• WISDOMfromPO-MO
    753
    I am really having a hard time with what a lot of people, including highly-influential, well-published, supposedly highly-rational people, are saying about "beliefs". Their thinking sounds like something you would expect from the superstitious, conspiracy theorist, belief-in-magic elements of the human population, not from the rationalist, modernist elements, to be honest.

    I touched on all of this in another discussion, but I will say it again: we are supposed to believe that there is a causal relationship​ between an individual holding a belief and horrible phenomena like genocide, war, ecological collapse, etc. Yet, no conclusive evidence of this relationship is ever presented.

    If someone believes, falsely or correctly, that I am a trespasser, he/she might kill me with gunfire.

    The issue is not whether or not the belief that I am a trespasser is justified. The issue is whether or not that belief caused the subsequent behavior of killing me with gunfire.

    There are a zillion other variables in play besides belief. Mood. Reflexes. Outlook. Goals. Pleasure and pain (the feeling of firing a gun is exhilarating; the fear one feels is overwhelming; etc.). Empathy or lack of empathy. Etc.

    Conclusive evidence that all variables have been controlled and it was in fact belief that caused the action is never presented.

    And it seems to be assumed that belief is something distinct that can be clearly isolated and identified in every mind like an enzyme can be clearly isolated and identified in every body. How do we know that one person's reported belief is identical in every way to another person's reported belief?

    And I have only been talking about the effect of belief on individuals.

    Yet, we have people saying that the personal belief that "God exists" results in carnage (genocide, war, etc.), poverty, widespread mental anguish, etc., and that people who have that supposedly epistemically unjustified belief are morally responsible for such horrors.

    Here's the irony: they condemn strangers they'll never meet for having a supposedly unjustified personal belief, yet they provide no conclusive evidence to justify their own belief about the danger of beliefs. And their belief is far greater in scope and in need of a lot more evidence--it is one thing to say"God exists", it is another to say that the beliefs in people's minds cause widespread local and global destruction and suffering throughout prehistory and history.

    Is this destructive power of "belief" even scientifically verifiable? If it is, where is the evidence? I'm talking about solid, thorough scientific investigation into a causal relationship, not correlations or anecdotes.
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.6k

    What if, instead of saying your beliefs caused your actions, I said only that you had acted on your beliefs, or acted with your beliefs in mind? Would you still object?
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    Look at the current political debate about health cover in the USA. I would say 'belief' plays a huge role in that. The hardline conservatives believe that individuals ought to look after themselves and that government interference in the marketplace is comparable to socialism and communism. The democrats believe that society has a responsibility to provide a baseline of care for any citizen. I don't want to debate the issue in its own right, other than to observe that these are very much matters of belief.

    Also there's a very porous boundary between belief systems and ideologies. If you look at some of the notably destructive political and terrorists movements, such as Pol Pot, Al Queda, and many communist movements, I don't see how you can claim that belief doesn't form a strong component of those movements.

    we have people saying that the personal belief that "God exists" results in carnage (genocide, war, etc.), poverty, widespread mental anguish, etc.WISDOMfromPO-MO

    That is the so-called 'new atheist' polemics - Dawkins and his various acolytes.

    As of January 2010, the English version of The God Delusion had sold over 2 million copies.[70] As of September 2014, it increased to 3 million copies.[71] It was ranked second on the Amazon.com best-sellers' list in November 2006.[72][73] It remained on the list for 51 weeks until 30 September 2007.[74] The German version, entitled Der Gotteswahn, had sold over 260,000 copies as of 28 January 2010.[75] The God Delusion has been translated into 35 languages.[6]

    This in turn is grounded in the 'enlightenment narrative' that religions are oppressive, reactionary powers that try to preserve their own power and work to suppress freedom of expression and individual conscience. In a way, it is itself a quasi-religious narrative, but it puts man in the place of God, and science in the place of religion. Dawkins' view has been described as:

    We find an initial idealised state, an evil intrusion, a present dreadful state caused by the intrusion, the promise of a future idealised state assured by the elimination of the intrusion. There is a glorious leader and even a sort of New Man. The message is pitched both at the level of humanity and at that of the individual.

