Tag Archives: indoctrination

The Sleep of Reason

 

Goya, the famous Spanish painter was well known for dark art.  No one ever accused him of seeing only the sunny side of life. Goya inscribed one of his works with the following words: “The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.” I find that profoundly true.

Voltaire the child of the Enlightenment, one might say a Fundamentalist Enlightenment thinker, said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Our species has impressive powers of reasoning. It is what sets us apart from most species. Yet we give up our advantage all the time. Why do we do that? Why do we allow reason to go to sleep? More importantly, why do we do that when it is clearly against our own interests to do that? That is a very big question. One I would like to answer.

One of the worst things that we can do is to abdicate our power of reasoning. If ever—ever–we give up our rationale for beliefs we are doomed.  We must always insist that all beliefs are based on reason and evidence.

Our reasoning power may be weak. It is certainly far from perfect. For each and every one of us our power of reasoning is flawed, but we never have a better tool to justify belief. Any belief. Beliefs based on evidence and reasoning are not guaranteed to be true. They are not certainly true, but they are the best-grounded beliefs we can have.

Reason goes to sleep whenever we don’t base our beliefs on reason and evidence.  The bars to reason are many and varied and include the following among many others: faith substituted for reason, indoctrination, fear, prejudice or bias, laziness, ignorance, herd instinct or wish to conform, wishful thinking, ideological blinkers, and advertising or propaganda.

 

I am going far beyond religion now. Beliefs based on something other than reason, like faith, or feelings, or wishes, can have dangerous consequences. This can lead to crazy beliefs. No where is that more obvious than the United States. There is a good reason for this. America is in my opinion the most religious country in the west. At least by conventional definitions of religion. Kurt Anderson described this phenomenon this way in his book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire(2017): “Unlike the Earth’s other moderns, we have rushed headlong back toward magic and miracles, crazifying some legacy churches, filling up the already crazy ones, inventing all kinds of crazy new ones.]Because the US has given itself over to beliefs without reason to such a fantastic extent for so long it has become vulnerable to believing all kinds of crazy things. Americans have become vulnerable to all kinds of crackpots from the ludicrous to the deranged.

For example it is astonishing how many Americans believed, without any evidence whatsoever, that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizzeria that had no basement. Or that there is a government conspiracy to spread toxic vaccines. Or that Satanic child molesters are everywhere.  That Obama is the anti-Christ, a  Muslim and was born outside the United States. That the massacre of elementary school children in Sandy Hook by a lone gunman was a scam promulgated by paid actors. That climate change is a hoax. That the high school students at Parkland Florida who were terrorized by a gunman were also paid actors.

The gullibility of millions of Americans is truly astonishing. Where did this come from? I believe that it is the result of checking reason at the door for decades if not centuries.    When reason sleeps monsters are indeed brought forth.

 

Programmed to Believe

 

I read a fascinating story in The New Yorker magazine. It was the story of a young 23-year old legal assistant named Megan Phelps-Roper from Topeka Kansas in the heart of the United States Bible Belt. She became well known as a result of her tweets on Twitter and picketing on behalf of her church Westboro Baptist Church. She would tweet things like this, “Thank God for AIDS! You won’t repent of your rebellion that brought his wrath on you in this incurable scourge, so expect more & worse.”  As Adrian Chen reported in the New Yorker,

 

She believed that “all manner of other tragedies–war, natural disaster, mass shootings–were warnings from God to a doomed nation, and that it was her duty to spread the news of His righteous judgments. To protest the increasing acceptance of homosexuality in America the Westboro Baptist Church picketed the funerals of gay men who died of AIDS and of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Members held signs slogans like ‘GOD HATES FAGS’ and “THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS,” and the outrage that their efforts attracted had turned the small church, which had fewer than a hundred members, into a global symbol of hate.

 

What really interested me about this story in The New Yorkerwas the fact that this young woman was attractive, fully devoted to a cause that attracted a lot of hatred against her and her family, and, most importantly, very intelligent. That seems hard to believe since her beliefs were so wildly unreasonable, but she was. She was often the spokesperson for the church and had been interviewed by media around the world.

How could such a person with all her advantages have such pitiful beliefs? I think the answer is obvious.  She had those beliefs because that is what her parents taught her. From birth she had been indoctrinated by her parents. From them she “learned” that gays were an abomination and it was her duty to attack them whenever she could, in whatever manner was available to her.

Eventually she did manage to wean herself from her parents’ rigid positions. In time she rebelled, but it is never easy to dissent, especially from our fundamental beliefs that we have held since we were extremely young and which were inculcated in us by our well meaning parents who wanted to help us and guide us and protect us from all harm. Yet, in the language of social media, eventually after profound doubts and deep unease Megan was able to “Unfollow” her parents and their church.

