Troublesome Beliefs

The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. 

-- Alan W. Watts, from The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message

    for an Age of Anxiety

Alan Watts wrote these words in 1951, about four years after W. H. Auden's long poem "The Age of Anxiety" was published. Any widespread anxiety identifiable in those years has only gotten more intense in the bewilderingly complex fabric of contemporary life. We often take refuge in beliefs, which can soften anxiety's influence by providing a comprehensible structure to the world. 

Yet Watts says, as have others, that the world goes on, much of it opaque to us, and talks of giving ourselves over to the insecurities, those unlit, unknown regions, allowing ourselves to experience things as they are, letting life be what it is, unfiltered by our preferences and prejudices. 

Our beliefs are not the world itself. They provide a model of the world for us, one necessary to navigation of the world. But how should we think about our beliefs? A statistician named George Box said, "[a]ll models are wrong, but some are useful." Philosopher and scientist Alfred Korzybski noted that "the map is not the territory."

A map or a model can be a guide, but it's not the thing it represents. Neither are our beliefs the things they represent. Recently, we've seen vividly what can happen when economic and financial models are given too much credit for faithfully representing reality. One prominent critic of the methods that got the U.S. financial system into the mess it's currently in is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. "My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know...." begins Taleb's web page at http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com . 

From science to economics to education to religion, we comfort ourselves by thinking we know more than we do. The problem is that our overly optimistic assessments of our knowledge limit us from learning. If we want to learn and grow our minds and spirits, we must be open to adjusting any beliefs that, when tested in the world's empirical reality, just don't hold up--beliefs that, in other words, don't represent the world faithfully. 

The faith of letting go that Watts mentions affirms life. It's an openness to reality, a willingness to accept and engage the world. Loving a person is not about loving our idea of the person--it's about loving her as she is. Loving the world, in turn, is about loving it as it is, which is where we have to start, even if we think we might be able to improve a little part of it. In order to love the world as it is, we must be open to actually knowing it as it is. 

Even devotion to whatever is sacred must contain within the devotion a willingness to admit that we do not know fully and with flawless fidelity what the sacred really is. So we must remain open, giving up any blind allegiance to a map we want to insist is the territory.

People, of course, have varying levels of attachment to their beliefs and ideas. And yet even seemingly trivial beliefs can inspire what appears to be frighteningly rigid devotion. Beliefs are often held onto as though they were the flesh of the believer--challenging someone's belief is tantamount to Shylock's insistence upon a pound of Antonio's flesh. 

In James Jones' novel From Here to Eternity, an army Private named Robert Prewitt undergoes vicious abuse from his fellow soldiers who won't respect his decision to withdraw from boxing. Jones has Prewitt musing on the business of challenging people's beliefs:

You can't disagree with the adopted values of a bunch of people without they get pissed off at you. When people tie their lives to some screwy idea or other and you attempt to point out to them that for you (not for them, mind you, just for you personally) that this idea is screwy, then serious results can always and will always come out of it for you. Because as far as they care you are the same as saying their lives are nothing and this always bothers people, because people prefer anything to being nothing . . .   

This forcefully expressed view seems to fit the facts of human conflict more often that not. People do become so identified with their ideas of the way things are or should be that disagreement with their ideas launches them on a mission to crush opposition through the exercise of whatever power they have. 

Without that faith that's brave enough, that trusts enough, to let go, the beliefs that cling can not only limit the healthy expansion of an individual's spirit, they can be downright toxic. 

We need beliefs--we need a map of the world. But we also need to understand that some aspects of the world, and some aspects of human experience, are beyond the scope of our knowledge and understanding at any given time. 

The philosophy of pragmatism--an American contribution to that long tradition--asks that we judge ideas by the effects they have in the world. With that in mind, here are some questions to consider: What is the effect of religious zealots' beliefs that God wants, by various means, to see the world cleansed of people they regard as "unbelievers"? What is the effect of the belief Israeli settlers in occupied territories hold that, thousands of years ago, God gave them the land from which Palestinian Arab families who'd lived there for generations are displaced? What is the effect of the belief that nature is only a "resource" to be exploited by humans? 

Anyone can construct such a list according to his beliefs. I have no doubt that some of my own beliefs are on display in my short list. So I'll entertain a final question: What might be the effect in the world of beliefs that could always be challenged and discussed? Not discarded, just challenged, and discussed. Of course we have challenges and discussions in the world, in marriages,  in the meetings of organizations, in diplomacy. But we could do a lot better.

Time Seen As Old Trees on the Ground in an Old Forest

They're more obvious, more starkly visible in wintertime, these trees lying on the ground where I'm walking in a remnant of an old growth forest, large trees allowed to die a natural death, finally falling when their roots, weakened by rot, lost the strong fiber needed to hold them up. I walk the length of one trunk slowly, noticing the thriving carpet of moss on the tree's remains, almost the only green thing around in the wintry scene. In some places, bark hangs toward the ground, suspended for the moment in its slow-paced separation from the tree trunk.

Most of the trees are oaks. They probably stood upright for more than a hundred years. Some of them have been on the ground so long they're identifiably on their way to becoming the ground. You can look at the remains of old trees in late stages of decomposition, particles of what was once unmistakably wood in a line sloping to the ground, the particles the dark color of the soil. Following the line to the soil, you see that at some point the decomposing tree and the earth are indistinguishable. It's a dramatic, if subtle glimpse into the process of decay and regeneration. The trees become the soil that feeds new trees, progeny of the old.