    Dawkins's message is basically that we are social animals on an evolutionary trajectory to ever more rational and therefore higher moral standards, but that the process has been derailed somewhere along the line by the appearance of religion. It had looked until recently as though we were shaking off religion and entering an Age of Reason. But now, with the rise of religious fundamentalism, there is a relapse which accounts for the world's present troubles. Nevertheless, thanks to the enlightenment Science brings, we can root out religion and get back on track. 1

    You can certainly make the case, but on the other hand, the very idea of 'freedom of conscience' and many other principles of liberal politics, were derived in the framework of the Christian idea of the sanctity of the individual. That case has been put by many of Dawkins' critics.

    But I think the argument is basically irresolvable either way. It's a matter of belief. ;-)
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.6k

    I can think of a bunch of other ways to put this too. Suppose I believe you are an armed and dangerous intruder in my home, and I shoot you. I could say I shot you because I believed that you were ..., that my belief was a or the reason I shot you, that it was a contributing factor in my shooting you. I think we would only say it was a or the cause of my shooting you or that the belief caused me to shoot you if we were speaking very loosely indeed.
  • WISDOMfromPO-MO
    753
    What if, instead of saying your beliefs caused your actions, I said only that you had acted on your beliefs, or acted with your beliefs in mind? Would you still object?...Srap Tasmaner




    I don't know what science says. If science has investigated it, such investigations and their findings are never presented.

    The way that you phrase it makes a belief sound like emotions; and information and other stimuli--things that one must cope with, respond to, etc. That is different from saying that a belief is something that people create and that, due to its power to determine behavior, must be created responsibly, never created in the first place, or removed.




    I can think of a bunch of other ways to put this too. Suppose I believe you are an armed and dangerous intruder in my home, and I shoot you. I could say I shot you because I believed that you were ..., that my belief was a or the reason I shot you, that it was a contributing factor in my shooting you. I think we would only say it was a or the cause of my shooting you or that the belief caused me to shoot you if we were speaking very loosely indeed.Srap Tasmaner




    1.) It is one thing to say "I had this belief, B, and B caused me to do action A".

    2.). It is another thing to say, "I had this belief, B. I had to decide what to do. I decided, based on B, to respond with action A".


    1.) is passive.

    2.) is active.

    Where is the evidence that beliefs act on people?

    If there is any scientific investigation into the matter to be found, should we be surprised if that investigation shows that, on the contrary, people choose to act on (or not act on) beliefs? Should we be surprised if it shows that most beliefs are inconsequential and just take up neurological space and never play a role in anything?
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.6k
    1.) It is one thing to say "I had this belief, B, and B caused me to do action A".

    2.). It is another thing to say, "I had this belief, B. I had to decide what to do. I decided, based on B, to respond with action A".


    1.) is passive.

    2.) is active.
    WISDOMfromPO-MO

    Right. I think folk psychology endorses (2) and (1) is just a sloppy attempt to express (2) in most cases.

    I couldn't tell you what the scientific support for (2) is. Certainly there are studies that address how people's attitudes and choices vary depending on the information you provide them. There are also studies that show reasons aren't everything, that people make choices that differ from what you'd predict given their self-identified reasons.
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    If science has investigated it, such investigations and their findings are never presented.WISDOMfromPO-MO

    Which branch of science do you think ought to be in the business of investigating the causal power of belief?
  • WISDOMfromPO-MO
    753
    cl
    Right. I think folk psychology endorses (2) and (1) is just a sloppy attempt to express (2) in most cases.

    I couldn't tell you what the scientific support for (2) is. Certainly there are studies that address how people's attitudes and choices vary depending on the information you provide them. There are also studies that show reasons aren't everything, that people make choices that differ from what you'd predict given their self-identified reasons.
    Srap Tasmaner




    But it is 1.) that what I would call evangelical evidentialism is trying to combat.

    I am inclined to think that any scientific investigation would not find 1.)--that "beliefs" determine behavior. I am inclined to think that it would show 2.)--that beliefs are simply something we must respond to / cope with. We could respond in many different ways. We could ignore them. We could doubt them. We could be annoyed by them. We could let them inform our choices.

