Comment: The Nature of Belief, or Why Are Some People Republicans? Part One.

You really do wonder sometimes. You think we all — we Americans — agree on certain fundamental things, and then you see people contradicting those fundamentals. How can they do that? How can they believe what they believe? How can they possibly? And the question is genuine and poignant. It’s as if these people, neighbors and fellow countrymen, have been abducted and replaced with alien beings of some unknown sort. How can this be?

You get this sense when you look at pictures of lynchings. You see a throng of happy, smiling, nice-looking people posing for a group photo. It’s a picnic ground, and there are little boys and girls at their mothers’ knees. Everything is sunny and beautiful, except that there’s the mutilated corpse of a black man dangling from a tree in the middle of the frame. The victim will have been tortured before finally being killed. Fingers and toes cut off one by one. Teeth broken or pulled out with pliers, one by one. Ears, lips, nose, genitals cut off. And so on. Your mind reels. You understand psychopaths. The occasional psycho doesn’t cause confusion and bewilderment. But this is a whole community of people who look like ordinary, decent Americans. How could this possibly have happened? How could they have done this? How could they have believed and felt the things necessary to believe and feel in order to do this? How could they possibly?

(I’m trying only to evoke a sense of incomprehension and bewilderment. I’m not equating anyone with a member of a lynch mob, though I understand that someone who wants an easy way to be offended, and who has the requisite level of stupidity or intellectual dishonesty – a “journalist,” say – would say I am equating Republicans generally with lynch-mob torturers and murderers. I’m not. But now that you mention it, I do notice that the set of people who defend our torturing and killing of Afghan and Iraqi detainees are mostly Republicans.)

Back to the subject: There are moments when you feel a similar incomprehension and bewilderment about people with other beliefs about politics and religion. I see this bewilderment in the face of a conservative acquaintances when she talks to me, and I sometimes feel it when I hear Bush supporters dismiss criticism of Bush over such piffles as deceiving the country and, on the basis of that deception, taking us into a war which he prosecuted with mind-blowing incompetence. It can be hard to understand such people.

So what’s going on? How do people come to believe what they believe?

This is an impossible question, but it’s not pointless. It is possible to say a few things that are meaningful, though a satisfactorily full answer is impossible. I’ll try to say something about this in the next couple posts.