Yet again I need to thank RMJ for steering my attention to William James using the same quote that I wrote about yesterday, about the school boy's definition of faith as believing in what you know ain't true, which the barroom atheist type will take as an obvious truth as they don't consider what any of the terms in the statement actually mean or that their understanding of those, if they bothered to consider such a thing as terms in their argument, would have to be considered in more detail that an immature schoolboy or a barroom atheist (these days so many of them holding PhDs, whether in STEMs or that debased thing called "the humanities" these days) would consider doing. Which is tempting to go into. But re-reading the essay, The Will To Believe, it early on contains these paragraphs:
THE next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion. When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions. When we look at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had once said its say. Let us take the latter facts up first.
Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our opinions being modifiable at will? Can our will either help or hinder our intellect in its perceptions of truth? Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else? Can we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars? We can say any of these things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in made up, --matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, and relations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us if we see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by any action of our own.
Only, today, in 2020, with what we're seeing in the Trump phenomenon, similar phenomena in Europe and Britain and elsewhere under the influence of modern culture, no, people choose to believe all kinds of things they want to believe even with the most obvious of evidence right there in front of them. They've been trained to disregard their experience of reality in favor of unreality as given to them on screens.
I think of the many things that the c. 40% of the American People claim to believe in regard to Trump and his Republican supporters even as the evidence that those are not true is right there, in plain sight, sometimes in immediate memory - often that belief comes in the form of immediately choosing to believe Trump didn't say something immediately after he said it as he chooses to pretend he didn't say it. It is clear from the broadcast testimony of so many of Trump's cabinet members, other hires of his, his nominees for the judiciary and other posts that they have been coached if not trained to do that in sworn testimony and the Republicans in Congress, House and Senate, those in the mass media will reflexively act as if the "matters of fact" which couldn't possibly be more immediate to their experience of minutes or seconds ago, are not there for not only themselves to have seen but for millions to have seen simultaneously.
That very sense of reality, what seems is an ever more quaintly experienced thing in a quickly fading past, a lost age of not only the possibility of something being true but also of it being real, has dissolved as a reliable feature of human culture and human experience.
I can't believe that is unrelated to the enormous percentage of the time of the average American spent in televised or broadcast or online or sitting in front of some screen non-reality, in the chopped up magical rearrangement of scenes and acts and locations and special effects.
I have mentioned the rather extraordinary phenomenon of us having now had two Republican presidents who were products of Hollywood, both of them pretty awful presidents, both of them adored by a fandom that surpassed the stage of irrational adulation, both of them with the support of the "news" media in ways that the most popular and even admirable Democratic presidents and politicians are never the subject of.
I remember the Kennedy mania of his administration, most of us will remember the faint echo of that for the first months of the Obama administration, but it was nothing like the enduring support that the legend of Reagan was and still is given.
With Trump, admittedly, more of the media, or at least some of the reporters and onscreen figures, have reacted to his destruction of the fabric of reality as the chickens they, or, rather, their corporate owners hatched have come home to roost, but the fact that that revolt against the Hitlerian-Stalinist manipulations of not only the truth but reality itself isn't close to 100% is as obvious as the thing Trump or his insider press and media whores deny he said less than a minute ago. The excuse that they don't want to upset the 40% of those who do, every day, what to William James and David Hume was unimaginable, is just an excuse. They know that the owners of the media, the advertisers, etc. are in on the theft and pillaging that is the motive for the entire thing and they know they will be crushed if their support of reality goes too far.
One of the things that has helped me to understand this is the fact that none of what we believe we know objectively, even the most primitive facts of arithmetic have to be believed as an act of willful acceptance on the basis of our experience. When that experience is superseded by a constant diet of televised or online unreality, that unreality will be the basis of what we choose to believe. As I've mentioned before, the schoolboy Bertrand Russell eager to discover the path to absolute truth he'd heard Geometry was was appalled to find out that in order to take that road, you had to just believe in the primitive axioms of it and he spent a fruitless number of years along with his teacher trying to find an absolute and objective truth on which to build mathematics only to have a more gifted logician demonstrate that such a thing is not to be had. I think we all, before we considered it or thought about it to then be remembered, recapitulate that needed step in our own lives.
But the sense of reality that could do that was a reality formed by our direct experience of the real, of what really happened around us, that is clearly damaged by a modern media environment and a large percentage of people will not successfully work around it. In the United States, the age of Trump shows that about 40% of the population cannot work around it to discover a reality that they will or can will to believe.
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And then there are those for whom "reality" is a brand name. As seen on TV and online.
As I've said many times here, the pop-atheist hankering after "objective truth" is really only a notional club slogan than something they really pursue. I don't think most of them have any idea of what such an "objective reality" would have to be. I don't think they'd care to think about that too hard else they fall into the despised activilty they derisively disdain as "philosophy". Most often "objective reality" as advocated today means the common received point of view of the modern, secular, scientistic materialists - and such it has been since the so-called "enlightenment" and its decay into late 18th and 19th materialism and a stream of often ahistorical myths and bromides. The pages of Skeptical Inquirer and the rest of the claptrap that the huckster, the late Paul Kurtz published or promoted is a good place to find an inclusive, though not necessarily exhaustive list of those. If you're typically lazy as the TV and media trained champions of that "reality" are and don't care about even much of a pretense of scholarship, you can go to The James Randi "Educational" Foundation and that most misnamed of things, "The Skeptic's Dictionary". Such "skeptics" are not ever in doubt of anything and they never investigate anything. In a way they're not that much different from Trump's dangerous 40%.
That's the kind of thinking the cynical aphorisms of Pudd'nhead Wilson presaged, that Twain promoted in his support of "free thinking" as mentioned here yesterday. I suppose we can't fault Twain for not being able to understand what those would become as the minds that contained them were trained by TV, Hollywood and the commercial hucksters of pop culture - though he had a really good handle on its pre-electronic forms as seen on the shores and riverboats of his youth, he, himself, fell for it when he put all his money in that invention.
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