| 3.1 I have tried in the introduction to argue about the evidential and logical basis of credulity. Any educated contemporary human has a lot of common sense evidence for some of what he ‘knows’; and either directly or indirectly has good scientific authority for a lot more. He also has good reason to trust a vast amount of reported information - for example guides to growing clematis, or to servicing cars, or to filling in income tax forms. or to choosing good investments. Roughly, and within limits the daily news is also reliable in a reasonable ‘democracy’. This kind of ‘knowledge” is not in question. Close to such ‘knowledge’ are a mass of beliefs about health, food, social relations, which rest on a mixture or trusted authority, apparent evidence and logic, some valid some fallacious some in between. To these, the arguments of the Tylor kind apply. People believe because they think logically on the evidence which they suppose to be available to them. In my terms, humans are inveterate fantasises, and invent innumerable models of reality, most of which simply never get very far. Many such ‘models’ fit reality in one way, but do not in another. And very very often more than one model is plausible in a given complex situation. So there is a great deal of room for different individuals and different societies to invent plausible ideas about their experience of their world. Logic and evidence are vitally important to all such ideas ‘models’; but only in rigorous science are they solely and finally ‘determining’. But most of the knowledge of any one human is derived from the authority of others. Babies have no choice but to learn from their parents, and older children learn minute by minute from all the people round them. All knowledge is social; what is obviously stored in individual minds is derived from and shared with other people. I go further in two ways. First, human knowledge is not equal. Individually, no two people can ever be equal in knowledge - always one knows differently form the other, and almost always one’s knowledge is clearly better than the other’s. Socially, people whose cognition is shaped by more powerful and open societies know on average and in general better than people shaped by less wealthy and less knowledgeable and more repressive societies. I hate the words ‘modern’ and ‘global’, because they carry such obfuscating rhetorical power. But in this modern global world, it is true that better educated people, most of them in the richer countries, do have access, mostly indirect access, to knowledge on a previously undreamt of scale, and knowledge of a more effective and better tested quality than any in any previous age; and that this knowledge |
| to the point of being meaningless. And if anyone takes thought to spell out a few of the possible testable statements which this metaphor could be held to mean, it becomes obvious that for many prisoners, and for almost all non-prisoners, prison does have effects which could be called “working’, and a large number which are damaging or hideously unpleasant, or both. But we heard it from the media and the politicians with almost no serious analysis; and its success has had at least some dire social effects. Equally, the death of Diana provoked a huge amount of plainly unverifiable or false nonsense. My twelve year old granddaughter remarked, - like a lot of other people, “ They obviously made all this up so they can hide her away” The BSE crisis likewise. There are dozens more examples. But to avoid totally disembodied ethnography, I take two more. 2.3. I use my memories of witchcraft, especially Evans-Pritchard. The variety of ideas and specific ‘knowledges’ about ways in which persons can secretly and malevolently bring evil on others, either by special inherent powers, or by performing rites, is very large. Anthropologists and others - historians, journalists and ‘ordinary’ western English speakers - use the word ‘witchcraft’. A good example of a word with more than one core meaning and massively fuzzy boundaries in all directions. 2.4. Religion. For this word, multiply the range of core meanings and the fuzziness of the boundaries many times. Moreover, human religion seems to me a puzzle to beat all puzzles. But I take (well I don’t as it turns out) Anglican Christianity, because since it is my own religion, much maligned already, and tolerant. I am unlikely to get a fetwa against me for discussing it. All the same, I am, interestingly, extremely reluctant to say publicly that, in any serious literal sense, the doctrines of the Creation, the Fall, the Virgin Birth, the Divinity of Jesus, the Resurrection, the Atonement, the Trinity, the Divine Authority of Scripture, are all totally implausible. People can, and do, in large numbers, fall back on giving them a non-literal symbolic interpretation; and the ideas of the universe created by the God of Love, of ultimate beneficent providence, of a personal unseen friend total every morning, of infinite forgiveness, of turning the other cheek, of loving one’s neighbour as oneself are all, to me and the Vicar of Dibley, immensely appealing. Moreover I find the familiar rites consoling, beautiful, and even uplifting. But alas non credo, quia absurdum. But billions of humans do. 3 Why are people credulous? |
