Are Beliefs Practical?

Beliefs are slippery little buggers. On the one hand, they are tools for navigating life. We believe certain things so that we can get around in the world. We need some way of dealing with the complexities of reality. I believe that western medicine by and large works and that it works far and away better than the alternatives. Therefore, I go to doctors trained in Western medicine rather than homeopathy or Ayurveda.

The belief is a means to an end: namely, my getting better. If I didn't need to get better, why would I worry about different medical practices? We have finite lives. We can't spend all of our time trying to make sure that our believes are correct, so long as our lives are running well. If I pick a shoddy medical practice that works for me, even as a mere placebo, I still feel better. What's the harm?

Sometimes, the belief can even change the result. William James talks about a person who is about to jump across a chasm. If this person believes that they can make it, they will have a higher chance of doing so than the persons that doubts themselves and hesitates. So believing something simply because we want it to be true can sometimes make it true.

But beliefs aren't merely tools. Having a belief means that we take something to be actually true about the world already. I take it to be the case that most of my sicknesses are caused by microscopic bacteria, viruses, and so on. The world is not made up of either 4 or 5 elements. Theories based on balancing these elements are just plain false, despite occasionally producing useful results. I can't believe that balancing the fire and water in my body will heal me without also believing that this is actually how things are; the very idea that I could is just nonsense, though some people have astonishingly high skill at self-delusion which allows them to get around this logical nicety.

So how can we take something to be true about the world and not care about whether it is true? How can we believe something, but then be unwilling to put it to critical analysis and to search out whether it is true? But is this really a problem? Why not just take it all with a grain of salt? Use beliefs as tools only. Believing something becomes like watching a movie – we suspend disbelief rather than take the plot to be actually true. It's a story to guide our actions, but merely a story.

This helps with local events: both local in space (affecting me and those closest to me) and in time (short-term goals). Sure, if I follow the medical tip from some random second cousin and it makes me feel better, then it works for me. I don't have to believe anything more than that it has been personally useful. However, it is not clear that this approach deals effectively with broader issues, such as those affecting other groups or calling for short-term sacrifice for the sake of long-term gain.

Take climate change, for example. There does seem to be some truth to the matter as to what will happen in the future if we continue to live as we do. Either humans beings are actually causing climate change, or we are not. Either this will produce a wildly out-of-whack world, or it will not. Either changing emissions in certain ways will help us deal with the problem, or it will not. (There appears to be little actual evidence against the notion that (a) there has been climate change over the past century of alarming proportions, and (b) that it is in large part caused by human beings. However, there is still a lot of discussion over what that entails for the future.)

There is potentially a disaster coming up within a couple generations, and adjusting ourselves to meet it could result in short-term sacrifices. We cannot merely look at what is practical for ourselves here-and-now in our own country to decide what would be better overall in the longer-term. Even if we were to decide that large-scale changes would not need to be implemented, it would have nothing to do with the fact that such changes would be hard right now – it would have to do with our best scientific research telling us that climate change won't be mitigated by our efforts. People arguing from local practical concerns alone, such as loss of jobs and increase in price of goods, completely miss the point, regardless of what our best plan of action will be.

I do not pretend to have an answer to this problem; I merely point out that there is a problem which must be dealt with based on matters of truth beyond what is recognizably practical to us now. (I thought I would give religion a break for a blog post, so I went with science instead.) So beliefs about what are practical to me and those close to me for the short-term can be decided through purely practical means, with little regard to overall truth. But those beliefs are also only suited for these very particular circumstances. Change the context, and the validity of such practical beliefs also changes. So for more far-reaching goals, concern over truth and the theoretical value of beliefs becomes more important.

Politically, this is problematic. Democracy and a democratic voting system is based on people being able to know where their interests lie, and trusting that people overall are smart enough to figure this out on their own. And this might be well enough for locally practical beliefs, for those that guide people through their own day-to-day experience. But people also vote based on issues impacting their communities, their country, and even the world, and it is not at all clear that their experience is useful here; in fact, it might even cloud their judgment in such matters without proper education showing them the bigger picture (and taking a couple science classes hardly instills scientific literacy).