    The evangelical evidentialists, on the other hand, seem to unequivocally say that beliefs determine behavior and that they therefore must either be justified or removed and that the failure to either justify or remove them is extremely morally irresponsible. Unjustified beliefs lead to horrible things like genocide, they say. But they never present any conclusive evidence to support the latter. It could be that certain behaviors cause beliefs, not the other way around. And it could be that those belief-causing behaviors are the result of other variables, such as ecological conditions.
  • WISDOMfromPO-MO
    753
    Which branch of science do you think ought to be in the business of investigating the causal power of belief?Wayfarer




    Anthropology, neuroscience, political science, psychology and sociology could be used to investigate it.
  • BC
    13.1k
    Conclusive evidence that all variables have been controlled and it was in fact belief that caused the action is never presented.WISDOMfromPO-MO

    Perhaps because

    There are a zillion other variables in play besides belief. Mood. Reflexes. Outlook. Goals. Pleasure and pain. Empathy or lack of empathy. Etc.WISDOMfromPO-MO

    The behaviorists (like B. F. Skinner) took the view that the mind is a black box. We can not observe what goes on inside. We can observe stimuli and we can observe response. We can not determine what the interplay of beliefs, mood, reflexes, outlook, goals, pleasure, pain, Empathy, prior conditioning, and other factors, might have on observed behavior.

    EDIT: B. F. SKINNER died in 1990 at 86; I don't think he was still working in the field. At the time he developed his primary theories, the MRI/fMRI and CT scan had not been imagined yet. However, in 2017 we still don't know all that much about how an idea is born, comes to be influential for us, and begins to affect behavior (if it does). end edit

    There is something to say for the behaviorist approach. "Just look at the observable facts of the matter; in most cases, we have very little proof of what people actually believe at any given moment, or what the relationship is between beliefs and behavior."

    In your example, you were trespassing and the land owner shot you. A jury would need to decide -- based on material evidence -- whether you could have known you were trespassing (maybe there were no fences or signs in sight) and whether the landowner was justified in using deadly force against you (in some jurisdictions the land owner might be convicted of second degree murder and in others killer landlords might be exonerated). A lawyer might bring up the landlord's beliefs about the sanctity of private property, but another lawyer might point out that the landowner's beliefs were irrelevant. You were 11 years old, unarmed, and were (apparently) collecting butterflies. You could pose no conceivable threat to the 250 pound ex Navy Seal landowner or to his property.

    I think you are correct: The existence of alleged or real beliefs doesn't prove very much.
  • BC
    13.1k
    Anthropology, neuroscience, political science, psychology and sociologyWISDOMfromPO-MO

    A good example of the matter of beliefs and behavior is voting. It isn't entirely clear what, exactly, the relationship is between the two. Some people who were at the time receiving significant benefit from the AHA and Medicaid voted for a candidate who promised to either radically change or get rid of the programs.

    Were they voting against their self interest with respect to health care, or were they voting on the basis of beliefs or perceived self-interests apart from health care? It should be possible to sort out what the real reasons were for (a sample of) people voting contrary to expectations.

    There are a lot of behaviors that are not well accounted for.
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    Anthropology, neuroscience, political science, psychology and sociology could be used to investigate it.WISDOMfromPO-MO

    Are you familiar with Max Weber? His Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a classic study of just these questions.
  • WISDOMfromPO-MO
    753
    Are you familiar with Max Weber? His Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a classic study of just these questions.Wayfarer




    I have read Max Weber: A Critical Introduction, by Kieran Allen.
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.6k

    Even if you start from the idea that individuals make their own choices based (or not) on their beliefs, it might be that in the aggregate you can make predictions or offer explanations that treat beliefs as conditions or causes like anything else. That's not completely crazy.

    Say you do a study and find that 70% of your subjects choose X given information A, but only 20% choose X given B. If you then want to guess the behaviour of 100,000 people you know have information A, you'll figure most of them will choose X. Each decides individually but you get an aggregate result. (You would have to do a whole lot more work than my little sketch here though.)

    Since you don't want to personify the crowd-- it doesn't think this or that, decide this or that. So you end up giving the usual, vaguely causal explanations.
  • WISDOMfromPO-MO
    753
    Look at the current political debate about health cover in the USA. I would say 'belief' plays a huge role in that. The hardline conservatives believe that individuals ought to look after themselves and that government interference in the marketplace is comparable to socialism and communism. The democrats believe that society has a responsibility to provide a baseline of care for any citizen. I don't want to debate the issue in its own right, other than to observe that these are very much matters of belief...[/b]




    Does anybody really "believe" those things?

    Or are they just using them as rationalizations for their positions and actions?

