The Long Reach of Belief

Often I am asked, why do you care what other people believe? Well, the simple answer is that people tend to act on their beliefs. I know lots of people who don't believe in new age mysticism or God or any host of other supernatural elements, yet they just do not understand why another person's beliefs should effect me. If an individual believes that gay marriage is wrong--forbidden in the bible or otherwise--then he might actually speak out against it, protest gay rights, or use political power to rally against equality.

The issue with many of the beliefs that people hold is that they're not simple matters of taste. I may dislike Nickelback as a band, but the fact that certain people enjoy Nickelback is of no concern to me. Why? Because people liking Nickelback has no effect on my life or that of anyone else who may dislike them. Now we have established a criterion for when beliefs held by others should matter: if the beliefs cause people to act in ways that they otherwise would not.

For example, if a person is secretly racist we may find this deplorable, but if they never act on it, in what way could we know? The chances of someone actually being racist and never acting on it are probably impossible, since these beliefs manifest themselves in subtle ways that we are generally not aware of. But the point is that beliefs lead to actions. And if these actions can hurt, oppress, and generally cause harm to society, then there is warrant for us to care what other people believe.

I've had people tell me that I am just as bad and intolerant of the people I am speaking out against. They've told me that just because I disagree with someone doesn't make them bad, or wrong, or give me a reason to question their beliefs. Let me illustrate a picture: does a person who is racist (something we in the liberal western world tend to think is pretty bad) have the right to say that an anti-racist is discriminating against them? That doesn't really make any sense. The people who fought to free the slaves and for civil rights aren't people we look back on and say "Geez, couldn't they just leave other people's beliefs alone?" I speak out when I think people are being oppressed or harmed.

How do we define harm? There are various ways, so I'll give some examples. When children are taught that humans walked with dinosaurs, the KKK were nice people, and gay people are as awful as rapists and child molesters, their education is harming them. When parents allow their children to die by refusing medical treatment in favor of prayer, their spiritual belief is harming them. When psychics rob people of their money by claiming they can perform spiritual healing, claim they can talk to dead loved ones, or just provide false info to further their personal gain, their credulity in charlatans is harming them. This is just a short list. I could write about a hundred more ways in which people are harmed every day due to the nature of their beliefs.

I can imagine someone saying at this point, "Okay, so some people believe some stupid things. But my beliefs don't harm anyone. For example, I don't believe in evolution and it doesn't hurt anyone."

I will attempt to illustrate that the effects of holding a view such as creationism aren't immediately obvious, but just because they aren't immediately obvious doesn't mean there can't be latent harm. For example, if there were only one person who didn't believe in evolution we wouldn't have a problem, but the fact remains that half of Americans reject evolutionary theory. And furthermore, any argument that goes, "Well, me alone doing this action isn't hurting anyone, therefore it is fine," is not justifiable when we imagine the consequences, were everyone to do it. This known as the tragedy of the commons. Therefore, yes, if you and just you alone decide to litter, you won't destroy the world, but if everyone does? Well, we're still trying to fix that mistake.

An anticipated objection at this point is "I understand that littering is bad, but you haven't demonstrated that not believing in evolution is bad."

Allow me to do so.

So we have this thing called scientific progress, where we find out more about the world and because we know more about the world we can do neat things. These include little things like medicine that makes it possible for us to live three times as long as we could a few hundred years ago (thank you biology). All the food and drink that you enjoy, all the pills you pop and the drugs you take (thank you chemistry). That little GPS in your car and in your phone that allows you to find your way (thank you physics). So what does this have to do with evolution? Two things: the first is the smaller point that the understanding of evolution allows us to create medicine such as antibiotics and helps us discover disease-causing genes. The larger point is that the denial of evolution is part of a more substantial problem: the denial of scientific curiosity. If you say to yourself, "I refuse to believe in evolution because it contradicts the bible," then you are liable to say that you refuse to believe in a great number of scientific concepts. And if you don't believe in these things, you won't have an interest in science (you might even disdain it) despite the fact that the life you enjoy today is owed to many things that wouldn't be possible without science. But hey, that's fine, no one is forcing you to become a biologist. But if we all suddenly became incurious and stopped exploring, well, we don't have to imagine what life would be like since history has done a fine job of documenting the dark ages.

Sometimes the harm of a belief is that it manages to oppress a group for no other reason than to oppress them. For example, to argue that racists are oppressed by civil rights would be quite silly. The oppressors do not get to say they are being oppressed when people speak out against them. Otherwise we would have an infinite regress of each person claiming that their rights were violated when another person disagreed with them. The buck has to stop somewhere, and it stops at the opposition. You don't get to simply oppose those who disagree with you ad infinitum; you defend your original position. So when people have beliefs such as an idea that a particular race is inferior their own, they might do something like enslave that race. Even after slavery has ended, the dominant group might continue to oppress that race. We clearly understand the link here between belief and action, and while it isn't one person who keeps the wheels of oppression turning, the mindset that "Racism is okay, even if I'm not a racist" does nothing to help those who are oppressed - it does just the opposite.

