I’ve just finished reading a great book: Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being by Agustín Fuentes. It’s a book about how our human ancestors evolved into us over millions of years, and how we are still evolving, particularly our ability to believe. Belief—coming to believe, having the capacity to believe, believing, and understanding why we believe—is a big part of what makes us homo sapiens.
Wondering why people believe what we believe is one of the biggest reasons I went to seminary over a decade ago. I always wanted to understand why things get stuck in our heads, and where those things come from. And, then sometimes, why does it feel like we can’t change it? Mostly I thought about the negative side of it: racism and hate—based on beliefs about people; or the terrible things we believe about ourselves and say to ourselves over and over again—I’m a bad person, I’m stupid, I’m a worthless failure.
But belief is so much bigger than that. It is actually an evolved human trait that has been essential in ensuring our species’ survival. We all have the capacity to believe, regardless of whether or not we place that belief in God or religion or anything else. I like this quote about belief: “It's commonplace to treat belief and faith as synonyms . . . but there are important differences.” Faith involves reliance and trust, and it endures in the face of doubts, whereas belief is simply something we take to be true.
Belief is simply something that we take to be true! True, despite no particular historical precedent, we just wanted to believe it; or maybe we received a flood of information about it and we decided it was enough to make us believe; or, maybe someone we admire or love or trusted believed it, and so we did too. Or, maybe, we were born with it*. Each one of these ways we might come to believe something is 100% valid, meaning, no matter the reason why we believe it, when we believe it: to us? It’s true. Period.
When we know something in our hearts is true, we usually act accordingly. In this way, belief functions as both a conjurer and motivator for us to change ourselves, or something in our environment. Belief enables us to use the knowledge and experiences we have gained from our environment and culture and the people around us and imagine new things. Maybe something that doesn’t exist. Maybe something you don’t already know. Maybe a different way of doing things. In this way, empathy is a sibling of belief because it gives us the ability to see outside ourselves, and into the experience of another—and the more you do this, the less self centered you become and the more others and community centered you become. You begin to believe other people.
The trouble with belief is not that, while it helps us do great things it can also make us do truly terrible things. The trouble with belief is that it was never meant to be static. It is an active trait, meant to help us navigate our environments, access our creativity, and connect with others. When our beliefs remain unchanged and unchangeable, we get stuck. We can’t fully become the people we were meant to become. We can’t change. We can’t evolve—and often, our static beliefs can keep other people from changing, too.
I’ll end with this: I used to believe that writers were drunks. That, in order to be a writer, you had to suffer, drink, and be broke, and no one would read your stories until you were dead. So, might as well hasten the journey. I honest to goodness believed it. If you had asked me back then if that is what I believed, I would have said no, because I didn’t realize it. I never thought about what I believed about myself and my life. But if you had a time machine, you would go back to the mid 1990s and see me sitting there, getting drunk at some cafe table, scrawling in a notebook some poem I would never be able to read the next day because my handwriting, which is already famously illegible, was even worse while inebriated. My life would have gone on that way if I did not get sober. With the people and my environment completely changed (I went to AA meetings, heard new stories, met new people, went to new church basements and rec centers) I started to believe different things about myself, and others, and so I could imagine a different path for my life.
Practice belief. Change your environment. If you’re stuck in your beliefs, even if you don’t know you’re stuck in them, the change will help you see it. Next thing you know, you might be believing all sorts of new and different things, fearlessly making the world better, because you will know, in your heart of hearts, that you can change your beliefs any time you want if they’re not working for you anymore.
—MBF
*I like to say I was Catholic before I was born, because my mother took me to church, took communion, prayed, filled her body with the sights, sounds, and smells of the mass from the moment I was conceived. I figured I popped out already believing.
As always your writing inspires.