    How do we know if a person really has a "belief" or what his/her response to that "belief" is? Rather than accepting a belief as corresponding with external reality, a person could have strong doubts about a belief.

    And how can we isolate and compare beliefs? I believe the concept I need is reductionism. We can reduce material to an enzyme and any further reduction makes it something other than an enzyme. We can compare one enzyme to another and see, I suppose, that they are almost completely identical (I don't know; I could be wrong; somebody might say something like, "Wrong! Scientists say that no two atoms are alike!). Those enzymes, I supposed, would be interchangeable. We could replace one with another and it would behave the same. But can we say any of this about beliefs? Is it scientifically possible to demonstrate this about beliefs? Can we transplant one person's belief that God exists in place of another person's belief that God exists and not change anything about the former person?



    Wayfarer
    Also there's a very porous boundary between belief systems and ideologies. If you look at some of the notably destructive political and terrorists movements, such as Pol Pot, Al Queda, and many communist movements, I don't see how you can claim that belief doesn't form a strong component of those movements...Wayfarer




    I haven't seen conclusive evidence that people's personal beliefs caused things like the deaths under the dictatorship of Pol Pot.

    Did somebody in a lab put Cambodia in several petri dishes, added some personal beliefs to half of them, and the brutality of the Khmer Rouge appeared in the latter but not the rest of them?




    That is the so-called 'new atheist' polemics - Dawkins and his various acolytes.



    As of January 2010, the English version of The God Delusion had sold over 2 million copies.[70] As of September 2014, it increased to 3 million copies.[71] It was ranked second on the Amazon.com best-sellers' list in November 2006.[72][73] It remained on the list for 51 weeks until 30 September 2007.[74] The German version, entitled Der Gotteswahn, had sold over 260,000 copies as of 28 January 2010.[75] The God Delusion has been translated into 35 languages.[6]

    This in turn is grounded in the 'enlightenment narrative' that religions are oppressive, reactionary powers that try to preserve their own power and work to suppress freedom of expression and individual conscience. In a way, it is itself a quasi-religious narrative, but it puts man in the place of God, and science in the place of religion. Dawkins' view has been described as:



    We find an initial idealised state, an evil intrusion, a present dreadful state caused by the intrusion, the promise of a future idealised state assured by the elimination of the intrusion. There is a glorious leader and even a sort of New Man. The message is pitched both at the level of humanity and at that of the individual.

    Dawkins's message is basically that we are social animals on an evolutionary trajectory to ever more rational and therefore higher moral standards, but that the process has been derailed somewhere along the line by the appearance of religion. It had looked until recently as though we were shaking off religion and entering an Age of Reason. But now, with the rise of religious fundamentalism, there is a relapse which accounts for the world's present troubles. Nevertheless, thanks to the enlightenment Science brings, we can root out religion and get back on track. 1

    You can certainly make the case, but on the other hand, the very idea of 'freedom of conscience' and many other principles of liberal politics, were derived in the framework of the Christian idea of the sanctity of the individual. That case has been put by many of Dawkins' critics.

    But I think the argument is basically irresolvable either way. It's a matter of belief.
    Wayfarer




    Well, the New Atheists don't seem to apply their evidentialist, "evidence-based" standard to their own position. I have never seen them or any of their disciples present conclusive, scientific evidence of "beliefs" determining behavior.
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    I have never seen them or any of their disciples present conclusive, scientific evidence of "beliefs" determining behavior.WISDOMfromPO-MO

    Maybe there isn't any!
  • Reformed Nihilist
    279
    While I think the point in the original post is reasonable to an extent, I also think it is reasonable, to an extent, to make judgments about how someone's beliefs motivated their actions based on their own explanations. Is it unfair to conclude that 9/11 was motivated by a belief in a specific form of Islamist fundamentalism (a belief system)? Bin Laden explicitly explained it to be part of a holy war. I suppose we could psychologize him, and try to determine proximate vs ultimate causes, but for most practical purposes, can't we just say that his belief, and the beliefs of those who took part in the attack were a significant, even primary, motivating factor?