So here's how the argument breaks down: sometimes the effect of a belief is apparent, as in:

Racist beliefs --> Racist behavior 

Sometimes it's way more latent, as in:

Science denial --> Kids dying from parent's belief in spiritual healing and lack of belief in modern medicine

Sometimes the path has many stops, as in:

 Evolution denier --> Uninterested in science --> Not enough employment science/technology related fields --> No cure for cancer yet

Sometimes it's a small part of a larger problem, as in:

No issue with racist beliefs --> A system that continues to run based on oppression

In short, beliefs matter a lot.  They have an effect we are unable to see most of the time. We should not write them off as necessarily harmless for that reason alone. I consider myself a feminist, yet for so long I spent time participating in behavior quite clearly anti-feminist and lo and behold, I was completely unaware of it. It wasn't until my consciousness was raised by the efforts of other individuals that I was able to implement change.

Don't be afraid to question things. It's the only way we can get true social change.

"Stop making me think!: The Compartmentalization of Critical Thinking

I am constantly amazed how young undergraduates can spend 3 hours a week for 15 weeks in psychology learning about cognitive biases, reciting the needed information on tests, and yet fail to ever apply what they know in real life. You might think that if a person wrote a paper on confirmation bias, then they probably wouldn't proudly tweet about how their horoscope is so right, because they are such a pisces. Most of us tend to think of our lives inside and outside the classroom as separate places with very little convergence. This belief is common about a great number of things. The late Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously wrote about a concept known as "Nonoverlapping Magisteria."It explained that the worlds of science and religion were in fact not antagonistic, but actually just pertained to completely different domains of knowledge. On this, he said:

"...we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven."

It's the division of two areas of reality, saying that there is more than one way of knowing. For religion, I go to my bible, for the empirical world, I go to my micro/tele/stethoscope. This compartmentalization of critical thinking happens in more places than the classroom and outside class, religion and science, but I'm going to stick with these two examples for now. I am arguing that what you learn in biology about evolution isn't just true on the test, it's true in the rest of the world. What you learn in sociology about race and class inequality isn't just a simple topic for your paper, it's based on facts about the reality that we live in. But most of us shut down these systems when we pack up and go home for the summer, the weekend, or even just tonight for this party. Nothing kills a person's buzz quite like reminding them that they're wrong, despite the fact that they learned the right answer.

This does not happen to everyone, but it happens to enough people for it to be concerning. It is the explanation for how we have wonderful scientists such as Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, who happens to be a devout Christian. He keeps his religion and science separate. He doesn't tell his colleagues not to run tests, but rather to pray. He does not attribute the success of the treatments at the NIH to God's will (at least, publicly). So why is there a problem? He is still compartmentalizing his critical thinking. He is using it in one area of his life (his work) and not applying it in others (his personal).

To get an idea what I'm talking about, think about a very simple concept that is basic to all religions: prayer. The idea that someone who does science for a living could at the same time believe in prayer is a complete division of reality within the mind of that individual. The issue with prayer is that it has zero verifiability. If it did, if it worked with the certainty you might expect from such a popular activity, then we could just fucking pray away world hunger, racism, and give each of us a million-dollar mansion to live in. Prayer seems to only give us things that could have happened in the absence of prayer. In fact, whenever we attempt to measure the effect of prayer, we have either found no effect, or (ironically) the opposite effect.

Critical thinking isn't always easy, but you actually do it more than you might know. Imagine this scenario: you attempt to turn on your TV with the remote and yet nothing happens when you press the "on" button. The first thing to pop into your head is probably not something along the lines of "god is punishing me" or "evil demons have destroyed my tv." No, you're probably (no matter how religious you are) bound to come up with a physical, natural explanation. The batteries in the remote might be dead, so you switch them from your DVD remote and see if they work. They don't, so you switch them back into the DVD remote to make sure THOSE aren't dead either. When in the DVD remote, they work fine, so it's not the batteries. You attempt to turn the TV on with the power switch on the front but nothing happens. You think the TV itself may have died, but there are other things to check first. You look behind the TV and notice that the plug had merely come out of the socket. You plug it back in and the world as you know it returns.

We have all probably done something like this before. And guess what? You were doing science! You (very quickly) created hypotheses and tested them, looking for results. Why is it easy to think critically in this situation and not others? The easy answer is that the results are instant. With the concept of prayer, you have to wait. And when you have to wait for as long as you do, such as for God to send you a husband, or for your depression to go away, or to get a promotion at your job, then you really have no way of telling if it worked. But, you may remember that you prayed about it. And when you credit prayer, you ignore the fact that you may have done hard work and earned the promotion, that serendipitous circumstance led you to your latest love, or that the medication you're taking is actually responsible for your good mood. In this sense, prayer is antithetical to understanding our world, because it robs us of actual explanations.

So whenever I hear someone say, "Stop making me think!" because I am pointing out their inconsistencies, it makes me sad. It could be that they're a biblical literalist and yet they claim to support gay rights - you can't have it both ways. Or when someone writes that they "don't trust science" from a computer whose technology could not have been built without thousands of scientists doing their job every day. Or when my friends with PhD's--whose job it is to think critically--tell me that they see psychics.

