we are built to believe. without beliefs, we have no guide for how to behave, what to hope for, who to trust. there's nothing we can do to avoid believing in one thing or another; it's impossible to make our way through the world without forming some opinion of the place.
what's more - we admire belief in one's beliefs. to be true to our beliefs is a virtue: "maybe i disagree with him, but i admire him for standing up for his beliefs," is a commonly expressed sentiment; i'm sure i've said it, and thought it, more times than i care to remember. to assure ourselves of the value of our own beliefs, we often point to great historical believers, whose sturdiness of belief was the fulcrum on which history turned - martin luther king, for example. see, we say: there is a man who stood for his beliefs in the face of violence, hatred and even death, and his belief in his own beliefs changed the world.
i'm not sure that this is a choice. we appear to be wired to cling to our beliefs, perhaps as an evolutionary tactic to foster tribal unity, or perhaps for some other reason. and for every inspiring historical example of the triumph of belief, there are a dozen tragedies of beliefs gone berserk that we'd rather not mention. if dr. king was standing strong for his beliefs, so was lester maddox.
a strange thing happens when one of our beliefs -- or even worse our entire "belief system" -- is contradicted. rather than revising our belief to fit reality, our instinct is to ignore reality to preserve the belief. if history is any guide, we are prepared to do great harm to one another to ensure our beliefs are not challenged. we will lie and cheat, destroying or obscuring any evidence that disproves our belief, or willfully propagandizing in favor of beliefs which have been shown to be erroneous. we will shun members of our community and even our own family whose actions, or whose very existence, contradicts our beliefs. we are not merely prepared to die for our beliefs, but to kill for them, to wreak vengence upon those who commit the unforgiveable sin of believing something other than what we believe.
in the economics game, they have a Rumsfeldian word for an event in which any outside person is affected by an agreement to which he or she was not a party: an "externality". for example, if i take your money to let you dump nuclear waste on my property, and my neighbor's cattle all die of radiation poisoning, that neighbor's loss of property is an externality, an unintended (but possibly inevitable) consequence of our contract with which he had no involvement. once you start looking, you can find externalities everywhere - victims of secondhand smoke contracting fatal illnesses, teachers being laid off because of reduced tax revenue which was the result of a financial crisis caused by overleveraged banks, and of course, the phenomenon of global warming, which is perhaps the mother of all externalities.
beliefs often have externalities as well, even the ones which superficially appear abstract. in my home state of texas, for example, many residents have a fanatical devotion to their right to purchase and own any firearm of any caliber and function, as a matter of principle. it's clear that there are externalities to this belief; tens of thousands of people die each year as a result of our resistance to stricter regulation of firearms, and everyone who supports unlimited gun rights is forced to make the moral calculus that their right to purchase and own any and every gun currently in existence is of greater import than these thousands of lives lost. (occasionally, this crowd will attempt to provide a moral justification for this in the form of an argument that more gun ownership reduces crime and therefore saves lives, but numerous independent studies have shown this argument to be bunk.)
similarly, the conservative stance against universal health care (or, if you prefer, "socialized medicine") in america reflects a willingness to let 45,000 people die annually (nearly half of them children) as an externality to this seemingly abstract principle.
this is not to say that principles are not sometimes worth making sacrifices for; i have no doubt that my good friends in texas who support unlimited gun rights are comfortable in their belief that tens of thousands of annual deaths is a small price to pay for their freedom to buy and own any weapon of any caliber, regardless of the effect on crime rates. and i only bring up the gun rights debate as an illustration of a larger point; our society is full of these sorts of trade-offs, where a little more liberty for me results in a little more suffering for someone else. these are complicated issues. we restrict the freedom of business owners to discriminate against black people because it collides with the freedom of those same black people to get a fair deal in the marketplace. many business owners (such as the aforementioned mr. maddox) feel that is a bridge too far, and that their property rights supercede the rights of their fellow citizens to be treated fairly. there are externalities on either side. what becomes dangerous, though, is when an unwillingness to challenge core beliefs shuts down the conversation and we commence the battle royal.
i recently read that liberalism (in the 18th century/Locke/Enlightenment sense) is a philosophy of unilateral disarmament in the face of intractable differences. which, i suppose, is my point. each of us has our own history and our own set of lessons that we draw from that history, but none of us can see the entire picture. if we're to continue to live in a society side by side with one another, compromise, rather than total fidelity to one's personal worldview, is required. our beliefs must always be tempered by a healthy skepticism and a willingness to evolve when those beliefs interact with someone else's reality.
