Dear Friend,
About belief, well, I think we’re making it all up. All of it. And we humans are good at it. Back in Nevada City, California, I made the acquaintance of Peter Collier, past Editor of Ramparts, recent publisher of Encounter Books, past left-wing activist, current right-wing activist, who, by his own testimony, was really out there on the far left, but then he changed his mind, transformed himself, and moved over to the far right. But he was entertaining and, as with David Mamet’s article in the Village Voice piece about his transformation from when he was a “brain dead liberal,” it was kind of fascinating to see “how he rolls.” Mamet’s article was too full of hyperbole for my taste, but, yes, “common ground” can be found, as he suggests at the end of the piece, around the company water cooler. Because that’s where we have to get along because we have to get some work done, and politics and religion are not about “work.” They are about beliefs. And beliefs, for me, turn out to be, maybe, matters of taste, or clever guidelines for controlling the populace (patriotism, taxes), or for acquiring power and riches (salvation from guilt, religious tithing), or, for some, like those who rendezvous in secret in public bathrooms, camouflage. And perhaps, after all, in the final analysis, beliefs are simply one’s “gang colors.” Furthermore, I might go on to suggest that beliefs are the verbal clothes we dress up in to justify our public persona, or perhaps conceal the hidden agendas we hide from ourselves. But they do not define a person. Good or bad behavior defines a person. Republican or Democrat, atheist or Catholic, good or bad people can be found wearing those “gang colors.” Which is not say that actions are not informed from beliefs, they are simply faux justifications. The sniper hiding out in the bushes in front of a birth control clinic, or the communist who spies on his fellow workers for the good of the party, or the suicide bomber who blows himself up in the marketplace, or the Christian racist who bombs a church and kills four black children, does not act from belief alone. People are, as Sartre might say, doomed to be responsible for their own actions, even when they did not understand what they were doing. It is an irreducible fact that no matter what society one lives in, and no matter what belief system one has adopted, one cannot escape from one’s own actions. And that’s the good news and the bad.
Warmly,
Charles