, its probability value is 1; when we know something is not so, its probability value is 0. One and 0 represent certainty. When we only believe that something is so or that something is not so, the probability value lies somewhere between 0 and 1. Beliefs and disbeliefs have values less than 1 but more than 0.

When a man predicts the weather—for example, whether it will rain in Cleveland—he gives the chance of rain as a percentage between 0 and 1. "There's a 60% chance of rain." Note that if he assigns a probability of 50%, he indicates that he has no more reason to believe that it will rain than he has to believe that it won't. "Fifty-fifty" represents maximum uncertainty.

In the stronger version of the paradox (in which we believe and disbelieve the same thing at the same time) the quantity that is less than 1 and greater than 0 is divided between the two. If it is divided equally, that would indicate that we are maximally uncertain as to which might be true. When belief alternately becomes stronger than disbelief, its quantity is more than one-half, disbelief's less.

The philosophy of "believing (and disbelieving) all things" seems, though, to call on us to be even-handed (or "open-minded") in how we regard things that we don't know, to treat believing and disbelieving equally; that is, as a "fifty-fifty" proposition. Even if maximal uncertainty ensures that we won't become fanatical, it's an untenable (unrealistic) position to maintain. Not even dispassionate, rational scientists can maintain it. We've got scientists, for example, whose belief that God exists approaches a probability of 1, while atheistic scientists' belief in God approaches zero.

Solution two rejects the notion that the philosophy of believing all things requires us as a logical necessity both to believe and to disbelieve everything that we don't know to be true.

Why was that not a logical necessity, after all? Well, look again into the mirror. Your head is atop your body both in reality and in the mirror, and your feet (assuming you have them) are below in both cases. But the right side of your face is also on the right in the mirror, and the left side on the left! No different from the reflection of your head and your feet. The mirror paradox works (or seems to work) because a switch in point of view is subtly introduced. You have to turn 180 degrees to assume the position of the image in the mirror. But the image in the mirror is not you. Its left and right hands are wrong.