Don't Believe Everything You Think

December 30, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

SERMON: Don’t Believe Everything You Think

One of our favorite myths is that we are a rational species, for whom reason trumps emotion – at least in grown-ups. It’s hard to understand where such an idea came from – surely not from watching human behavior in politics, economics, religion, gambling or dating.

There are hundreds if not thousands of counterexamples, because what really drives us has very little to do with reason. You can probably all think of five or ten, and I’ll share some this morning. One of the more famous stories comes from the field of medicine from 160 years ago, and is a story every medical student learns.

In 1847, a physician in Vienna named Ignac Semmelweiss saw a pattern others hadn’t seen. He worked in obstetrics, and obstetricians both delivered babies and also did the autopsies on women who died in childbirth – without washing their hands. The mortality rate of women in childbirth was running between 10% and 30%, and he decided the doctors must be carrying something on their hands from the autopsies to the deliveries. So he made all the doctors working under him wash their hands in a chlorine solution, and childbirth deaths dropped dramatically. He tried to get other doctors to wash their hands, and was ridiculed because he seemed to believe in invisible agents, like demons, which was unscientific and didn’t fit the teachings of the modern medicine of the day. Still, women delivering babies were far more likely to come out alive in his hands than anywhere else in Vienna. You’d think that would count as enough empiracle data to at least try washing hands. But his idea didn’t catch on widely for several decades. I don’t know if anyone has tried to estimate the number of women who died needlessly during that time, but he is now known as “the savior of mothers.”

What’s going on here? These doctors were smart, and they were good people. They went into medicine to save lives, and I suspect all of them would have felt horrible if they believed they were actually killing their patients.

What’s going on is that a very different aspect of human nature is showing. It’s happened in science and every other field, probably forever. Thomas Kuhn wrote about some of this in his 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I’d still propose as the most influential book of the past fifty years. As long as scientists share the same paradigms and assumptions, he said, they can think very logically. But when they can’t agree on basic assumptions, they can barely communicate at all. Like whether there could be invisible agents on the hands of doctors capable of killing mothers, an idea Semmelweiss proposed more than a decade before Louis Pasteur had proposed his “germ theory” of disease.

But you don’t have to go to 19th century medicine. This is so deeply a part of human nature you can find it anywhere. Here’s a story that combines comedy and politics, then adds some neuroscience.

In 1960, the comedian Lenny Bruce watched the very first televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. He said he would be with a bunch of Kennedy fans watching the debate and they would be saying, “He’s really slaughtering Nixon.” Then he’d go to another apartment, and the Nixon fans would say, “How do you like the shellacking he gave Kennedy?” And then he realized that each group loved their candidate so much that a guy would have to be this blatant – he would have to look into the camera and say: “I am a thief, a [criminal], do you hear me, I am the worst choice you could ever make for the Presidency!” Yet if he did that, his followers would say, “Now there’s an honest man for you. It takes a big guy to admit that. There’s the kind of guy we need for President!” (Mistakes Were Made, p. 18).

Neuroscientists have recently shown that these biases in thinking are built into the very way the brain processes information. Three years ago, in a study of people who were being monitored by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while they were trying to process information about George Bush or John Kerry, researchers found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when participants were confronted with information that contradicted their biases, and the emotional circuits of the brain lit up happily when they heard information that supported their biases (Mistakes Were Made, p. 19). In other words, once our minds are made up, it’s hard to confuse us with the facts, because we’re often not even able to see the facts.

Some of these stories are pretty unbelievable. They must shock my own naive hope that we’re rational creatures, because I find that I don’t want to believe them. In the Dinka and Nuer tribes of the Sudan, for instance, there is a shocking practice that has gone on for many generations. They extract several of the permanent front teeth of their children. Apparently, this began during an epidemic of lockjaw; missing front teeth would enable sufferers to get some nourishment. If so, it once made some sense. But very few children ever got lockjaw, and for several generations now, none have. So why continue it? Because it evolved into something else. They’ve forgotten about the medical history, and convinced themselves that pulling teeth has an esthetic value. They turned it into a rite of passage into adulthood. “The toothless look is beautiful,” they say. “People who have all their teeth are ugly: They look like cannibals who would eat a person. A full set of teeth makes a man look like a donkey.” “We like the hissing sound it creates when we speak.” “This ritual is a sign of maturity” (Mistakes Were Made, pp. 23-24). Now I know some parents are thinking about your children and their tattoos and piercings, but forget it. They’re looking at you and wondering why your body didn’t matter enough for you to put some art on it.

Or we can move from body art to the body politic. One researcher took peace proposals created by Israeli negotiators, labeled them as Palestinian proposals, then asked Israeli citizens to judge them. The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposals attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposals attributed to the Palestinians. Think about this. If your own proposal isn’t going to be attractive to you when it comes from the other side, what chance is there that the other side’s proposal is going to be attractive when it really does come from the other side? (Mistakes Were Made, p. 42).