    I'll agree that some people play this hand too strongly, saying that all wars through history have been caused by religious belief. But the overstatement or poor formulation of an idea doesn't mean we should dismiss every formulation of that idea. I would suggest that we should concern ourselves with determining motivation instead of cause, and figuring out to what degree various beliefs or cultural/social institutions help to motivate positive and negative behaviors. Surely it isn't unreasonable to suggest that the various dogma of the social institutions of religion have historically been a large motivating factor in various violent incidents, including many wars and genocides? The Spanish inquisition, the Crusades, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the Indian/Pakistani conflicts,etc. Surely that's not controversial?
  • WISDOMfromPO-MO
    753
    Maybe there isn't any!Wayfarer




    So, evidentialism says that one is justified in having a belief only if there is sufficient evidence and that this is of moral necessity because unjustified beliefs cause a great deal of harm, including wars, genocide, poverty, etc., yet there is absolutely no evidence of the latter.

    If everything I wrote in that previous sentence is true, then it seems to me that we may be flirting with the height of absurdity.
  • WISDOMfromPO-MO
    753
    While I think the point in the original post is reasonable to an extent, I also think it is reasonable, to an extent, to make judgments about how someone's beliefs motivated their actions based on their own explanations. Is it unfair to conclude that 9/11 was motivated by a belief in a specific form of Islamist fundamentalism (a belief system)? Bin Laden explicitly explained it to be part of a holy war. I suppose we could psychologize him, and try to determine proximate vs ultimate causes, but for most practical purposes, can't we just say that his belief, and the beliefs of those who took part in the attack were a significant, even primary, motivating factor?

    I'll agree that some people play this hand too strongly, saying that all wars through history have been caused by religious belief. But the overstatement or poor formulation of an idea doesn't mean we should dismiss every formulation of that idea. I would suggest that we should concern ourselves with determining motivation instead of cause, and figuring out to what degree various beliefs or cultural/social institutions help to motivate positive and negative behaviors. Surely it isn't unreasonable to suggest that the various dogma of the social institutions of religion have historically been a large motivating factor in various violent incidents, including many wars and genocides? The Spanish inquisition, the Crusades, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the Indian/Pakistani conflicts,etc. Surely that's not controversial?
    Reformed Nihilist




    In general, all of that is reasonable.

    But we are talking about a specific context here: evidentialism, epistemic justification, and the assertion that it is morally wrong to have a belief if certain conditions are not met.

    Okay, it is morally required that I not believe a proposition when there is insufficient evidence that it is true and that I believe a proposition when there is sufficient evidence that it is true, because failure to maintain such rational hygiene causes me to engage in behaviors that are destructive and cause suffering. Where is the sufficient evidence for the latter claim? It is never presented.

    And this barely scratches the surface of problems that such a philosophy presents. Another problem: if we must re-program ourselves according to "the evidence" then that puts us under the control of whoever is deciding how evidence-gathering resources are spent. If the people who make decisions about how resources are allocated decide to spend 80% on research in theoretical physics and only 1% on research in cultural anthropology then the body of "evidence" that is available and that we must form or discard beliefs around is extremely biased.

    It would be like all of life is like a criminal trial. There may be exponential amounts of evidence to consider, but things like what evidence the law allows to be presented in court, the skill of detectives, the whims of attorneys and judges, good luck and bad luck (the murder weapon is discovered by a construction worker seconds before it washes down a storm sewer; a witness dies before being able to testify), etc. limit the evidence considered to a small portion. Evidentialism, the way that I understand it, would mean that our entire lives would be dictated in the same limited way that a criminal investigation and trial is. Who decides what counts as evidence, who decides where evidence-gathering resources are spent, the skill of the people gathering evidence, good luck and bad luck like evidence being discovered by accident or never being discovered because it is lost, etc. would dictate every second of our lives.

    Some influential people on the intellectual landscape, it seems, want all of us to adjust our lives to a moral system that does not meet the requirements it demands: sufficient evidence.
  • Reformed Nihilist
    279
    But we are talking about a specific context here: evidentialism, epistemic justification, and the assertion that it is morally wrong to have a belief if certain conditions are not met.WISDOMfromPO-MO

    Aye, and there's the rub. Justification, in real life, is a post hoc process, unlike how it is regularly viewed in philosophy as being the reason for, or cause of behavior. In any sufficiently complex scenario, multiple rationally defensible but mutually exclusionary justifications are possible. I would submit that it makes more sense to explore under which circumstances people are more likely, or less likely to behave in ways that lead to such things as wars and genocides. I think that there is a case to be made that religions are for the most part exclusionary in principle (heresy is a sin in every religion), if not always in practice, and that this buttresses in-group thinking. There's a great deal of research on in group/out group dynamics, and the social discord that come from it, which include wars and genocide. Again, I think some people overstate this connection as a direct causal chain, but I don't think it's unreasonable to draw some lines. Here's a very reasonable take on the matter:

    http://bev.berkeley.edu/Ethnic%20Religious%20Conflict/Ethnic%20and%20Religious%20Conflict/1%20Identity/Journal%20of%20Peace%20Research-1999-Seul-553-69.pdf

