Belief as identity

Just some noticings and speculations

It was probably 1971 and me and my contemporaries were 9 or 10.

I said: "I don't believe in decimalisation¹" and they all objected by saying that decimalisation was actually happening.

Two things about this are funny. One is that I was trying to be the copied and pasted version of my parents that they wanted. They were quite conservative in their fondness for tradition and discomfort with change.

The other is that it was a moment in which I realised the difference between believing that something is the case and believing in a principle.

The point here is that most of us don't start believing in principles for a while, whereas we're quite quick to decide which things we believe really exist in the world and which ones are stories or lies.  So at age 5 I believed in ghosts and God but I didn't believe or not believe in socialism or the scientific method.

As an avowed (if too often struggling) rationalist I'm more comfortable today with my beliefs in objects than I am in principles. I can see the screen in front of me right now and although there's no certainty that it exists anywhere outside my consciousness (whatever the heck that is) I'm cool with accepting that it's really there.

The beliefs I've developed scepticism about are the other sort.

Consequently, I'm in a process of jettisoning them, or at least trying to.

Call me a moral sceptic. This is not the same as having no values or adopting a nihilistic worldview. But that distinction is for another time.

The process began with the adoption of formal mindfulness practice 18 months ago. Dropping back to observe rather than be the thoughts that course through consciousness was a bit unnerving at first. They began to reveal themselves as chimera. Arbitrary chimera at that.

On reflection I noticed that I had constructed an identity around them. Instead of being (in the words of my best friend) 'just a bunch of biochemicals meandering to oblivion' I was a believer in things. Things that were good and right, of course. Things that if only everyone else believed them the world would be so much better for believing.

I have the relentless moral appraisal of speech online to thank, at least partly, for noticing this. People share a thought and are judged for it. The judgement is rarely limited to the thought or the idea expressed. It's of the person themselves. You think x and that makes you a somethingist, or a whateverphobe. You. Your identity is nailed as inseparable from that thought.

The people doing this evidently see themselves too as ists of various persuasions. They don't just think something. They are the thing that people who think that thing see themselves as. As ever, language is revealing here. I've lost count of the times I've said things like 'I am a socialist'. Rather than 'I lean towards ideas about more equitable distribution of power and wealth than we see in our present world'.

So, we identify as our beliefs and we identify others as their beliefs. When actually I can't think of a good reason to identify as anything other than what you do.

It was last November and I was scything my meadow at home when I suddenly thought 'you aren't what you think - you are what you do'.

Take an extreme example of this, as discussed recently in the episode of the Blocked and Reported podcast on paedophiles.

Are people who are sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children, but who never act on their urges, really paedophiles? Because that's what they think about? Are they really the content of their thoughts? Are you really the content of your thoughts? Or are you what you do in this world? I don't know, but it's worth thinking about the distinction.

This isn't me hinting that I have a sexual predilection for children of which I feel I can excuse myself because I don’t actually abuse kids.. But it is me hinting that I do have the kind of thoughts that would spark condemnation from many people. For example, such is my sense of the nature of Boris Johnson that when I reflected on the prospects of him dying from Covid-19 it was with some amusement.  Nor did I merely not care whether he pulled through or not. My thoughts were much less humane than even indifference to his suffering and possible death.

The gleeful phone catch-up with my best friend that would have marked such an event would mark us both out as sociopaths. When, in reality, we are actually just two people who are never going to kill Boris Johnson. Part of our doings in this world are not killing Boris Johnson. This is what I mean by the difference between being our thoughts and not being our thoughts. I think this too about people who wouldn't want a mosque being built in their neighbourhood. But who would also never go around abusing Muslim people.

The judgement of people for their thoughts, rather than their actions, seems confused to me. It essentially confuses mental states with physical states. Or maybe puts mental states above physical states in the hierarchy of things that most matter about us.

It also seems very ... controlling. Like the Catholic ritual of confession. Because, no matter how much you didn't touch your neighbour's wife or husband - and never would - despite finding them insanely attractive, the fact that you imagined it is a sin.

The distinction between what you think and what you do seems to be conveniently forgotten in this time of moral hyper-vigilance. And I suspect that it leads to personal confusion around identity. I suspect that we find ourselves adopting beliefs, even if we don't externalise them as actions, because we mistake them as bits of us. Bits of identity.

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Here's how I think we end up identifying with our thoughts. Confusing what we and others think with ours or their actual identity.

I picture being alive in a world with lots of stuff happening all around as like being adrift on an ocean. There's not much you can do, just floating there. So we grab onto objects that float within reach. They give us some kind of security and - before we know it - we start mistaking them as part of ourselves. Then we fear to let them go, unless there is another object that we can grasp onto. Some of us do it with relationships and I think that most of us do it with ideas and beliefs.

We do it because our sense of self can be uncomfortably incomplete without them. A job, a significant other, a child, a certain type of car or house, an opinion on the right way to handle the refugee problem.

I also wonder if this is why we’re so passionate about our beliefs and opinions at a young age. We’re trying to assemble an identity with them.

Another thought … isn’t this why arguments about these things so often end up angrily personal? Because isn’t it really quite irrational to be angry about someone holding an idea, unless you identify them with the idea?

But it's interesting to notice that ceasing to identify with one's own thoughts (or even absence of thoughts) seems (at least in my experience) to dial down the neuroticism that clouds your perception of who you really are. The feeling that there's a part of you missing when you skim past the celebratory LinkedIn post about someone's child you don't know having endured a year of chemo. Without feeling or even thinking anything, let alone reacting or offering condolences or congratulations.

I recommend playing with this. The concept of not identifying with your mental states and focusing entirely on what you do as the answer to what you are.

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Postscript.

Here's one of the pushbacks you'll get if you voice this idea. It's easy enough to flatten, using the familiar tools of our current cultural exigencies.

The difference between thoughts and deeds is an idle distinction. Articulating a thought that others don't like translates it into doing something.

I have now proved that you really are a Bad Person, for I am very good at reasoning.

Watch out for this, because it's how the notion that words are violence has taken root in many areas of public discourse.

You say you're just sharing a thought, well I'm telling you that your thought is HURTING people now that they potentially know about your thought.

Therefore YOU are hurting people.

You say that you are what you do, so you are a people hurter.

There you go. If you're fond of flattening a proposition, that's how you do it here.

And if you ran that argument yourself before even reaching this bit of the article, you'd probably do quite well on Twitter.

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In the previous edition I invited anyone who enjoys Rarely Certain to consider a paid subscription, as I’ll be making some posts subscriber-only from October 2021.

A reader wrote back to suggest something interesting. They said:

One option might be to continue with the 'free' service but instead of just giving it away you ask for time in the form of research. So maybe you set a question that a free subscriber has to answer before they get access. Maybe the answer is an explanation rather than a one word answer. One of the questions could be: what could be an alternative to money?

I like this idea. It won’t help me to pay for the new gate I need, the large dental bill I’m expecting imminently or put food on the table, but I’m always drawn to doing things differently.

Please get in touch if you have any ideas around what might constitute a fair exchange for this type of reading matter. Or any other reason you might want to be in touch about.

1. When Britain switched to a more sensible way of counting money, measuring and weighing things.

Picture credit: Gerd Altmann on Pixabay