We all believe what our parents teach us. Our parents are our guides and mentors in our life’s journey. Humans, unlike most animals, have a long period of time in which they are nurtured by their parents. This process takes years. Longer in fact than with any other species. During this time we soak up what our parents teach us. Evolutionarily this is what we had to do to survive. Millennia ago, when life was nasty brutish and short, and dangers lurked everywhere, young children that did not listen to their parents’ warnings tended to perish. The risk takers were often taken by predators. Children that stayed close to their parents and abided by their dire warnings tended to survive and later passed on their genes to their offspring. Obedience to parents is wired deep in the human DNA. We are programmed to believe.

When we get older, some of us learn that our parents were not always right. When I was young I thought my mother was the finest cook in the world. I was so lucky to have such a wonderful mom. That is true by the way. Later in life–much later and very subtly–I began to realize she was not a perfect cook. She tended to burn her meats and badly over cook her vegetables. That was the way she had been taught to cook by her mother. That was the standard of good cooking. She was not perfect in other ways either. Pretty close, but not quite perfect.

Parents are important. We love them. They guide us through the informative times of our lives when as young children we are totally helpless and entirely at their mercy. We appreciate what they do for us and for what they have taught us, but we should never remain obedient children. We have to grow up.

I remember a conversation with a young lawyer a few years ago. We were arguing about some ethical issue.  He and I disagreed about whether something was ethically right or wrong. Such arguments are not easy to resolve. His ultimate answer–and it really was an ultimate answer–was that, ‘well that is what I was taught by my parents to believe.’ How could he not believe what he had been taught to believe?

He was an intelligent young man.  Yet he admitted he believed something solely because that was what he had been taught to believe by his parents. It seemed absurd to me, but I had managed, with great difficulty many years earlier, to dissent from some of the things that I had been taught by my parents.

Yet that is what we have an obligation to do. When we mature, I would suggest, we must challenge what we have been taught. Not everything our parents taught us was absolutely true (or wrong). Our parents thought it was true. Why else would they teach it to us?  But our parents, just like anyone else, can make mistakes, even fundamental mistakes and we should make sure we have not been led astray by well-meaning parents.

But such a challenge is extremely difficult. The fact is that it is very difficult to reject fundamental things that our parents teach us. We believe those things. It takes a great deal of courage and determination to challenge  that.

Megan was extremely intelligent and she certainly did not lack courage. To stand up in public on a public sidewalk in front of a funeral for soldiers carrying placards that mock everything about those soldiers, takes a lot of guts. To hold up placards at a funeral of gay people denouncing gays in the most crude and brutal manner certainly takes courage. It is misguided courage, but no less courage for that.

Eventually, she came to realize her parents had taught her badly. They had not just taught her they had indoctrinated her.  Later it took courage to Unfollow her parents.

Our parents are our first and usually most important teachers. Yet, as Friedrich Nietzsche said, “a pupil repays a teacher badly if he remains forever a pupil.” A good teacher wants to be challenged. A good parent wants to be challenged.

Keeping silent is not the answer

A good friend sent me a private thoughtful critique after a recent post. He said, he found “finding fault” alone at best amusing but mostly annoying. He suggested I make some positive suggestions.

First of all I think if we find fault we should criticize. I don’t think silence in the face of injustice is ever wise.  Sometimes it is important for us to make clear that we dissent from the conventional wisdom. This is particularly important, I believe, where the powerful majority is sometimes misusing its power or authority. Someone should stick up for the weak. I am trying to do that in my puny way, even if that means that I annoy some of the powerful.  So be it. I have been too quiet for too long. I am choosing now to speak up. I think I should have spoken up sooner. Sometimes the time has come to denounce actions of a large group. Sometimes it is important to let others know on which side you are on. Others can choose to disagree.

I live in a small town where sometimes, in my opinion,  the majority has gone too far in their dominance of the vulnerable. I am not saying they were always wrong or that they were bad people. Many of them are good people who meant well. And that is important. Others abused their power.

I have  been asked to make some “constructive propositions.” I intended to do that later, and will do so. However, let me make one at this time.  I was very fortunate to have been raised by loving Christian parents who did their best to lead me to salvation. They were not mean or abusive. They did it with love. They taught me; they did not indoctrinate me. For example, they never forced me to attend revival meetings.I was free to go if I wanted to, but was also free to avoid them.   I was expected to attend Sunday School every Sunday. It did not damage me, though I was not keen on it.  What they gave me was spiritual freedom. I will always be grateful for that freedom. Some of my friends were not so fortunate. I intend to blog about the positive as well.  Specifically, I think there is a better way than evangelical religion. I intend to share that.

With such wonderful freedom comes responsibility. So I have chosen to speak up. Martin Luther King also spoke for those who had been taken advantage of. I am not comparing myself to him. He did that in much more serious circumstances than I have been doing. He was a brave man. I know I am a moral pipsqueak in comparison. This is what he said, “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” I don’t think we should keep quiet just for fear of being annoying.