-- 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.
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