When Our Premises Differ From Our Beliefs, Part II

In Which I Assume The Absolute Sincerity Of Everybody

Jean, Daisy and I recently returned from a 3-week journey across the country and back. During our wonderful week on Islesford (Little Cranberry Island), where the view from our cabin’s porch looked across to Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park, I stumbled on an unassuming book, with a foreword by Edward R. Murrow, entitled ‘This I Believe.’

Compiled during the early years of McCarthyism, 1952, the book consists of 2-page testimonies of personal belief by one hundred men and women. Many are famous for a variety of reasons; some are just ordinary folks, like you and me. But let’s start with Murrow’s foreword. While it’s tempting to quote long passages from his words, I will restrain myself and relate what I consider his main points.

First: “The only way of discovering what people believe is to ask them. We have discovered in preparing this series of statements that most people have never attempted to reduce to writing what they believe and why. Almost without exception they have told us that this is the most difficult piece of composition they have undertaken - to say, in a few hundred words, what they believe to be the important and permanent landmarks they have found in their journey so far upon this minor planet.”

The next is mindblowing, considering today’s technology: “There was also a time when the writing of letters was an art so well developed that some of the letters were worth keeping and later being published between covers. But the speed of modern communications has largely turned conversation into assertion, and letter-writing into telegrams. The reporter and the listener are overrun and smothered, trampled down by the newest event before they can gain perspective on the one that just passed by. It has become a cliché to say that modern man has been debased and materialized by the circumstances of his daily life.” Remember, he wrote that in 1952!

He continues: “There exists a real danger that the right of dissent, the right to be wrong, may be swamped because the instruments of communication are too closely held. We face the risk of forgetting that today’s minority may become tomorrow’s majority, and that every majority in a free society today was not so long ago a minority.” Sound familiar?

“Dewey Defeats Truman!” : “We almost came to believe that the hopes, the fears, the prejudices, the aspirations of the people who live on this great continent could be neatly measured and pigeonholed, figured out with a slide rule. As individuals we didn’t count; we were just little dots on a graph.”

And finally: “ At a time when the tide runs toward a shore of conformity, when dissent is often confused with subversion, when a man’s belief may be subject to investigation as well as his action, we have thought it useful to present these brief statements by people who have attempted to define what it is that they believe.” Now I understand Murrow’s iconic sign-off: “Good night and good luck.”

Along with many of you, I have spent countless hours thinking about what I believe, and the last few years have seen several dramatic shifts in both the premises I hold and the inevitable changes in my thinking that those evolving assumptions have created.

None has been more difficult and complicated than assessing ‘sincerity,’ both my own and that of others. Like it or not, we all have been battered around by countless forces that have shaped how we see the world. And trying to ferret out all of those influences to arrive at beliefs and opinions that are devoid of their effect on us, both emotionally and intellectually, is an impossible task.

At long last, I have found what is for me (today) a workable compromise. Rather than succumb to the fate of Sisyphus, forever pushing that boulder (being quiet) up the hill, I will make every effort for the more thoughtful, and forgiving, me to hold more sway. In other words, for our present purposes at least, I will assume absolute sincerity on the part of everybody. Am I up to the challenge?

‘American Exceptionalism’ has had a long, ever-changing history.* It has been proclaimed by a wide variety of people who have occupied the entire political spectrum, from de Tocqueville (1835) to the General Secretary of the CPUSA, Jay Lovestone (1927), to Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church.

Regardless of the proposal’s source, a common thread has always included the idea that the USA is ‘unique,’ that our Great Experiment is without equal. There is undoubtedly truth in such a claim, although much of that truth is hardly a cause for celebration. Uh-oh, here come those ‘weeds’ we want to avoid.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

Something on which nearly all of us agree is that our country is in trouble. Of course, after that we split off into dozens if not hundreds of explanations for our predicament. Therefore, we will remain as general as possible, as we look at how our premises differ from our beliefs. Back to ‘This I Believe.’

In entry after entry, the contributors say they believe one thing, or one set of things, but spend the overwhelming majority of their time engaged in activities that contradict those beliefs. Few if any of them seem to recognize that contradiction. Cognitive dissonance is nowhere to be found.

There’s General Lewis B. Hershey who bemoans the fact that, while learning everything from “how to make fire to learning how to fission the atom”, we have spent no time learning about ourselves. “Man must turn his eyes and interest inward.”

Nowhere in his testimony does he mention that he has spent much of his life pursuing interests involved in the taking of lives, of destroying ‘the enemy.’ Instead, he declares that “we dismiss it as unpredictable prior to the clash, or, afterwards, we declare the result to have been inevitable and expected by everyone. In either case we are denying our ignorance.”

Then there is James Q. Du Pont, an engineer by training and, at the time of his testimony, working in the Du Pont Corporation’s public relations department, presumably as its Head. While he doesn’t use the term, his premise about humans is the epitome of Social Darwinism, citing “the ‘frightfully radical duality’ between the brain and the beast in man - in all of us.”

Just as so many others, he ‘solves’ the contradictions that surround him by declaring that there is a God who, in his infinite wisdom “designed, constructed and operates this existence as we mortals know it: this universe with its galaxies and spiral nebulae, its stars and moons and planets and beautiful women, its trees and pearls and deep green moss - and its hopes and prayers for peace.”

General Hershey, quite accurately, says (in 1952, remember) that we know very little about ourselves, about how we function and why. Mssr. Du Pont tells us, by implication, that such knowledge is unnecessary, since the all-knowing God is fully in charge and will guide us through whatever difficulties arise, if we just have faith.

Aldous Huxley’s entry is a perfect answer to an oft-debated question; do the ends justify the means? Every member of a group, organization, or political party with passionate goals, especially when those goals are frustrated by present circumstances, has (or should) face this question honestly.

Full disclosure: At 19, my naiveté having been recently shattered, my answer

was a resounding, YES!

As I approach my 76th birthday, I don’t just agree with Huxley’s citing of Gandhi’s answer, I actually like it: “The means are the end in its preliminary stages.” This sentiment has been restated countless times over the decades. Perhaps the most well-known in the USA today is ‘be the change.’

Even here there is a problem. Since we are all unavoidably products of our environment, if we ‘wait’ until we successfully shed every trace of its toxicity before acting, we will never act. Therefore, as with so many issues, a compromise or middle ground must be found, or maybe not.

As I re-read these musings, I find that I have, once again, assumed that we humans have agency, that we are ‘in charge’ of the situation, and that therefore our sincerity or premises are crucial. Unfortunately, we do not have the last say in our fate. The Laws of Nature do, and our repeated attempts to ignore, alter or stomp on them only worsen our predicament.

So maybe I have misnamed this essay. Unless accepting the truth about our position is our main premise, and only a very few believe that, then both our premises and all that follows from them is misguided. Then the contradiction between what we say we believe and how we actually live our lives is meaningless, of no consequence. Sincerity is beyond irrelevant.

Either we (re)learn how to live in cooperation with all that surrounds us, or we go extinct. It really is that ‘simple.’ Peace.