I'm old enough to remember when brainwashing was a more commonly used word than it is now. An article by Nikhil Krishnan in the April 7 issue of The New Yorker, "It's Always the Other Side That's Been Brainwashed," reminded me of this.
During the Korean War, American prisoners of war were subjected to brainwashing by Chinese authorities in a sometimes successful attempt to make the prisoners believe that the values of their country were less desirable than communism.
In 1962, my freshman year in high school, a fictional movie about this was released, The Manchurian Candidate.
The plot centers on Korean War veteran Raymond Shaw, part of a prominent political family. Shaw is brainwashed by communists after his Army platoon is captured. He returns to civilian life in the United States, where he becomes an unwitting assassin in an international communist conspiracy. The group, which includes representatives of the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, plans to assassinate the presidential nominee of an American political party, with the death leading to the overthrow of the U.S. government.
That's a dramatic, though rather unlikely in reality, example of brainwashing. But the article does a good job of explaining why this term is difficult to clearly define, since mind control is ubiquitous, and often we don't realize how our mind is being shaped by outside forces.
There was outrage when it was revealed that Facebook researchers were tinkering with users’ emotions—making tiny tweaks to their feeds in what Lemov calls “massive-scale emotional engineering.”
But she notes that the backlash didn’t stop the researchers from running these experiments; it just made them more reticent about their results. One researcher on the project said that the response amounted to people thinking, “You can’t mess with my emotions. It’s like messing with me. It’s mind control.”
And, in a sense, it is mind control. But that phrase, much like “brainwashing,” runs into a tricky question: Isn’t everything that shapes our thoughts, desires, or feelings a form of mind control?
Lurking behind our unease is a fantasy of total, unshackled cognitive freedom. Any deviation from that ideal gets labelled as manipulation. If we cling to that standard, then, sure, we’re all brainwashed. But the standard is an absurdity. It’s obvious that our minds are shaped by the world we live in, including what others say. This isn’t what we have in mind when we talk about mind control.
Instead, Krishnan argues that what we mean by being free of brainwashing is not to be subject to the will of another. Yet here too, there is a continuum of mind control, not a sharp divide between brainwashing and freely chosen beliefs.
There’s another irony here. Much of what Wills came to believe when he lived in China—that socialism is superior to capitalism, that the United States is an imperialist power run by a class of kleptocratic oligarchs—is shared by many young people today who were subjected to nothing more traumatic than a typical liberal-arts education. Their professors would, of course, balk at the implication that they’ve brainwashed their students, but that’s exactly what their critics in the conservative media have long been accusing them of.
It’s a familiar pattern in our polarized age. The right accuses the left of using the institutions it dominates—the federal bureaucracy, nonprofits, universities, Hollywood, and “legacy” media—to brainwash the public. The left, in turn, levels the same charge against the right, pointing to talk radio, partisan television networks, and manosphere podcasts. (Each side condemns the other’s social-media activity.) Naturally, no one admits to doing what they denounce in their opponents. But that’s to be expected: persuasion is what we do; brainwashing is what they do.
The same implies in the realm of religious belief versus atheism, the absence of such belief.
Believers in God decry the power of secular humanism to turn people, including children educated in godless schools, away from the righteous path of traditional religion. Meanwhile, atheists see religiosity imposed on society through lots of means, including the slogan In God We Trust on our money and national holidays, Easter and Christmas, being celebrations of the dominant religion, Christianity.
I found the end of Krishnan's article to be a wise perspective on the complexity of belief. While I'm prone to being judgmental toward people who don't share my political or religious views (progressive and atheist), in my more reasonable moments I see them as having as little choice in their beliefs as I have in mine. Seemingly, we're all trying to do the right thing, even though some are better at this than others. It's just damn hard to take this apparent fact to heart.
Krishnan writes:
Although beliefs can be badges—tribal markers chosen less for their empirical accuracy than for what they signal about us—plenty of people do buy into outlandish factual views. It’s not a cope, or a flex; it’s what they take to be reality. How about them?
There’s a well-meaning, if patronizing, ethical impulse behind our propensity to blame brainwashing for others’ convictions, whether they’re expressions of allegiance, hard factual commitments, or something in between. Labelling people as brainwashed casts them as one of the damned—lost souls whom we, as saviors, must redeem. Yet it might be our own savior complexes that we need to shed.
