Ambigamy

This article is such great insight!

When I think of people I know who lean conservative, they do fit into the faith-abled group. In some ways I'm jealous their mindset lets them live with greater peace. Sometimes I believe I'm "tougher" to be able to face the doubt, the mystery, the unknown, and I feel the other mindset is inferior. I suppose it comes down to my basic belief that humans are fallible. And they always will be no matter how hard we seek the truth!

I think that my close friends and family with such certainty must need that certainty to continue in life? Maybe they wouldn't be able to function without it? Maybe it's their only option? We all connect to the beliefs that "sound right" to us. When some people hear something that sounds right, they jump on the bus and get a ride. Certainty simplifies things. And certainty makes the world black and white but I think it is shades of gray -- very complicated shades of gray! Unfortunately I don't think seeing so many different shades makes anyone happier.

This article makes it clear to me why I will never be able see things the way some people do. And why it is truly useless to debate them.

I can't help but wonder whether it is wise to let the faith-abled control things for too long at a time. It's true they can have an inspiring confidence and energy, but they seem to be unable to adapt quickly to sudden changes in life. That can result in speeding into a dead end at top speed. In these uncertain times, I can't help but question the wisdom in letting such people choose the direction we will go in at their seemingly reckless pace. Better to let faith-disabled people readjust the direction as we go along. But then again, I think I fall into the faith-disabled category, so that probably is a biased opinion.

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. - Eric Hoffer

Deep doubts, deep wisdom; small doubts, little wisdom. - Chinese Proverb

If I am sure that I cant be sure, isn't that self contradictory. How can one be Faith enabled about being faith disabled :)

I have thought about these differences quite a bit as I have pondered our dysfunctional political system. One of my theories is that people have differing levels of tolerance for complexity. As scientists, we can postulate that virtually any subject we care to study contains great complexity if we study it long enough and in enough detail. However, many people seem to become anxious or overwhelmed with too much complexity. It is like we each have a personality based "thermostat" that determines how much complexity we are comfortable with.

Faith can be the great simplifier. What could be simpler than deciding that the Bible or Koran holds all the knowledge we need to know? Meta-confidence may be simply a symptom driven by the fear that their whole simplistic world view will collapse if they allow a shred of doubt to creep into their belief system.

This is not to say that spiritual truths are necessarily a silly oversimplification of reality. Real spiritual growth and gaining an understanding of how spiritual issues impact mankind is a very complex undertaking.

I have absolute confidence, meta-confidence that the world is a better place when we embrace the differences between us and celebrate them. I have meta-confidence in my choices to love, to forgive, to show compassion in a true and meaningful way.

I would argue that the conservatives are not just faith-enabled, but the liberal is, too. The liberals, after all, often risk arrest, psychological and physical duress, and even their lives striving to stand up for those who are disenfranchised within a government that for a long part of its history catered to one religion, one race, one gender, one way of thinking.

It is easy to just voice one's opinion, to maintain the status quo and quite another thing to be motivated by the power of one's convictions to march against the majority. To risk one's life against the mob. To, even in the face of hate and bigotry and fear, put the flower in the gun. Stand against the tank. It is a disservice to the men and women willing to lay down their lives for change to say that they are faith-disabled.

This is ridiculous.

It sounds to me like a faith-abled person is operating at Robert Kegan's stage 3 (Traditional) and a faith-disabled person is operating at stage 4 (Modern) or higher. The prefix "meta" is a giveaway that you've moved something from subject to object. In this case you've moved ideals, values and other abstractions from subject to object, the step that separates stage 3 from 4. No longer are these abstractions a definition of one's self, and thus unalterable, but an object that can be manipulated and, if necessary, changed.

the only thing that remains the same is change...including any one human's discovery of the theory-of-everything.

whatever you are today, you will not be tomorrow...and neither will anyone else. And whatever construct you think will be, will not...if man doesn't change the shape of things to come, nature will and man will only be left adaption.

am I faith disabled? perhaps. your article was too thick to figure out exactly which definition you defined to what adjective since you basically described both sides of the same coin without reminding us that the coin is indeed ourselves and we each could be on either side at any given time, depending on whichever ongoing change we are arguing about: i.e. you just downgraded a human in the same fashion she downgraded other humans. Just because you one-upped her in front of your peers, does that make you better? Instead of seeing evolution in progress (mixed race couple against gay marriage); you are seeing deformity. Where is your allowance for the different learning stages and ranges of humankind? You allow for none and even the evolutionist is guilty of not seeing the forest for the trees. Where did that girl's parents stand on desegregation? Where will her (mixed race) children stand on gay marriage?

You're just lookin' at the "now" for reasons "they" are like they are, and "you" ("we") are not....jes like everyone else. Granted, you are much more erudite than Terry Jones but your mantra is the same ..."because its so different"... as they say. If they are not evil, they are disabled...in any case, they ain't right like we are.

Then again, if we humans weren't so good at making things up just cause we can, there would be no PsycCentral...and no --supposed--progress of man.