I'm not going to stop making you think, because I believe it is the most important thing you can do.

Slut Shaming and Why It Needs To Stop

What is slut shaming? It is a very simple and subtle thing that many of us do without even being aware of it. It is the process of making women (and men) feel bad about their sexual choices. Often it's the word "slut" or its many synonyms used in conjuncture with a derogatory comment or tone. As in,

"Look at what that girl is wearing, what a slut."

When that is said, several implicit assumptions are made:
1) Girls who wear more "revealing" outfits are "sluts"
2) Being a slut is a bad thing

So let's get a working definition of slut then, since it would be impossible to call it a bad thing if we don't even know what one is!

The simplest definition I can seem to find is someone who has an open sociosexual orientation. This means that they are open to the idea of having sex without being in a committed, monogamous, romantic relationship. Now, most people seem to agree on this definition. But here's the problem: most of us then, by definition, are sluts. What?! How can this be? Sluts are a terrible awful no-good very bad thing... right?

The word "slut" is pejorative, meaning that it can have positive or negative connotations depending on the group that it is used in. A good way to think about this is to talk about America's other favorite set of pejorative words.

In the middle school years, kids are prone to use words like "gay" to talk about things that they don't like. They might say, "this class is so gay," or "I hate this band, they're so gay," when neither the class nor the band contain any homosexuals nor homosexual behavior. Are these kids confused about the meaning of the word? No. If you ask them, they get it right. But when asked why they use the word like that, they'll probably shrug. Everyone knows that when they say something is gay it doesn't mean actually gay. Right. But if the connotation is that "gay" is a synonym for "things that are bad," suddenly this doesn't seem okay anymore. Most progressive teens start getting aware of this around high school and stop calling things gay. They even might call out others that use it, stating that use of the word in that pejorative sense is homophobic. What predicts this kind of pro-LGBT behavior? Knowing someone who is gay. That is why gay rights campaigns urge people to come out of the closet if they can. The single biggest aid to fighting homophobia has been the realization that, hey, lots of people are gay, and they're just people like the rest of us.

What does this have to do with slut shaming? Well, because when it comes to the word "slut," we're still in middle school. We know what it means, but we use it talk about people we don't like, almost exclusively women. In fact, when men are called sluts, it's usually in the form of the euphemistic "man whore." It is far more acceptable for men to be sexually promiscuous and open about their exploits than it is for women. So instead, we have lots of women who are sexually free in this sense, but they feel bad about their own behavior. They feel bad because we have taught them to feel bad. They slut shame themselves. This is because they're in the slut closet and don't want to come out into a world that disdains what they do. But where does this slut shaming come from?

There are evolutionary reasons why men and women have different sexual preferences and strategies. It our ancestral past, it was an adaptive strategy for women to be very choosy with whom they mated with. This was because they would bear the burden of carrying a child to term, being unable to mate in the interim, and then raising said child. So it made sense that women would care more: their investment was higher. Men invested a few minutes of work, and that was all they needed to pass their genes on.

The truth is that these behaviors are rooted in human nature, but reinforced by our society. Because we subvert human nature all the time. Why do we like to eat, often to the point of it being unhealthy? Because it was adaptive in our past to eat as much as we could because food was scare. Now we have obesity, an unintended side effect of this drive. Likewise, most of the sex in we have as a species in this contemporary age is not for procreation. But that's what sex is biologically for. It feels good because those who enjoyed it had more offspring, so we have a species that loves to fuck, and that most of the time is not thinking about having children.

Today we have a set of men and women who seem to police women who might not be as choosy about their sex partners. If you asked them why, they probably couldn't tell you. Evolutionary theory gives us some clues, but its not the entire story. The fact is that when people engage in slut shaming, they are not thinking, "Look at that silly girl! By not being more choosy about her sexual partners and waiting to invest in a man who will also invest in her, she is liable to make a mistake and possibly end up with a poor genetic recombination with a man who will not aid in raising the child!"

There are many dark, undesirable sides of human nature. The fact that it may have been adaptive to be misogynistic, xenophobic, and violent in our past does not mean that because they have some "natural" origin, that they get a free moral pass. We are able to evaluate behaviors in a way that we couldn't then. We are not bound by the chains of human nature; our society allows us to move past it, most people just never consider it.

The idea of taking the word back is appealing to some people. This is what happened with the gay community. Nowadays, you might hear someone describe their friend as "gay", and it will mean just that: that their friend prefers to engage in sex with people of the same gender. So could we do the same with slut? Could slut just mean someone that enjoys sex and doesn't need the restrictions of a traditional relationship to engage in it?

I want to now ask what I feel is the most important question of all: what, if anything, is wrong with being a slut?

I think the people over www.slutsunite.org get it right.

Most people would agree with what is written there. And then suddenly, given that, what's wrong with being a slut?

It's your sex life. As long as you are being safe, sane, consensual, then do what you want. Life is too short to feel bad about doing what feels good.