    I also don't think that it's unreasonable, given those sorts of associations, to conclude that it is more prudent to reject religion. In a sort of a reverse Pascal's wager, I would suggest that religion offers little of value that can't be acquired otherwise, and there is at least some reason to believe that it underpins some of the worst parts of our nature, so it is the most moral choice to both reject it for oneself, and to speak out about it's possible ills.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    I touched on all of this in another discussion, but I will say it again: we are supposed to believe that there is a causal relationship​ between an individual holding a belief and horrible phenomena like genocide, war, ecological collapse, etc. Yet, no conclusive evidence of this relationship is ever presented.WISDOMfromPO-MO

    From what I've read (basic stuff), causal connections are not easy to establish, especially if attempted at the level of scientific rigor.

    Also, cause is subdivided into remote cause, proximate cause, necessary cause, sufficient cause, contributory cause, etc. - each with its own place in the causal chain.

    As you mentioned, there are a myriad factors that weigh in on a person's actions. Belief, by itself alone, can't be isolated sufficiently to make a scientific statement on the matter.

    That said, from the rough outline I provided you on causation, the many types of cause can be used, if only sketchily, to establish a causal link between belief and action. In a nutshell, belief can, at least, be a contributory cause (the weakest causal claim).
  • BlueBanana
    873
    Let's say a+b=5, where a=2 and b=3. Did a+b=5 because a=2?
  • WISDOMfromPO-MO
    753
    Aye, and there's the rub. Justification, in real life, is a post hoc process, unlike how it is regularly viewed in philosophy as being the reason for, or cause of behavior. In any sufficiently complex scenario, multiple rationally defensible but mutually exclusionary justifications are possible. I would submit that it makes more sense to explore under which circumstances people are more likely, or less likely to behave in ways that lead to such things as wars and genocides. I think that there is a case to be made that religions are for the most part exclusionary in principle (heresy is a sin in every religion), if not always in practice, and that this buttresses in-group thinking. There's a great deal of research on in group/out group dynamics, and the social discord that come from it, which include wars and genocide. Again, I think some people overstate this connection as a direct causal chain, but I don't think it's unreasonable to draw some lines. Here's a very reasonable take on the matter:

    http://bev.berkeley.edu/Ethnic%20Religious%20Conflict/Ethnic%20and%20Religious%20Conflict/1%20Identity/Journal%20of%20Peace%20Research-1999-Seul-553-69.pdf

    I also don't think that it's unreasonable, given those sorts of associations, to conclude that it is more prudent to reject religion. In a sort of a reverse Pascal's wager, I would suggest that religion offers little of value that can't be acquired otherwise, and there is at least some reason to believe that it underpins some of the worst parts of our nature, so it is the most moral choice to both reject it for oneself, and to speak out about it's possible ills.
    Reformed Nihilist




    But are religion and personal, private belief the same thing?

    Even if we could satisfactorily demarcate what is and is not religion--as far as I know nobody has been able to--and eradicate it, things like people personally believing in the existence of God might remain.

    A growing number of people in the Western world are identifying as "spiritual but not religious". That is further evidence that religious belief is to a great degree, if not entirely, personal rather than institutional.

    Usually, if an institution is destructive we don't throw out the baby with the bath water. Instead, we reform or replace the institution. If the marriage institution is failing we don't say that sex and romantic love are bad and have got to go. Instead we reform the marriage institution or replace it with something else to facilitate and regulate things like sex and romantic love.