Quoting other mens' learned opinions and "standing on the shoulders of giants" in support of one's own opinion is getting really old when it becomes one big back-petting party. Nothing new under the sun, move along people, nothing to see here. Very herd mentality of you. You did get the memo that the sun is no longer revolving around the moon? Or that physics law are not universally applied in space?

So exactly what are you going to DO with this discovery? Other than label people with it? People whose lives you evidently know nothing about...red state, blue state bah.

I'm half a red and half a blue by birth and have spent 40 years watching this little diorama between real people that you supposedly just figured out ...some of us see the idiocy of belief, and where mis-communication occurs on both sides and you both are wrong and you both are right. But getting each of you to admit that and make friends is the impossible part. And neither of you is willing to listen to those that have one foot on either side of the fence because...well...we are uncommitted and that in and of itself is suspect. You read your own article on the three ways to deal with a bully re where you and Mr. Jones agree, right? There is a VERY fine line between tolerating/not tolerating, intolerance...are you SURE you know where it is?

All or nothing. You both are just as all-or-nothing as each other. Was a lot more tolerable when it stayed in the political field. Maybe this country should re-study the civil war time line and see if resurgent polarization is applicable in this day and time.

If so, you, dear Sir, are certainly having a hand in pushing the snowball over the mountain.

She had made condemnation of interracial marriage an examinable object to examine but hadn't universalized it to make condemnation of any marriage an examinable object.

uh huh. so did you:

make a condemnation of [conservative] political belief an examinable object to examine but haven't universalized it to make make condemnation of any [liberal] belief an examinable object...i.e. liberal belief is not "disabled".

Pot meet kettle, kettle meet pot. Ya'll got a lot in common.

Participant A: One can be sure. [that there is a spoon]
Participant B: One can't be sure. [that the spoon is a spoon]
Observer C: Actually I'm sure B is right. One can't be sure.

and then there is D:
There is no spoon.

Politically speaking here in France, we have more political party's than we can shake a stick at!

At least five parties to the right including the far right and at least six or seven to the left including the far left.

Not to mention a center party which claims to be neither left or right!!

Personally i believe we are all faith-enabled to a certain degree, just some people are more flexible in their beliefs.

Dogmatism and judgmentalism is the apanage of both the left and right i have found, sometimes more so to the left even.

Thanks for the thoughtful post.

Jeremy, thanks for sharing. I often read your posts, write out long answers, and then delete them. This is a response to both "Inheristance..." and "Faith..." I am not sure why you receive such snippy reactions among the comments; as if you do not have a right to take one side of an issue. I am conservative and appreciate your openness. What makes me "a conservative" and what I think is at the heart of most conservatives' orientation is the fascist, self-imposed responsibility for things that one has had no choice in; an acceptance that life is fundamentally unfair. This constant asceticism makes for very little sympathy for those unwilling to carry the same stone. This results in something like: "We are aware that life is hard and unfair, quit bitchin' and develop some character." Most of this is dressed in myths e.g. life is unfair because Adam sinned, human nature is inherently evil. However, much truth is contained beneath the "perfect word" of these myths. Much to the chagrin of so many 19th and 20th century liberal intellectuals, there IS a human nature and relative to civilization it IS broken and evil. Most conservatives believe this to be true but I don't know if it can be said that they "know" it. Most of our lives are now decided by factors our brains aren't built to deal with. We can throw a spear or work together in teams like no other species. But who has a holistic, emotionally adaptive grasp on compound interest? It took several millennia of literate civilization to figure it out and it's amazing that we did it in the first place. The emergent mechanics of industrial economies, known collectively as "capitalism," are difficult even for abnormally intelligent people with PhDs and decades of study. And what those experts tell us about those mechanics doesn't jive well with our instincts to share and cooperate with our tribe. Thus we have a cognitive bias away from the reality. I think that American conservatives tend to put their eggs in Heaven's basket and are thus slightly more psychically buffered from economic realities. It's easier for them to accept the failures of economic reforms and embrace the market. Life is hard and unfair, no? Why should economies be different? But all that mythical buffering leads to some far bigger delusions: Creationism, Climate Change Denialism, etc. It's unfortunate in my estimation that the Republican party has been overrun by religious radicals and hawks.
Wait... I acknowledge Evolution, GW, the universe's lack of deities, I'm pro-choice, for downsizing our defense expenditures, "faith-disabled" and I am a conservative?! Well, yeah... conservatism is accepting the fascism of responsibility so that you may reap liberty.

Thank you for taking the time to write it. I just got back from a month away and will come back to respond in more depth. I think I'll find plenty of resonance with your assumptions and will probably be able to show that resonance by citing some of my own articles in which I'm making a parallel case to yours targeted at the assumptions that have accumulated around liberalism. If you get a minute, I'd like to hear a little more about what you mean by the 'fascism of responsibility" How do you mean fascism? Especially as relates to common definitions of it. I'm guessing you're extending the definition a bit, like poetic license, which I employ pretty often. But how exactly do you mean it?

Thanks again.

Jeremy