Tales from the Steppes

2004-01-02

1:30 p.m.
to the left, ever to the left

I was rereading the Blue Duke's post on Opinion and Faith. This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart, or to be more precise in my choice of words, I contemplate a fair amount. The latest issue of the journal Parabola is about Truth and Illusion, which is another way getting to the same issue. (I highly recommend this journal to all. Even when the issue is about something that I think I am not particularly interested in, I find that by the end of my reading, I am fascinated by the topic.) When I was younger (and less of the P I am), I did not think I had faith in anything. Many opinions, but no real faith. I now believe that I was full of crap and that we all have faith in various things, mostly non-deity based. Otherwise we would have no particular world-view, no way to evaluate the input of our senses. The tricky thing is to _know and acknowledge_ honestly what our various faiths are.

We all have deep-seated biases that cause us to understand the world differently. I am not necessarily talking about the big biases people have - religon, sex, race and all that. The little ones will do just fine in differentiating us and the way we interpret things. For example, I believe that people are basically good and that no one is out to get me or anyone else. This is not a belief that is shared by all. In fact, many might consider it naive and an overly simplistic way of looking at life.

The above discussion was well illustrated on New Year's Eve at aforementioned party of doom. A friend of the Spousal Unit, whom I knew to be quite conservative, was loudly declaiming about Al-quaeda in Iraq and I dared to question him on the sources of his information. When he informed me that this information was correct because the US, British, German, and Russian intelligence communities said so, I questioned the accuracy of this data, given the track records of these intelligence organizations. He then rounded on me and informed that since I have such a different worldview than him, based on different assumptions, there was nothing to be gained by talking to me. After I got over my shock at his rudeness, I did realize that his comment did contain a partial truth. Yes, we do see the world completely differently. I do not see "the West" as being under attack by the Moslem world. I do not believe 9/11 changed everything. I also do not believe that we have nothing to learn from speaking to each other because of these differences.

This little exchange also highlights another aspect to the whole truth and illusion dialogue. Intelligence analysts make judgements based about the whole based upon a small set of data. Like the blind guys with the elephant. Of couse, the analysts have their own biases which cause them to evaluate the data in a given way. And it is usually a small part of the big picture. So how many lives are we willing to risk based upon this? And when you consider this, please include the combatant and "collateral" lives in the other country. They have just as much worth as yours and mine. But I guess that is just my own bias talking.