Symbolic Beliefs

Roger Berkowitz

I was recently in Mechelen, a small and incredibly lively and liveable city in Belgium, to speak to a group of mayors from the European Union about diversity and polarization. Belgium presently occupies the rotating presidency of the EU and they convened this meeting in Mechelen, the city whose Mayor Bart Somers has been internationally recognized with the World Mayors Prize for his extraordinary efforts to facilitate mutual understanding between immigrants and the local population. Mechelen is also home to one of the more active Hannah Arendt Institutes around the world, a group dedicated to bringing Arendt’s thought into the world of policy. 

My address to the European mayors in Mechelen made three points. First, Polarization is not necessarily something to be feared and derided. Some level of deeply held and opposed beliefs is fundamental to plural and diverse human societies. Polarization understood as meaningful differences of opinion is central to humanity. Second, while polarization can be dangerous, it only becomes dangerous when our politics fails. Diversity today poses a serious challenge to a politics of common sense not because of polarization, but because, at least in the short term, diversity has broken down the institutions and norms that underlie a healthy politics. Finally, politics is based on talking with one another in ways that nurture a common sense. Common sense is not what all people believe. It is the product of what Arendt calls an enlarged mentality, thinking from the perspectives of others. A healthy politics needs institutions that develop common sense. These institutions can vary at different times and different places. Some can be more authoritarian. Others more from the bottom up. At times of mistrust and skepticism and cynicism, we need to reimagine our institutions from the bottom up. 

In making my first point about polarization, I relied upon a recent essay by Manvir Singh. Singh argues that we make a mistake insofar as we believe that our present polarization is rooted in misinformation. Many today argue that misinformation is the great problem undermining democratic societies, that, as Sander van der Linden has written, ““viruses of the mind” disseminated by false tweets and misleading headlines pose “serious threats to the integrity of elections and democracies worldwide.”” Misinformation theorists suggest that people are gullible, that they easily believe propaganda and misinformation, and that this misinformation is corrupting our politics. 

One problem with this worry about misinformation is that it overlooks that there is misinformation all around us and on all sides. The problems we face are not from misinformation, but that certain misinformation is more persuasive than other misinformation. As Hannah Arendt argued in Origins of Totalitarianism, there are many forms of propaganda and there are many ideologies. But antisemitism and Bolshevism were the  two ideologies in the 20th century that were successful and persuasive as political weapons. We need to ask, Arendt adds, why these ideologies were so popular and malleable so that they could be used for various political goals including totalitarian domination. 

The theory that misinformation underlies our current polarization rests on the assumption of gullibility, that people have a natural tendency to believe what they read and what they hear. But many of those who partake in conspiracy theories holding that 9/11 was an inside job, that President Obama was not born in the United States, that Russia was behind the election of Donald Trump, Jews are the true powers behind the economic and political system, and that a cabal of high-level pedophilic Democrats controls the country, are people who pride themselves on their skepticism. These are people who reject information given by certain sources and believe information given to them by other sources. The problem behind the rising appeal of conspiracy theories cannot be misinformation. 

Singh argues that instead of action following misinformation, it is more accurate to say that “beliefs, even fervently espoused ones, sometimes exist in their own cognitive cage, with little influence over behavior.” Catholics “believe” that the sacrament embodies the flesh of Christ in a wafer. Jews “believe” that Messiah will come. Muslims “believe” that the Qur’an was dictated literally by Allah through Mohammed. And the Dorze people in southern Ethiopia “believe” that “the leopard is a Christian animal who observes the fasts of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.” None of these beliefs mean that Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and the Dorze are incapable of distinguishing belief from reality. The Dorze farmers still guard their livestock on fast days just as much as on other days. This is “Not because [they] suspect some leopards of being bad Christians,” “but because [they] take it as true both that leopards fast and that they are always dangerous.” 

Singh writes that we can understand how beliefs can be isolated in their own cognitive cage by distinguishing factual and symbolic beliefs. “factual” beliefs. Factual beliefs—such as the beliefs that leopards are dangerous, that a virus is highly contagious, and that vaccines and masks can help prevent a public health crisis—address actions in the real world. But there are also  “symbolic” beliefs. These beliefs are core to our identity, they originate not in facts but in feelings. We can believe, Singh writes, that God is all-powerful and good while allowing for the existence of evil and suffering. We can worry that vaccines will sicken us even as we know that they in general improve public health. Symbolic beliefs, meanwhile, largely serve imaginary, symbolic, and social ends. We hold symbolic beliefs not because they are factually true, but because they support our need to belong to a certain identity, to see ourselves as part of a group, a religion, or a movement. And we can hold symbolic beliefs even in the face of contradictory evidence. 

