Belief and Authority
What do Charles Sanders Pierce and Rudolf Rocker have in common? Well, a lot one could say. But beyond the obvious, there is an interesting connection in their work that is still very relevant to current affairs today. Public opinion, and the control of it by authority, is still a crucial problem in the twenty-first century. Perhaps more so than in times passed, because of the finely-crafted methods by which the public relation industry shapes public opinion. Revisiting, albeit briefly, a few pieces of Rocker’s and Pierce’s work can provide a good, and much needed framework, for discussing the problems the left faces today.
In November 1877, Popular Science Monthly published an essay by Charles Sanders Pierce entitled, ‘The Fixation of Belief.’ The aim of the essay was to suggest that humans have a particular ‘habit of mind’ that seeks to eradicate doubt and fix belief. Pierce argues that doubt is a worrisome position to be in and people will reflexively try to alleviate this doubt by fixing upon a belief, even if it’s erroneous. Pierce then provides the methods by which people do this. There are four methods: the method of tenacity; the method of authority; the method of a priori, and the method of empirical investigation. He sums up the essay by suggesting that only the method of empirical investigation provides humans the ability to firmly choose between right and wrong beliefs. Empirical investigation provides an objective ‘check’, so that following rational methods will lead to a universal truth that others can also verify. Now for our purposes here, what I find most interesting in this essay, is not which method used to fix belief, but simply the claim that there is a ‘habit of mind” in itself. It’s this habit of mind (note that Pierce is mostly talking in the sense of pragmatic beliefs, ie. common sense reasoning and agent-based planning) that allows us to form beliefs about the world and then act upon them. Pierce argues that perhaps the reason so many hold false beliefs is an evolutionary adaption, it being easier to have a host of ‘fanciful ideas’ then to live with the grim reality about. Now, despite the evolutionary psychological bent, and its flaws, he makes an important observation here. But let me comeback to this.
The method of authority Pierce believes is the most effective method by which to control belief. Indoctrination and repetition of dogmas are powerful tools to make people belief even the most obvious of lies. As Pierce says:
In judging this method of fixing belief, which may be called the method of authority, we must, in the first place, allow its immeasurable mental and moral superiority to the method of tenacity. Its success is proportionately greater; and, in fact, it has over and over again worked the most majestic results. The mere structures of stone which it has caused to be put together — in Siam, for example, in Egypt, and in Europe — have many of them a sublimity hardly more than rivaled by the greatest works of Nature. And, except the geological epochs, there are no periods of time so vast as those which are measured by some of these organized faiths. If we scrutinize the matter closely, we shall find that there has not been one of their creeds which has remained always the same; yet the change is so slow as to be imperceptible during one person’s life, so that individual belief remains sensibly fixed. For the mass of mankind, then, there is perhaps no better method than this. If it is their highest impulse to be intellectual slaves, then slaves they ought to remain.
Throughout the essay there is an implication that while we have some control over which method we may choose in fixing our belief, some operate more powerfully than others. While Pierce suggests that empirical investigation is the most reasonable, the habit of mind certainly does not operate by free choice. Pierce hints at this when he speaks of a ‘social impulse.’ Much of the actual processes we use in or day to day life to interpret and understand the world are unconscious. Even a limited amount of introspection can reveal how there there is a strong bias to internalize cultural beliefs, norms, social hierarchies, etc… Pierce doesn’t explore what this ‘social impulse’ is, in this sense. But thinking like this makes it not so much authority imposing upon people ideas, but people actively internalizing the prevailing cultural norms and belief systems. Whether there is an authority there or some other social system, it doesn’t matter. There is a strong propensity for people to accept as truth what the majority of people say as truth, even in the face of contrary evidence. It’s a logical fallacy, but in pragmatic terms, it can be very useful. Pierce’s essay highlights very well this constant tension between our common sense reasoning, our cultural indoctrination, and scientific reasoning. For many who lack the intellectual training, the cultural indoctrination is all pervasive, and they operate to maintain those beliefs in the face of all evidence against. This would be Pierce’s method of tenacity.
Nationalism and Culture is a great book by Rudolf Rocker. It’s epic in scope and insightful in substance. It reads, in many ways, like the first third of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. Both show that great moments in a societies cultural richness, diversity, and intellectual ingenuity are dependent on the political and economic institutions. In simple terms, the freer the society is, the more one see’s innovation, art, and science expand. What makes Rocker’s different is that he seeks to demonstrate that the religious institutions controlled for a long time the belief systems of pre-industrial societies, and then to make the further claim that in industrial society, nationalism has come to replace the religious institutions. Nationalism is what he termed a ‘political religion.’ When before justification for state action was provided by dogmas of divine right, original sin and heresy, today we live in a world of altruism, exceptionalism, patriotism and ‘enemies.’ And this goes further then just foreign policy, as well. In pre-industrial times the authority of the church was were people turned to for truth, as Pierce noted in his essay above. But after the enlightenment this was replaced by man as the ultimate arbiter. And so it ia that today our beliefs come not from the church, but from experts, intellectuals and the media whose role it is to justify the iniquities we live in and to depoliticize the populace. As Rocker says:
To maintain this state of things we make all our achievements in science and technology serve organised mass murder; we educate our youth into uniformed killers, deliver the people to the soulless tyranny of a bureaucracy, put men from the cradle to the grave under police supervision, erect everywhere jails and penitentiaries, and fill every land with whole armies of informers and spies. Should not such “order,” from whose infected womb are born eternally brutal power, injustice, lies, crime and moral rottennesslike poisonous germs of destructive plagues gradually convince even conservative minds that it is order too dearly bought?
Consequently, as Rocker had claimed, our culture suffers disastrously as a result. He also come to the same conclusion as Pierce, that the ultimate source of knowledge is through empirical reasoning, free and independent from all coercive institutions, allowing creative inquiry and guided only by reason alone. When societies provided these types of conditions, culture flourishes, science innovates, and art creates. In the most authoritarian times it is the opposite. As Russell loosely once said, ‘They don’t call it the Dark Ages for nothing.”
So, both Rocker and Pierce agree that authority plays the most significant role in belief systems of a society. Pierce approaches the issue from a psychological perspective, in essence, arguing that mans habit of mind to fix beliefs, often times, leads to false beliefs. Rocker, approaching the issue from a socio-political perspective, explores the different methods authority uses to fix this belief. Pierce’s essay resonates very strongly today with the sophisticated means that authority uses to control belief. The propaganda created by the public relations industry at the turn of the century, in fact, exploits the innate faculties that Pierce was speaking of. Now more than ever these techniques trump rationalism as people are taught how to not think. History is a telling example of how easy it is to control peoples beliefs systems and it can be very hard to combat this with empirical reasoning. I do not agree with Pierce’s conclusion that then we should ‘let them be slaves,’ though, now matter how strong this social impulse can be. A change in the institutions can easily have then be slaves of rationalism, which doesn’t doesn’t sound to bad. Rocker’s thesis that nationalism functions the same way as religion also portends, very accurately, the continued rise of the public relations industry.
In conclusion, their thought is just as salient and insightful one-hundred years later, as the techniques have grown only more sophisticated and all-pervasive. While this is a very cursory overview of their ideas I would strongly recommend one to read them further, as they are instructive and telling tracts that only show how great the need is for worker education, and as Chomsky once said, an “intellectual self-defense.’
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1 Comment
Robert,
I think there may be a couple of typos in this – follow directions at the very top of ZNet top page – and you can edit it yourself. Also, I am putting it in the highlighted content section – rare for blog posts.