| Ataturk and the Kemalists totally transformed the new state. Not only HERE did they immediately change the constitution , the whole system of law and judicial institutions, the whole system of education, the script and the system of government., they set about changing the language, and radically rewriting the state’s history, and proclaiming the unity as Turks of the whole population within the new frontiers , - which had been decided by the accidents of war and diplomacy. Two processes seem to have been involved. The ruling intellectuals themselves, the inventors and imposers of these changes, made apparently very little effort, - and certainly no successful effort - to argue about the ‘objective truth’ of the new ideas. They were defined as modern as nationalist and therefore true; and the political authorities saw to it that they were not effectively challenged in public. Since 90% of the population was illiterate, the new nationalism and the new history could be taught to the next generation of literate children with no alterative rival source of information. So this version of history is now common sense orthodox knowledge to all but a very few cynical and radical Turks. It is full of questions; yet everyone knows that it is true. The official Language Foundation, also set up around 1927, set to work to eliminate as many Arabic and Persian words from the standard Turkish vocabulary as possible. Scholars sat down and made up words on Turkish roots, or borrowed and changed words from Asian Turkic languages, to replace established imported words. This enterprise has been highly successful. Contemporary children find the Turkish of the 1920s incomprehensible - Ataturk has to be translated - and even the Turkish of 1950 is difficult and old fashioned.Two paradoxes; this language is fiercely defended by most Turks as modern and nationalist, and it is universally known as true Turkish - 0z Turkce. The overall amount of ‘social knowledge’10 - the totality of ideas and information circulating in the communities and networks of the 65 m. Turks in 1998, is astronomically more than in 1927. But the new ideas and information contains a huge amount that is unproven or downright false. Some of this is passionately believed. Why do people passionately espouse huge amounts of new knowledge which is not supported by evidence and logic? Credulity? 2.2 Such credulity is perfectly normal, as I have said. One example which especially maddens me; the slogan of Michael Howard - “prison works” (deafening applause). The phrase itself is imprecise |
| 10 Stirling Forthcoming 1999 |
| ‘ knowledge’ or ‘belief’. 1.9 Why relativism? I had hoped to use these arguments to explain why relativism is plausible, and why highly intelligent colleagues are capable of espousing in all seriousness (and sometimes with a nauseating air of intellectual and moral superiority) an all out relativism which ethnographically is palpably false, and is philosophically absurd. But I have only succeeded in alluding to this puzzle. 2. Examples 2. Intro All this has so far been an attempt to clear the ground. The messiness of the customary range of uses of the words ‘reality’, ‘truth’ , ‘knowledge” and ‘belief’ provide a splendid example of the endless and unproductive confusion caused by our social science vocabulary. I plead guilty to feeling strongly that credulity is worth discussing on two grounds , which we all confuse. First, it is surprising, and its causal connections - its causes and results - are puzzling. But second, it makes me irrationally angry, partly because it is exploited by the powerful, and also because a great deal of human misery; but also from a kind of absurd Enlightenment Protestant indignation. Perhaps unnecessarily, I am giving some examples of human credulity out of thousands which I could have used, were I more of a scholar. 2.1 Turkey The triumph of Kemalism in Turkey, and the commitment of non literate villagers, the urban middle classes and the European educated elite intellectuals to an implausible ideology invented almost in its entirety since about 1890, and mostly in the 1920s, I have long found astonishing and puzzling. For social, moral and political reasons, I have soft peddled my reactions. In 1923, Turkey became a sovereign nation state, the successor to the Ottoman Empire. This brand new state owned a territory that had been the core of the Empire, and was ruled over by people who had been its elite, began life with its laws and institutions, including the ‘millet’9 system. It even inherited its international debts. |
| 9 The ‘millet’ under the Empire were originally religious (no suitable noun) ‘communities’ which because they had had their faith, orthodoxy, also rand their own education, and their own law. They were all subordinate to Sunni Islam, but enjoyed a degree of autonomy. The system was complicated., and broke down from around 1900 on with European ideas of egalitarianism and of nationalism. |