Walking through a woods like this, and really seeing what's here, offers a sense of a time scale we rarely have such a direct opportunity to reflect on. On a clear winter night I can see the Orion Nebula through binoculars, a place in space called, in a delightfully anthropomorphic metaphor, a "stellar nursery." In this most vivid of constellations, stars, over immense ages of time, are formed. But the pleasures of Orion are not as direct as those of the forest, where I can actually see stages of something unfolding over more years than my life will hold. In the forest, I can even smell it, touch it.

Human education has always been sadly lacking in lessons on what time is really like. So much we do affects the places we live, and can go on affecting them for long spans of time. Our perspective is limited to what we need and want now. Our imaginations are underdeveloped and thus unable to reach across the ages.

And now some say we are the universe becoming conscious of itself. Evolution has reached a point where creation can contemplate its own wonders. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge continues to feed us. Now we have some ability to watch what happens not only across generations, but across geological ages, and even back to a time when there was no earth (the ge in geology) to have ages.

So what are we doing with this knowledge? I can see, in the transmutating trees, a process that extends over hundreds of years--decay forming soil, smaller trees nourished by the decay, large, mature, strong trees that most intensely characterize the forest, and that, left alone, will also feed it one day.

I can see, too, as can a number of other conscious people, a process unfolding over hundreds of years that is changing the climate of the earth. Still, for me as for so many others, what is judged as urgent from my personal perspective usually takes precedence over matters I know to be of greater ultimate importance. It's difficult, this business of being human and taking responsibility, at your own expense, for events that will occur after you die. Most of us just aren't up to it.

And now we've come to a time when our actions have powerful implications for our own descendants, as well as so many other forms of life on earth.

The earth is old, so much older than we are, and eventually, it will regain any health lost to human bungling. This blue and green planet has been through a lot of changes in the last four and a half billion years, and our star is thought to have at least that much life left in it. The question is not whether the earth will remain, but whether, and how long, we and our race will remain.

A Real Survivor

Last week, a golden retriever named Buck was reunited with his family after six months of fending for himself in rural Montana. Buck had been on a trip with his people when they stopped in the town of Chester. Buck was alarmed by the blast of a train whistle, and, in accordance with his instincts, bolted. The Halter family of Bonney Lake, Washington, stayed around a while to look for him, but eventually left after posting pictures, descriptions, and contact information.

Stories about Buck's time in the wilderness appeared this week in the Liberty County Times (Paul Overlie, "Buck makes it home," Feb. 3, 2009) and the Associated Press (Amy Beth Hanson, "Dog found after being missing for 6 months," February 7, 2009).

The Halters left Montana in August, and got a call at the end of January from a local resident who'd found a dog fitting Buck's description, first sighting him on a day the temperature reached 27 degrees below zero. Buck was holed up under a collapsed building, and the farm family that found him lured him out with food--he'd lost a lot of weight.

I wondered briefly when I read these accounts if the dog had been named for another Buck, the dog who goes from a slow-paced easy life in a sunny California valley to the harsh and competitive environment of the Yukon in Jack London's The Call of the Wild. London's Buck just gets stronger in the wilderness, besting dogs, wolves, and men around him in a series of contests for survival and dominance. In the course of all his trials, he becomes legendary. I read Call of the Wild for the first time when I was in elementary school and was utterly enthralled by it. Leafing through it now, almost 50 years later, I'm still drawn to the tale.

And yet the Buck from a town near Seattle who spent from August 2008 to January 2009 on the loose in Montana is a more plausible story. He got separated from his protective human family because something--a train whistle--really scared him, and he took flight. Railroads these days often carry an aura of history, and in this country, what we like to call "Americana." But to animals who don't understand their uses, they're just something huge, fast, extremely noisy, and altogether incomprehensible.

The Buck of 2009 inspires with the sheer force and efficacy of his survival resources. Just enduring the cold seems a remarkable achievement. What are ordinary dogs capable of? Their wolf ancestry may hold unexpected possibilities. In his fascinating Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez writes of some of the ways canis lupus deals with bitter cold:

In extreme cold the wolf can reduce the flow of blood near its skin and conserve . . . heat. A team of biologists in Barrow, Alaska, found that the temperature of the wolf's footpads was maintained at just above the tissue-freezing point where the pads came in contact with ice and snow. Warmth there was regulated independently of the rest of the body.

So maybe Buck's body knows something about conserving heat. Bodies do have a wisdom built into them, a fundamental, pre-rational kind of wisdom that bolsters survival. Dogs, people, and other animals may well have resources beyond what we believe. How else would people endure some of the things they endure?

Buck's family wondered where he'd been, what he'd been doing all that time. I also find that unanswerable question interesting. In the 1970s, my wife and I had a dog named Maxwell. One night he was accidently left outside. We spent the next day looking for him and posting "lost dog" notices on utility poles around the neighborhood. That night, a still-warm September in Tennessee, we slept on the couch in the den with the windows up, so we could hear him if he barked at the door. The next morning, he scratched on the door. I heard and immediately recognized the sound of the paw on wood, jumped out of bed and welcomed Max home. He was damp in spots, and carried a load of cockleburs and beggars' lice. We gave him a royal meal. And naturally, wondered where he'd been, what he'd been doing. He'd been gone less than 48 hours.

The story of Buck's Montana sojourn is life-affirming in and of itself, with its overtones of a capacity beyond what anyone might have expected--separated from his accustomed civilized support in a hostile environment, he held out.

As for Jack London's Buck, he ends as the Buck of legend. Maybe a Ghost Dog who continues to threaten the native people who killed his closest human companion, his last link with what was not wild. Maybe in one of his progeny, who continues to lead a wolf pack. London's yarn closes thusly:

When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.

Thoreau recognizes the way of nature's wisdom: "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Not wilderness--wildness. "A song of the younger world," maybe. Human culture, itself an extension of nature, is smart. But nature is smarter.