I have so far distinguished between belief as anticipation-controller, belief in belief, professing and cheering. Of these, we might call anticipation-controlling beliefs "proper beliefs" and the other forms "improper belief". Proper belief can be wrong or irrational, as when someone genuinely anticipates that prayer will cure their sick baby. But the other forms are arguably “not belief at all.”
Yet another form of improper belief is belief as group identification—as a way of belonging. Robin Hanson uses the excellent metaphor of wearing unusual clothing, a group uniform like a priest’s vestments or a Jewish skullcap, and so I will call this “belief as attire.”
In terms of humanly realistic psychology, the Muslims who flew planes into the World Trade Center undoubtedly saw themselves as heroes defending truth, justice, and the Islamic Way from hideous alien monsters a la the movie Independence Day. Only a very inexperienced nerd, the sort of nerd who has no idea how non-nerds see the world, would say this out loud in an Alabama bar. It is not an American thing to say. The American thing to say is that the terrorists “hate our freedom” and that flying a plane into a building is a “cowardly act.” You cannot say the phrases “heroic self-sacrifice” and “suicide bomber” in the same sentence, even for the sake of accurately describing how the Enemy sees the world. The very concept of the courage and altruism of a suicide bomber is Enemy attire—you can tell, because the Enemy talks about it. The cowardice and sociopathy of a suicide bomber is American attire. There are no quote marks you can use to talk about how the Enemy sees the world; it would be like dressing up as a Nazi for Halloween.
Belief-as-attire may help explain how people can be passionate about improper beliefs. Mere belief in belief, or religious professing, would have some trouble creating genuine, deep, powerful emotional effects. Or so I suspect; I confess I’m not an expert here. But my impression is this: People who’ve stopped anticipating-as-if their religion is true, will go to great lengths to convince themselves they are passionate, and this desperation can be mistaken for passion. But it’s not the same fire they had as a child.
On the other hand, it is very easy for a human being to genuinely, passionately, gut-level belong to a group, to cheer for their favorite sports team.1 Identifying with a tribe is a very strong emotional force. People will die for it. And once you get people to identify with a tribe, the beliefs which are the attire of that tribe will be spoken with the full passion of belonging to that tribe.
1 This is the foundation on which rests the swindle of “Republicans vs. Democrats” and analogous false dilemmas in other countries, but that’s a topic for another time.
Bob: Great post.
Eliezer: I was not saying anything cannot be understood, but rather that using our specialized "empathic" capabilities for understanding human behavior in terms of our own hypothetical behavior is counterproductive to understanding many instances of human behavior when the humans in question are from different cultures or otherwise very different from one's self. It's easy to model it, possibly even to model it well (Chronicles of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez tries to), but next to useless to model it by reference to your own feelings. If we couldn't model it at least somewhat we couldn't even form the concept and talk about it, but we don't have the special advantages here that we have when modeling a hungry person eating or the like.
For a less politically charged example, fairly young (7 or 8, maybe 9?) could learn to model sexual desire, but they can't empathize. Adults cannot empathize with a child's enjoyment of TV shows targeting young children even though they have been children and may remember watching the same shows and enjoying them. Actually, since enjoyment is virtuous, that example answers your question, though across ages rather than across cultures. For 'virtuous', cross cultural, and impossible to empathically model (ignoring that to some degree there is a contradiction here, as without the ability to model the state it is hard to be confident of its intrinsic virtuousness, only of the virtuousness of the actions it brings about, which could also have been pursued for utilitarian or other deeply generally human reasons such as caring. The symmetry with abhorrent actions is broken in this respect) there are surely many different types of meditation or other altered mental states, enjoyment of a vast number of foods (I can understand liking kumiss via a "comfort food" schema, but not *kumiss AS kumiss), entertainments, and art forms, and probably more subtle and general feelings having to do with attachment to the land, etc, though I can model these empathically to some degree.
Most generally of all, I already had given examples, in citing Haidt's 5 moral domains.
Hmm. Criticism of Haidt's theory. Haidt, and most other people, probably see conservatives and liberals as having equal lack of understanding of one another. (the point of his theory is that he lacks such empathic understanding, hence the need of an empirically derived theory). However, his theory suggests that conservatives should easily understand liberals. The magnitude of one's disagreement shouldn't be the cause of empathy failure. Rather, empathy failure should follow from the apparent pointlessness of the action being criticized. For instance, it's probably easy for us to empathize with Joseph Mengele's actions while still strongly disapproving, as scientific curiosity is a shared motivation and the difference between his actions and actions we would approve of is because of his not applying enough weight to caring/sympathy considerations that we consider important. The opposite is true of one's experience reading about Isaac Bashevais Singer's father in "My Father's Court" or other good works of anthropology dealing with rich cultures. We are bemused by the apparent pointlessness of all of the ritual details that this silly man takes so very seriously, but he is harmless and we are not indignant at all.