There's an essay by Ronald Aronson at Butterflies and Wheels that raises some interesting issues. The essay is entitled 'Choosing to Know', and in it Aronson poses a question and puts forward a thesis both of which I would like to comment on. I should emphasize that, so focused, my discussion of the piece is selective. It doesn't adequately register all that is of interest in what Aronson writes. You might like, as they say, to read the whole thing.
The question that interests me is this one:
[W]hy is our society awash in weird beliefs, which people embrace despite an absence of scientific support and against logic and evidence?
Aronson is referring here to the US, the rejection by many Americans of evolution, the widespread acceptance of Creationism, and belief in ghosts, UFOs, witches, astrology (a state of affairs, he says, that 'would make the Enlightenment weep'). But it's the general bearing of his question, rather than its precise historical instantiation, that I want to focus on. I'm wondering whether, as a general question, it is well formed.
What I mean by this is that it will make sense to ask of any particular weird belief, or category of weird belief, why it is that people hold it. But I'm not sure that asking in a general way why people hold weird beliefs - or, otherwise expressed, why they believe things that aren't true - can yield a single and satisfying answer. We think, as a rule, that it is a sufficient reason for believing something that the something is true. Where, on the other hand, we come across a person believing what we know to be false, we look for an explanation for their false belief. We might or might not find one. But even if we do, it won't necessarily be the case that this will be the same kind of explanation as the one that fits someone else's false belief on another matter.
Why does A believe that his son B is an honest person, when most of B's acquaintances know this not to be the case? Perhaps A doesn't have all the information he needs to make a sound judgement. It may be the very same for C and her daughter D – who, like B, is widely known for her dishonesty - but it also may not. Perhaps C does have the information she needs but can't face the conclusion it leads to and so reinterprets the information in a way which will sit more comfortably with her view of her daughter. Why does E not recall something that passed between him and F last time they met and therefore have a more favourable memory of the encounter than F does? Or G believe that touching wood makes a difference to anything, or H think that one number is better for her at roulette than any other is? The explanation for why people believe that a certain group of others is inferior to them, when they aren't, may be different in kind from the explanation why some think the collapse of the Twin Towers was a put-up job, if indeed the same explanation applies for all of those who think this.
There are many different kinds of influence upon belief and therefore there need be no unity amongst the things that cause false belief. Even true beliefs can be held for reasons other than their being true. Here's an example. It could be the case that, for some true belief Z, person J holds it - although it's true - because it suits her interests to do so; counterfactually, she would continue to hold Z should Z turn out to be false. In other words the self-interested reason for holding it is doing the real work. I think this fact strengthens the case for doubting that there's a satisfying general answer to the question why people hold weird, or false, beliefs.
In addition, I'm sceptical of the notion that there could be a time free of all falsehood and illusion. The battle for truth against error is like the one for moral and social progress. It is a never-ending task, not a linear movement leading to some altogether transparent future of perfect knowledge.
As for the thesis of Aronson's that I want to comment on, it is his application to the general question about weird belief of the following distinction: between (a) the conditions that cause such belief, and (b) the choices people make in embracing ignorance, as he puts it, and their motives for doing this. He writes:
To choose not to know is an act of bad faith: we seek to deny what we in some sense already know is there, and we degrade ourselves by willfully suppressing our awareness of it. We do so because we don't want the situation we ignore to be the way it is. Through imprisoning ourselves in ignorance we seek a kind of fantasy makeover of the world to fit our desires, crippling our understanding rather than adapting ourselves to the world by knowing it as it is and acting accordingly. We deny what may be troubling or disheartening, threatening or terrifying.
Bad faith can certainly play a part in someone's refusing to recognize a truth which they have in some sense perceived; there is such a thing as wilful ignorance. At the same time, to make this a major explanatory cause for beliefs that are very widely held strikes me as a form of wishful thinking: as if to say that all these millions of people really know the truth already but won't own up to it; or that the reality of things is always there before us and seeing it takes no effort. This is a misconception that is at one with believing there could one day be a world free of all error and illusion. We are imperfect beings and the obstacles to knowledge, both within us and without, are many and various.