Closer to home, another social psychologist found that Democrats will endorse an extremely restrictive welfare proposal, one usually associated with Republicans, if they think it has been proposed by the Democratic Party, and Republicans will support a generous welfare policy if they think it comes from the Republican Party. Label the same proposal as coming from the other side, and you might as well be asking people if they will favor a policy proposed by a coke-snorting Taliban official. What’s more, none of these people believed they were being influenced by their party’s position. They all claimed that their beliefs followed logically from their own careful study of the policy at hand, guided by their general philosophy of government (Mistakes Were Made, p. 43). Yet their attitude of certainty has trumped reason, truth, and nearly everything else, and this seems to be as deeply a part of human nature as anything we have.

If we’re wrong but certain, and our brain doesn’t even let us see what we don’t want to see, we could do harm, feel no remorse, and not even want to make it right later if we had the chance. And there are plenty of stories from actual court cases like this from our rational species.

Many of you will remember the awful 1989 case of the Central Park jogger, the woman who was assaulted and nearly beaten to death. Five teen-agers were arrested, questioned for up to 30 hours straight, finally confessed and under coaxing, added details of what they did. They were sent to prison for life. Donald Trump bought a full-page ad in the New York Times, urging the court to give them the death penalty. Thirteen years later, a felon named Matias Reyes, already in prison for rapes, robberies and murder, admitted that he alone had done the crime. His DNA matched, and he provided details about the crime that no one else could have known. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office, under Robert Morgenthau, investigated for a year and found no connection at all between Reyes and the boys, and in 2002 a motion was granted to vacate the boys’ convictions. But the court decision was angrily denounced by former prosecutors in Morgenthau’s office and by the police officers who had been involved in the original investigation, who refused to believe that the boys were innocent. After all, they had confessed (Mistakes Were Made, pp. 128-9). Never mind the DNA evidence, or the fact that the boys had said after their confessions that after 30 hours of constant interrogations they would have said anything, they just wanted to go to sleep. It isn’t about being right. It’s about being certain. And we are often incapable of telling the difference.

The best known of the efforts to clear innocent people on death row is The Innocence Project, founded by Barry Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld. They keep a running record on their Web site of the men and women imprisoned for murder or rape who have been cleared, most often by DNA testing but also by other kinds of evidence, such as mistaken eyewitness identifications – and mistaken eyewitness identifications are involved in about 75% of false convictions: people who were dead certain, and dead wrong.

As of December 6, 2007, their site reports that 209 defendants previously convicted of serious crimes in the United States had been exonerated by DNA testing. Almost all of these convictions involved some form of sexual assault and about 25% involved murder (Mistakes Were Made, p. 3). This is good news! Besides setting innocent people free, it also means that now we might find the guilty ones who actually did the crimes. Or so you would think.

Here’s the part that’s hardest for me to accept. Of all the convictions the Innocence Project has succeeded in overturning so far, there is not a single instance in which the police later tried to find the actual perpetrator of the crime. The police and prosecutors just close the books on the case completely, as if to ignore the fact that they made serious mistakes that imprisoned innocent people and have let guilty people go free (Mistakes Were Made, p. 151). It isn’t about catching criminals or following facts. It’s about the almost supernatural power of certainty. They were so sure, they believed they couldn’t be wrong. But how much sense does this make? We are dead certain yet dead wrong a lot of times. Certainty is only an attitude, not a guarantee. The attitude of certainty is about us, not the world outside of our psyches. If I tell you something of which I am absolutely, without reservation, dead certain, you’ve learned something about me. Whether you’ve also learned something about the world we both live in is something you might want to check for yourself. This is why certainty is so dangerous, and national, religious or political ideologies are so deadly. If one person who is dead certain but dead wrong can do harm with a clear conscience, a large group who think alike can change history, sometimes in horrible ways.

Here’s an insight from an unexpected place, the memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s henchman Albert Speer: “In normal circumstances,” he wrote, “people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world, which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over” (Mistakes Were Made, p. 65).

That’s a pretty remarkable confession and insight. But doesn’t this describe the self-reinforcing certainty within political parties, scientific communities, religions, nationalisms, discussions of astrology, abortion, homosexuality or discussions among University of Texas alumni about their favorite football team?

There are many more stories like this, but what do we do with this? What does it have to do with us – especially us liberals, who like to think we are rational people and sometimes even imagine we might be the hope of the world?

