Guest Blogger - Marc Andre, Cruset of Ideas
October 25, 2006 by thinking girl
Hi all,
my second guest blogger has stepped forward, and I couldn’t be more pleased that the idea is catching on! if you haven’t considered submitting something, please do.
Marc Andre submitted to me a post he wrote on his French language blog. (Don’t worry, he translated it for us!) It’s about Faith, and I thought it was a very useful post that might generate some discussion.
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Of Credit and Faith
We can believe people on various levels, especially the intellectual one: what we say makes sense and we adhere to the position; and the emotional one: it is not so much the reasoning but the person we believe, or the idea behind the reasoning. This emotional credit supercedes the intellectual; it acts as filter to rational, logical, argumentative discussions. We can beleive, understand the reasoning, the thoughts, but it doesn’t go further if emotional credibility is lacking. That is what often distinguishes good dialectiticians: you believe them, not their words.
I would actually distinguish between the two types by calling intellectual credence “credit” and emotional credence “faith.” When we give faith to an idea or a person (actually, it might be more accurate to say the idea we have of the person), there is not too much room for reasoning. Belief in God precludes any rationalization - it’s a question of gut feeling. Same thing goes with ideas (e.g. patriotism) or people (love??). We filter out, disregard any data going against this faith; the information just doesn’t stick.
It’s not a question of intelligence (or lack thereof) but of perception. We can use reason to challenge our own faith, but we will only change it through revelation, epiphany. And sometimes, that’s exactly what we need; it’s necessary, even reasonable, to have faith in an idea or a person. This is often what keeps us going, without havin gto always question everything. This can of course lead to abuse (we often see that in discussions where people stick to their guns), but it seems to be a vital mechanism.
Kuhn (whose study I’m fond of quoting) showed that such a mechanism exists in sceince. When a student begins his training, they give credence to what the teachers say. This basic knowledge of the field, its axioms, will never, for most people, be challenged, all contrary data being filtered out, explained away.
The same thing goes with our view of society.
Marc Andre Belanger, Cruset of Ideas
This is what I’ve felt all along, but never had the words to say. People mix up credit and faith so often, to the point where nothing seems to makes sense. Brilliant writing; you have a blog written in English, right??? (I don’t know French). If you do, I’ll have to look at it.
Hi Jess
that’s what I thought, really brilliant to separate the two concepts. To answer your question, Marc Andre does indeed have an English blog - right now he is making us all drool with his beautiful travel journal and pictures from his recent trip to Corsica!
This really is very good.
It immediately made me think of when I was trying to be a christian. My problem was I could never find the “faith”. I was always trying to rationalize it & everyone kept telling me I was just supposed to believe it. I figured out that belief & faith were choices but, that didn’t give them much “credit” as you call it in my eyes.
On my blog, I notice in political & religious arguments, the sides line up right away. The emotional positon is always in the forefront. even though I see it over & over I’m always puzzled by peoples ability to be what i think of as irrrational. (It’s fairly easy to determine how rational someone is going to be by their first comment.)
Come to think of it, to be fair, we kinda have blind spots that way when it comes to ourselves. Do you know what I mean?
I’d rather say (slightly) oblivious than irrational. We rationalize from what we perceive. And, like you said lt, we all have our blind spots.
“oblivious ” That means to be unaware of something. the emotional people who comment on religion & politics are aware of the topic, for sure. But, the emotional ones just come up with stuff as fact that doesn’t take obvious things into consideration. (By obvious things, I mean of course things that i think are obvious) that’s where they are lacking in sound judgment.
I think they don’t take those obvious things into consideration because they cannot be aware of their relevance, because of the filter imposed by their faith. Hence the use of “oblivious”.
What you said on Mister P’s blog was interesting. Keep these things in mind if you can.
You don’t know if you will be here in the next minute, so make the best of it.
Money is just an energy that flows around so don’t make it your God.
Slow down, relax, tell others that you love them. You don’t have to love them a lot, just love them is all.
Don’t push others away, yes you will get hurt at times, but it evens out. And remember, I love you.
I loved you before I met you, I can always love you more, but I will never love you less than a one.
you must expound on this because of the filter imposed by their faith. what do you mean by filter?
It’s taken me a little while to be able to jump in on this one. Maybe that’s the struggle I have with faith?
I don’t know about this one. I think a lot of people have faith and believe in things and feel that they have no choice at all about it, that it is out of their control altogether that they have a certain belief. And, in my experience, sometimes people grow up with a certain belief system that they simply accept without question, so I don’t think of that as a choice either, just a reflex.
yes, but we perceive from what we already believe, don’t we? We see the world as we are, not as it is, right? Our beliefs inform our perspectives and perceptions. Is that perhaps what you mean by “the filter imposed by their faith”?
so, I think an important question is: How do people come to their faith?
Billy B
thanks for your words of wisdom.
I don’t care about money, never really have. I worry about it when I don’t have it. Right now, I don’t have it. I used to, but now I don’t. When I did, I didn’t care about it. Next time I have it again, I probably won’t care about it then, either. I want to have enough money so that I can have a secure and comfortable small home (I don’t necessarily want to own it), so that I can travel wherever I want to travel, and so that I can donate enough money to charity to really help make a difference.
I read a book years ago called ” A Return to Love.” What you are saying reminds me a lot of that. The basic idea was that there are only two root forces: Love and Fear. All else stems from that - anger, hate, violence, meanness, bitterness, etc.