    And I am not convinced that any cultural tradition, let alone religion, causes intergroup conflict. I have read plenty of accounts of diverse groups with diverse backgrounds coexisting peacefully before being pitted against each other by political actors who use social division/fracturing to gain and maintain power. It seems like the constant in such outcomes is deteriorating economic conditions. In other words, if economic life was steady people would not get politically divided over resources and there would be no advantage to belonging to a particular religious or ethnic group. Alas, environment, ecology, economics, etc. are volatile. Read John R. Bowen's "The Myth of Global Ethnic Conflict". Another good source is Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism where Richard H. Robbins shows how the actions of the World Bank / IMF led to division in places like the former Yugoslavia.
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.6k

    I think there was something that historians (and maybe anthropologists) used to call the "intellectual fallacy," which was supposed to be overstating the importance of culture and beliefs relative to the material conditions of life. There's the stuff Marvin Harris did in anthropology, for instance. (I had forgotten this one, but Wikipedia says he argued that Aztec cannibalism can be explained by protein deficiency instead of religion!)
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.6k

    You might also want to check out Timothy Snyder's Black Earth which repeatedly explains the events of the Holocaust in terms of the local political situation instead of attributing everything to anti-Semitism.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    Does this discussion presume that one has free choice and can act on their beliefs? If so there is ample evidence that the Nazi's believed that they were a superior race and acted in it to gain Lebensraum for the race by killing 10s of millions of people (it's not as if they were trying to hide and if this).

    If we are presuming the materialistic model then I don't have any idea who are what it's acting on anything. The genes are just going mad and doing things I guess. I can't imagine a gene having a belief but maybe they are just little humans and do.
  • Rich
    3.2k
    You might also want to check out Timothy Snyder's Black Earth which repeatedly explains the events of the Holocaust in terms of the local political situation instead of attributing everything to anti-Semitism.Srap Tasmaner

    The Nazis were pretty indiscriminate in their genocide. 35 million Russians were killed. Why? The Nazis, like the Mongols, were super-large-scale murderers and thieves. They enjoyed having millions of slaves working for them and stealing everyone's natural resources. Europeans in general developed this practice over several centuries though the Nazis refined it using the latest war technology.
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.6k

    I think the issue @WISDOMfromPO-MO was raising is a kind of oversimplification people reach for, especially when religious beliefs are on the table. Snyder comes in here not as someone denying that beliefs are important, but as resisting that oversimplification. For instance, he says you misunderstand Hitler's radicalism if you think of him as being really, really, really anti-Semitic. He refuses to explain what happens in Lithuania, for instance, by saying that Lithuanians must be more anti-Semitic than other Europeans. Snyder is controversial, but the book is absolutely worth reading.
  • WISDOMfromPO-MO
    753
    I think there was something that historians (and maybe anthropologists) used to call the "intellectual fallacy," which was supposed to be overstating the importance of culture and beliefs relative to the material conditions of life. There's the stuff Marvin Harris did in anthropology, for instance. (I had forgotten this one, but Wikipedia says he argued that Aztec cannibalism can be explained by protein deficiency instead of religion!)Srap Tasmaner




    Many years ago I read Marvin Harris's Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going. Recently I read a few chapters in a book presenting opposing viewpoints in anthropology. In the chapter asking if anthropology is a science and should try to emulate the natural sciences, Clifford Geertz says no, Marvin Harris says yes.

    Harris's cultural materialism is controversial, as far as I know. He is famous for saying Hindu's go malnourished even though there are calories available in their environment in the form of beef and that their seemingly irrational refusal to consume beef is rational because abstention from beef consumption minimizes ecological inputs and maximizes ecological outputs.

    Yeah, if Harris is right it is further evidence that the causal relationship between belief and behavior is unfounded.

    I don't recall hearing Harris say anything about Aztecs and cannibalism. But I did recently hear the same thing you said from a different source. The writer said that the cannibalism of the Aztecs occurred at a much greater rate than that of other people in the New World and that it was because there was much less non-human protein calories in their environment than other places. In other words, cannibalism was practiced to consume protein, not to appease gods or anything like that.
  • Srap Tasmaner
    4.6k
    Ah, so your question was exactly that: is there anything on the Geertz side, say, that at least aspires to scientific rigor as Harris did? Harris may not have succeeded but at least he properly identified the goal. Yes?

    So what do you think of the sort of cracker-barrel statistical approach I presented earlier?
  • WISDOMfromPO-MO
    753
    You might also want to check out Timothy Snyder's Black Earth which repeatedly explains the events of the Holocaust in terms of the local political situation instead of attributing everything to anti-Semitism.Srap Tasmaner




    I just read the description and some customer reviews at an online retailer.

    Again ecological instability is said to be a precursor to horrible events.
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