My husband, Craig, came home last weekend with a grocery bag full of chanterelles and stories about his camping trip with our friend Larry. Since Larry loves to cook, much of the conversation was about food prep. Craig mentioned that Larry is of the school that believes water boils faster uncovered.
My hackles rose.
“No,” I said, shaking my chanterelle cleaning brush at him, “Larry doesn’t believe water boils faster uncovered, he thinks it does.”
My long-suffering husband sighed and settled back for a long rant.
“It would be a simple experiment,” I continued, “Just boil the same amount of water over the same heat in the same pan covered and uncovered a few times and you’d have your proof, one way or the other. But you can’t prove a belief.”
And yet, we are all so certain of ours. Not because we can prove they are correct to the rest of the world, but because our bodies tell us at a gut level that they are correct. We don’t form them in an honest, straightforward manner. There is no logic involved, although we are sure there is. They sneak up on us through our parent’s DNA, our mother’s milk, our childhood environment, extended family, and friends.
It’s sad to see any decent, self-respecting word fall into disuse, but it’s especially hard to watch it happen to belief. This is a really important word. It’s what makes humanity so brilliantly and frighteningly insane. Much as we blather on about how rational we are, it is a mystical mixture of raw data and belief that forms our unique philosophies of life. The same set of information poured into the ears of three people gets filtered through three different belief systems and comes out as three different interpretations of that information. Any policeman will tell you that if three people witness the same occurrence they will come up with three slightly different accounts of what happened, due to their expectations about that situation which are formed by their beliefs.
Our philosophies in turn dictate our codes of ethics. Civilizations don’t rise and fall in a logical manner, but in an inevitable seesaw between belief that might and money make right and the belief that justice makes right. Much as most of us would like to see justice prevail, it seldom lasts for long because no one can agree on what is just.
This, IMHO, is humanity’s predicament in a nutshell. Belief fuels chaos and hatred, but it also makes us capable of divinely inspiring acts of beauty and courage. It is what good fiction is all about.
10 thoughts on “A Writer’s Rant”
Belief appears to be how political conservatives derive answers, while the rest of us try to deal with facts. Do ethics come just from belief? How about pragmatism, where we deduce that ethical behavior leads to better (more survivalist) consequences?
So a watched pot will boil, after all…..
This is a good question and one of the reasons I wrote this entry.
I would say that yes, our ethics do come from our beliefs. A pragmatic, logical person is pragmatic and logical because her chemical makeup and life experience have conditioned her to be pragmatic. Her life experiences have demonstrated to her over and over again that the facts she observes can be put together to form a logical, correct conclusion. A pragmatist would say she knows this, but I would say instead that she believes this,
because what she doesn’t realize is that that same body chemistry and life experience is influencing how much weight she gives each fact and even which facts she considers. I’m not talking about a simple, controlled experiment here. I’m talking about complex life issues which involve a myriad of facts muddied by intense feelings. This is the crucible that forms our beliefs, which in turn determine our ethics.
It is a demand often that one be the same as the day before. Constant personality traits are encouraged. Yet, the change in perspective, literally the side of the bed one got up on, is different from moment to moment.
Beliefs come into and out of focus. Often they lurk beneath conscious thought and influence profoundly what gets into our awareness of each moment. Our lens focus our beliefs into what we pay attention to in the first place. A writer presents a sequence of events and wants the reader to believe them, and in so doing, the reader wants to know what will happen next. The hook is sunk.
Exactly.
The writer plays on the readers’ beliefs as he presents events and spins his tale.
To sink the hook, he must have an innate understanding of the way belief is formed.
Let me add a similar rant on the word, “feel” vs. “think.” as in the sentence, “I feel that justice is more important than prosperity.”
Many times, I have explained to my writing students that “feeling” is something we do with our five senses, and that thought is what we do with our minds. However, having served on a jury, I can tell you that decisions are made in that small, secluded room that have as much to do with jurors’ stomach contents as they do with their minds. And that is, I think, a dangerous truth about justice.
Amen!
Did you run the experiment?
Not yet. We’ll run it when you and Alex come down this weekend?
ya know ………………………………………………
I rarely use the word Belief.
Because there are few things I BELIEVE in.
I find my TRUTH by fact finding missions. Sometimes even in the dictionary.
I, like you Auntie Chrissy, *THINK* that belief comes from guts …. and proving a point comes from practical experience and from the process of elimination …. a series of hypothesis being proven wrong or right.
Things I believe in:
my son
yep that’s about it ….. it was posed to me one fall evening many moons ago that Christians died for their beliefs; they killed man, innocent women, innocent children because they believed —what ever.
I take that into account when I create my list of what I believe. Beliefs take many years to create and consecrate and become concrete – hard as Hades to break! Which is most likely my reason behind why I only have one item on my BELIEF list.
The movie Dogma with Matt Damon, Ben Afflec, Alan Rickman, Chris Rock, Jason Lee, etc … listen to Chris Rocks character who was Jesus’ 13th Apostle as a Black Man. He talked about the word Belief … then changed it all around by saying, something along these lines
“J.C. (Jesus) had an idea, and this idea spread amongst his crew, and then it spread amongst his flock and now this IDEA got turned into a BELIEF and people are Killing each other over the Belief, but it started out as an IDEA.”
I *Think* this thread began awhile ago, yes? So … what was the outcome of the great experiment? Whom was Right and whom was Wrong? hahahaha I hope both of you were at least WINNERS!
Hey Jenn!
Larry won. I did the experiment twice and the uncovered pan boiled faster by an average of 26 seconds both times.
Craig is unconvinced, however, because he’s not satisfied with my methods.
I said if he didn’t agree he should repeat the experiment so it’s up to his standards.
He, of course, hasn’t gotten around to it.
I’ll let you know when he does.
It may be awhile.