I agree with Mister P - I’d like to hear more about your idea that we are all god in evolution. If you’ve written about this on your blog, perhaps you could give me a couple links to check out?
L>T, by filter I mean 1) what stands between our immediate senses and our (conscious) perception (cf. my post on the subject) and 2) what stands between the data exposed and our (conscious) reasoning; what “informs our perspectives and perceptions” as TG puts it. When someone just doesn’t get it, it’s usually because they actually cannot see it; trying to explain it is then like trying to explain the difference between green and red to a colour-blind person.
For the longest time, a very close friend of mine has been trying to reform her on-and-off boyfriend (and father of her son); the guy is, in some ways, Homer Simpsonish, he can’t see what he does wrong. For some time now, I’ve been trying to explain to her that he’s oblivious, that there is information that he cannot perceive and she can’t argue it in (in a way, he’s got too much faith in himself). Then it hit me: not only did her faith in him (or her idea of him) make it impossible to see his obliviousness (which much everyone else could see), but my faith in her made it impossible, until that revelation, to see that I couldn’t make her see (which much everyone else could see). I filtered out that fact.
TG, “but we perceive from what we already believe, don’t we?” My point exactly. That is why I have a problem with the use of “irrational”. You can argue most anything logically if you disregard (consciously or not) part of the data. That, actually, is the point of dialectics. I remember a philosophy course where we had a debate on Socrates (from a Ancien Greek point of view); those in the “con” half of the class that were the most persuasive were actually pro-Socrates. But they knew what the “pro” were gonna say, so they could carefully choose their arguments against, and make a pretty convincing case, by knowing what data to obfuscate. They were quite rational, just selectively oblivious. So yes, that is what I meant by “the filter imposed by their faith.”
“How do people come to their faith?” I think most of it comes when you’re an empty vessel. As you grow up, you’re open to explanations about the world you perceive. Most of it you can’t explain yourself, so you beleive what trustworthy people tell you (parents, teachers, etc.). And once it’s there, it’s hard to change.
How does faith change? The short answer would be: revelation. Actually, I would say that it’s through a process of interiorisation. There has to be a lot of unconscious putting together of elements of your experience (which comprises things people say, things you read, etc.). Your subconscious distills all these snippets and, at one point, something (that could be quite trivial) comes along that makes all the pieces of the puzzle come together. That happened to me a few times when I was far from the business of life, surrounded by nature. The surrounding peace gives you the necessary space to figure things out.
But to do that, you either have to be willing to work on yourself, be open to the possibility that you could be wrong.
Thanks Marc. for explaining. I get it now. I’m just a little slow, sometimes.
Someone just posted an interesting comment on the French version of this post. I won’t translate it all, but basically what she said is that when your arguments are being blocked by the other’s faith (and it’s somehting you really care about getting through), you should talk on the same level: about emotion, not intellect. Start by exchanging about what that person feels towards the subject/person/idea.
I hadn’t thought of that (intellectually), but it’s a logical extension of my argument.
Today’s Dilbert: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2006101221628.gif
that’s funny Marc Andre. I hadn’t thought of that either, but it certainly makes sense - engaging with people on their level makes sense in all sorts of arenas, so why should it be any different here?
Marc: for some reason your initial credit/faith distinction didn’t quite ‘click’ for me, but the rest of your comments make a lot of sense.
I think one reason people cling so hard to certain ‘faiths’ is less because they’re so heavily invested in the correctness of a particular piece of dogma, and more because that belief is intimately tied in with identifying as being a member of a particular group. The need to experience oneself as ‘belonging’ to a group of other human beings where one’s existence is given weight and significance is a pretty basic human need, and most people will emotionally resist anything that threatens that belonging, even to the point of tuning out facts and logical arguments.
I think a key part of a lot of right wing propaganda has less to do with actually ‘winning the argument’ (whatever the argument might be) than with providing cover to people who want to cling to a certain perspective, and who can then point to ‘the dispute’ (like ’some people say there’s global warming, some don’t') as an excuse to tune out the whole thing and continue identifying with whatever group they comfortably identify with.
It is also one of the driving forces behind efforts by Republican strategists like Frank Luntz, who crafted the fine art of repetitively using highly negative words and phrases against Democrats to make it difficult for ordinary people to identify with them. (The corporate domination of the media makes it much more difficult for the Dems to pursue a similar approach against the Republicans, though they do use this tactic at times.)
I think this makes it a little more challenging than merely appealing to someone ‘on their level’. A key element to trying to persuade someone whose mind is ‘closed’ might be the need to present a different ‘group’ with which that person might ultimately identify, and that can be a very difficult challenge indeed, depending on the issue.
marc, what I get out of that …it’s like when you are having a fight (with your spouse, for instance) you are told to first acknowledge their feelings. (I got that from my therapist) Example: “I see that you are angry” instead of saying right away “You shouldn’t be angry”.
I see that as meeting another person on their emotional level. That’s what opens up dialoge & when it comes to our OWN faith in religions, political parties, ideas, whatever…we don’t want to be talked down to as if we are stupid children, either. That just makes us obstinate.
I think the best level to meet people would be the level, where we could truely say, “I’m no better then you.”
hi ballgame!
great insight! This is also why I think ultimately, postmodernism can’t work for identity. And why we still have problems of discrimination and oppression - one group pitted against another.
L>T
another great insight! I think this is really hard for some people to do, especially when they’ve been told all their life, by society and by their loved ones, that they are special and wonderful, and society is set up as one big competition right from the get-go at grade school.