Years ago, I heard a great scholar (Stephen Toulmin) explain the Atlas myth to an audience which, as I remember it, included graduate students and professors in religion, science and philosophy. “We must understand,” he tried to explain, “that the picture of Atlas holding up the world is not meant to answer the question “What is holding up the world?” Instead, it gives us a mental picture to reassure us on an emotional level that this world on which we live, die, hope, love, lose and try to think big thoughts, this world rests on shoulders that are not only strong, but also friendly to us. That’s what all our stories are trying to do: create pictures that can embrace us within comfortable certainties.” The same is true of our religious certainties, political certainties, nationalistic and racial certainties, and all the rest of them. It isn’t about truth, any more than it was for those obstetricians Dr. Semmelweiss tried to talk into washing their hands 160 years ago, or about the Kennedy, Nixon, Bush or Kerry fans, or the happily toothless tribes of the Sudan, or those who cover themselves with body art and those who are sure it’s a ridiculous idea. It’s about wanting and needing to believe that when we are absolutely, positively dead sure, we couldn’t possibly be wrong – especially if we hang out with others who share our beliefs. Because if we can’t trust that deep feeling of certainty, what on earth can we trust? I think this is a deep human dilemma, not a shallow problem.

My favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once said, “Remember that we stand on the world, but the world doesn’t stand on anything else.” Then he added, “Children think it’ll have to fall if it isn’t held up.” I think that’s a far more profound statement than it seems at first sight. Because like that scholar I heard explaining the Atlas myth – a scholar who had been one of Wittgenstein’s students – he wasn’t really talking about our planet. He was talking about the social, emotional and conceptual “worlds” we each live in: worlds that are finally held up not on the shoulders of Atlas, but on the shoulders of our own certainties, reinforced by the certainties of those who think like we do.

It looks like human nature is not built to seek and defend truth. After all, how would evolution have a clue what truth is? We are built to seek and defend an attitude of certainty, and to justify our opinions in the face of nearly everything that should snap us out of it. First we become certain, in a dozen different ways: from swallowing whole some ideology, absorbing second-hand beliefs, annexing our family’s or society’s biases and bigotries, reading some focused collection of authors (rather than others), and many other ways. But first, we become certain. Then we name whatever it is that made us certain, The Truth. Of course, there’s no necessary connection. Certainty is only an attitude, and has nothing at all to do with being right. But try telling that to thousands of years of persecutions in the name of religion, nationalism, race, culture, politics, and preference for particular soccer or football teams. Try telling it to doctors who waited for decades to begin washing their hands before delivering babies, to prosecutors whose behavior says they don’t care who really committed over two hundred rapes and murders if it wasn’t the one they convicted. Try telling it to billions of people who have lived their lives in fear of religious or political damnation.

We live within certainties that have become familiar and habitual. They define and bind our world and often our possibilities, in religion, politics, nationalism and a hundred other ways.

The philosopher of science who explained the Atlas myth once said that the way scientific thinking usually changes isn’t through a rational or scientific process at all. It mostly changes when the deans of top schools and editors of top scientific journals retire and are replaced by people who were educated under different assumptions and paradigms. Then different kinds of scientific articles are published in the leading journals, and different kinds of PhD theses are accepted by the most influential universities, and there has been a kind of scientific revolution. What’s this got to do with us? What all of this has to do with religious liberals, honest religion – and the scientific method, while we’re at it – is absolutely fundamental. That dilemma of identifying with the process that can question everything, versus the need to stand some place solid is the greatest challenge for human beings who want to take either science or honest religion seriously.

This is what is meant by saying that both the soul of liberal religion and the scientific method are a process, but never a position. The liberal spirit is the spirit that challenges an orthodoxy to make room for the truths that give us life. The minute we”ve chosen one and declared it to be true, we have created our orthodoxy, and then try to protect it from the spirit of liberal religion, which would question it, too. So we’re all friends of the spirit of liberal religion or science as long as they help us criticize the beliefs of others. But we’re not as eager to understand that once we”ve found our own orthodoxy, our own position of certainty, those same spirits must question our certainties.

You can tell that this is a subject we could talk about for weeks, and one that can lead into a hundred different directions, many of them very pertinent to the world we’re living in. And I will invest some time doing some sermons on these themes in the spring.

But for now, I have painted us – or at least I’ve painted myself – into a corner filled with questions more profound than answers, so I’ll end with questions:

If you can’t trust your certainty, or even the certainty of a group of people who agree with you, what can you trust? If honest religion can’t ever be grounded in absolute unchanging facts, how do we live with confidence? Are there some absolute unchanging facts? What do you think they are? If you can’t believe everything you think, what can you believe, and why? If you can’t share the certainties of your friends on important topics, do you think they’ll still be your friends? If you now thought they were wrong on fundemantal issues, for how long could they stay your friends if you had to work together on these things? If being certain has no necessary connection to being right, what does?

In some ways, this is like Cassandra’s dilemma in ancient Greek mythology. Apollo, the god women never liked, was after her. So he gave her the gift of prophecy; she could see and say what was going to happen in the future, and she would always be right. When that failed to soften her heart toward him, Apollo got angry. But there was some kind of rule that gods couldn’t take back gifts they”d given, so she still had the gift of prophecy. To get even, he added a curse. She would always see the truth and always be right, but nobody would ever believe her. Which would you rather be – certain, or right? Or are these really the right questions to be asking in an honest church?

Your move.

(NOTE: All page numbers are from Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) Why we Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

-[Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, 2007])