The philosopher Karl Popper, writing in 1960, suggested that the temptation to attribute misguided beliefs to sinister manipulation came from a mistaken assumption: that “truth is manifest.” If the truth were manifest, it would follow that the failure to grasp it must reflect “the work of powers conspiring to keep us in ignorance, to poison our minds by filling them with falsehood.”
But, even when confronted with a world of people holding views we find baffling, why assume that they’re victims of a grand conspiracy—or victims at all? Perhaps truth isn’t so obvious. Uncovering it demands effort and a bit of luck.
Other people will take different things to be true because their paths—owing to differences in diligence or chance—diverged from ours. That conspiracy-minded cousin isn’t necessarily a casualty of mind control; he may simply have wandered down intellectual rabbit holes where evidence matters less than belonging.
To depict him as a victim of manipulation grants him an unearned absolution. The most disturbing possibility isn’t that millions have been brainwashed. It’s that they haven’t.
Critical thinking welcome here. Preachiness, not so much.
On this blog I've gone back and forth with moderating comments. After deciding a few weeks ago to return to approving comments before they're published on this blog, I'm feeling good about doing this.
I'd rather have just a few -- or even just one -- thoughtful comments on a post than a bunch of irrelevant comments, especially if they're of the "Praise God!" or "Praise Guru!" variety.
But for many years my boundless Buddha-like compassion for religiously-minded beings has led me to offer an "open thread" option to those who want to express themselves in a fashion that isn't appropriate for comments on regular blog posts. Such as, being preachy.
(Here's the newest Open Thread that I just put up.)
This is a big difference between open-minded atheists like me, and dogmatic religious devotees.
I can pretty much guarantee that few religious web sites or blogs allow commenters to criticize their faith, while most non-believers are fine with open discussion of their viewpoints.
Critical thinking is key. I love comments that exhibit thoughtfulness, even if the commenter disagrees with me.
Now, I don't have a definition of "critical thinking," nor do I feel like looking one up. Instead, here's my ideas about what this entails.
I'll start with the most important word, critical, since I think most people understand what thinking means. Critical can mean "important," and that's certainly true with critical thinking. It also connotes a certain skeptical questioning, not taking things on faith.
A critical thinker isn't a blank slate, since all of us have preconceived ideas, assumptions, world views, and such.
However, we need to be willing to hold the attitude "I could be wrong." Many, if not most, religious believers aren't willing to do this. Though they may use critical thinking in other parts of their lives, they put it aside when it comes to their belief in God, heaven, life after death, and so on.
The main goal of critical thinking is to understand reality as clearly, completely, and accurately as possible. A related goal is to enable individuals to have productive discussions of what reality consists of, since without critical thinking as a foundation for such discussions, they'd degenerate into people making claims that stifle open debate.
Let's imagine a group talking about global warming -- it's causes, consequences, and what should be done about it. Then someone chimes in with "Jesus saves!" or "God is in control, so no worries." That would stop the discussion in its tracks.
Critical thinking mainly is directed at objective reality, the world outside of our internal subjectivity.
If someone says, "I believe in God," or "I like chocolate ice cream," there's little that I'd feel like saying in response except, perhaps, wonderful. However, if that person says "God is real," or "Everybody should like chocolate ice cream the best," I'd want to argue with them.
During the 15 years I've been posting regularly on this blog I've seen countless (almost) examples of religious believers mixing up their subjective faith with objective reality. No reasons need be given for subjective faith, but very good reasons must be provided if a claim is made about objective reality.
Typically, truths about objective reality require an extensive process of review, discussion, debate, and criticism.
No one gets to say "the world is like this: _____" without that claim being put under the microscope of critical thinking. Saying so doesn't make it so. Facts, evidence, sound arguments -- those things make it so.
Look, I'm not saying that every comment on this blog outside of an Open Thread needs to be an intellectual tour de force. I'm simply encouraging visitors to this blog who want to leave a comment on one of my posts to be thoughtful in your arguments. Which doesn't mean serious, necessarily. Humor and thoughtfulness are allies, not enemies.
Each of us should be able to laugh at our mistakes, our tendency to believe that we're correct even in the absence of evidence, our unwillingness to admit I could be wrong.
Again, I see this as a difference between us atheists and religious believers.
I'm not certain that God doesn't exist. I'm open to evidence and arguments that God does exist. All I ask is that religious believers have the same attitude. Admit that you aren't certain God exists. Be open to evidence and arguments that God doesn't exist.
If this happens, we can have a dialogue based on critical thinking.
Here's a few cartoons about critical thinking.
Posted at 07:58 PM in Atheism, Comments, Religions | Permalink | Comments (7)