Studies have shown that even when people hold symbolic beliefs, they retain the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. There are sizable differences in how Democrats and Republicans think about politicized topics, like, for example, what happened on January 6th or the number of casualties in the Iraq War. But paying respondents to be accurate, which includes rewarding “don’t know” responses over wrong ones, can cut the partisan differences by eighty per cent. Conservatives may accept the truth of false headlines, but they are less likely to do when they are compensated for saying what is actually true. Singh’s point is that misinformation does not lead to false beliefs. Rather, we all have an interest in symbolic beliefs that speak not to the factual world but to our identity, our sense of ourselves. That is why misinformation is more of a symptom than a disease. 

The underlying disease is a profound sense of loneliness and purposelessness that feeds a need to believe symbolic beliefs to give ourselves a sense of belonging and connection. In order to understand the deep human need to believe symbolic truths, Singh reviews a series of scholarly books that is traced back to Dan Sperber. He writes:

The paradox of belief has been the subject of scholarly investigation; puzzling it out promises new insights about the human psyche. Some of the most influential work has been by the French philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber. Born into a Jewish family in France in 1942, during the Nazi Occupation, Sperber was smuggled to Switzerland when he was three months old. His parents returned to France three years later, and raised him as an atheist while imparting a respect for all religious-minded people, including his Hasidic Jewish ancestors.

The exercise of finding rationality in the seemingly irrational became an academic focus for Sperber in the nineteen-seventies. Staying with the Dorze people in southern Ethiopia, he noticed that they made assertions that they seemed both to believe and not to believe. People told him, for example, that “the leopard is a Christian animal who observes the fasts of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.” Nevertheless, the average Dorze man guarded his livestock on fast days just as much as on other days. “Not because he suspects some leopards of being bad Christians,” Sperber wrote, “but because he takes it as true both that leopards fast and that they are always dangerous.”

Sperber concluded that there are two kinds of beliefs. The first he has called “factual” beliefs. Factual beliefs—such as the belief that chairs exist and that leopards are dangerous—guide behavior and tolerate little inconsistency; you can’t believe that leopards do and do not eat livestock. The second category he has called “symbolic” beliefs. These beliefs might feel genuine, but they’re cordoned off from action and expectation. We are, in turn, much more accepting of inconsistency when it comes to symbolic beliefs; we can believe, say, that God is all-powerful and good while allowing for the existence of evil and suffering.
In a masterly new book, “Religion as Make-Believe” (Harvard), Neil Van Leeuwen, a philosopher at Georgia State University, returns to Sperber’s ideas with notable rigor. He analyzes beliefs with a taxonomist’s care, classifying different types and identifying the properties that distinguish them. He proposes that humans represent and use factual beliefs differently from symbolic beliefs, which he terms “credences.” Factual beliefs are for modelling reality and behaving optimally within it. Because of their function in guiding action, they exhibit features like “involuntariness” (you can’t decide to adopt them) and “evidential vulnerability” (they respond to evidence). Symbolic beliefs, meanwhile, largely serve social ends, not epistemic ones, so we can hold them even in the face of contradictory evidence.

One of Van Leeuwen’s insights is that people distinguish between different categories of belief in everyday speech. We say we “believe” symbolic ones but that we “think” factual ones are true. He has run ingenious experiments showing that you can manipulate how people talk about beliefs by changing the environment in which they’re expressed or sustained. Tell participants that a woman named Sheila sets up a shrine to Elvis Presley and plays songs on his birthday, and they will more often say that she “believes” Elvis is alive. But tell them that Sheila went to study penguins in Antarctica in 1977, and missed the news of his death, and they’ll say she “thinks” he’s still around. As the German sociologist Georg Simmel recognized more than a century ago, religious beliefs seem to express commitments—we believe in God the way we believe in a parent or a loved one, rather than the way we believe chairs exist. Perhaps people who traffic in outlandish conspiracies don’t so much believe them as believe in them.

Van Leeuwen’s book complements a 2020 volume by Hugo Mercier, “Not Born Yesterday.” Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the École Normale Supérieure who studied under Sperber, argues that worries about human gullibility overlook how skilled we are at acquiring factual beliefs. Our understanding of reality matters, he notes. Get it wrong, and the consequences can be disastrous. On top of that, people have a selfish interest in manipulating one another. As a result, human beings have evolved a tool kit of psychological adaptations for evaluating information—what he calls “open vigilance mechanisms.” Where a credulity theorist like Thagard insists that humans tend to believe anything, Mercier shows that we are careful when adopting factual beliefs, and instinctively assess the quality of information, especially by tracking the reliability of sources.

Van Leeuwen and Mercier agree that many beliefs are not best interpreted as factual ones, although they lay out different reasons for why this might be. For Van Leeuwen, a major driver is group identity. Beliefs often function as badges: the stranger and more unsubstantiated the better. Religions, he notes, define membership on the basis of unverifiable or even unintelligible beliefs: that there is one God; that there is reincarnation; that this or that person was a prophet; that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are separate yet one. Mercier, in his work, has focussed more on justification. He says that we have intuitions—that vaccination is bad, for example, or that certain politicians can’t be trusted—and then collect stories that defend our positions. Still, both authors treat symbolic beliefs as socially strategic expressions.