In an earlier post, I talked about the disadvantages of ‘belief’ but also its necessity in a world where so much can’t be known for certain. However I didn’t even mention the utility of ‘belief’ as a marker of belonging, as when a religious person explains their faith by saying ‘we believe X’, where it is the belief that makes possible that ‘we’ – and therefore also an excluded ‘them’. In many religions, notably in Protestant Christianity, belief in the correct dogma is, or at least has been, seen as far more important than moral behaviour. Only faith – sola fide – can save you from the fires of hell. And of course many religions, including Islam and most branches of Christianity, have not even waited for the afterlife, but have had people tortured and killed in this one for not subscribing to the correct dogma.
There are all kinds of advantages to sola fide. It’s easier to conform to a set of beliefs than it is to change your way of life. It’s also helpful for the wealthy and powerful who might otherwise have to take seriously moral teachings such as, in Christianity, Matthew 5.5 (‘blessed are the meek’), or Matthew 19:24 (‘ it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God’). At my primary school – a famous fee-paying school, and therefore only accessible to well-off people- the ‘eye of the needle’ was explained away by the chaplain as the name of a gate in the walls of Jerusalem through which a camel could actually pass, though it might be a bit of a squeeze, which makes the whole saying rather lame, and is quite funny when you consider all the other sayings which religions have insisted should be taken completely literally. Many people have been burned alive, for instance, for denying that communion bread and wine are literally the blood and flesh of Christ.
But this takes us back to importance of belief as a marker of belonging, the means by which a virtuous ‘us’ is separated from a ‘them’ which at best is ignorant and in need of enlightenment, and at worst does not deserve to be treated as part of the moral community at all. This is very handy. It makes priesthood important, for one thing (because priests are the ones who let you know what you have to believe in). It gives even the lowliest of believers the comfort of feeling superior to somebody (which is useful for elites who want to keep them in their place). And it provides a rationale for treating unbelievers badly, which is great if you want to conquer their country, or make them into slaves, or even just dismiss them as of no account.
The thing about this kind of belief, though, is that it’s no good just asking people to believe something obvious. You can’t build an ‘us’ and a them’ on the back of, say, ‘the sun rises every day’ or ‘on the whole, it’s good to treat people nicely’. It has to be something that isn’t obvious and that wouldn’t normally occur to you. In fact, more than that, it needs to be something which everyday experience would suggest there is no evidence for. Even ‘there is a god’ isn’t really sufficient, because that’s a pretty widespread idea which isn’t associated with any particular belief system, but ‘God consists of three persons – not two, mind you, or four, but three – who are all distinct, but are still somehow only one god’ – now, that’s more like it, no way is anyone going to come up with that empirically! And ‘bread and wine are literally blood and flesh’ is perfect.
Sorry to pick on Christianity by the way -I know many good people who are Christians, and who don’t use their religion in this kind of way- but it just happens to be the religious tradition I was brought up in, and therefore the one I feel best qualified to criticise. The point I am actually coming to is that sola fide is not confined to religions. In particular, I am struck by the way that politics has degenerated into competing belief systems of this kind. Hence the so-called culture wars, the internet-fuelled tendency to separate into competing tribes, each with its own priesthood and its own rigid and often arbitrary beliefs which you have to subscribe to in order to belong, even when your head is secretly saying to you ‘it’s really not as simple as that.’
Since my own politics, cloudy as they are, are on the left (which is to say, it seems to me that the people at the bottom of society get a lousy deal, and the people higher up are obscenely privileged) my particular concern is this tendency on the left. If being on the left is reduced to expressing the latest ‘correct’ views on social media in the latest approved language, with the aim of demonstrating your loyalty to your faction, and your superiority to that other lot, it has ceased to really be politics in the sense of a practical attempt to make things different, and has just become a way of feeling superior.
And this at a time when oligarchy is on the rise and oligarchs are managing to persuade a lot of people who would normally be your natural allies, that you belong to a haughty self-righteous elite who don’t even like them, and that they should throw in their lot with them, the oligarchs.
