Prophets and Politics: When True Belief Differs From Belief in Truth

The most original excuse a student has yet given me for failing to turn in his paper on time occurred in my very first year of teaching. “The world is coming to an end,” the student explained. Quoting triumphantly from the Book of Isaiah, he asked whether I had not ears to hear that the Red Chinese were planning to initiate World War III the very next day. I sat in stunned disbelief. The young man next appeared before an attractive English professor and promptly removed his shirt to show stigmata displayed upon his body. She fled her office. And he left school. The year was 1971.

Of course, that young man was crazy, had been in and out of therapy. But he managed to convince a number of classmates that he was their true prophet. They didn’t hand in their papers either. The trouble with prophets is that there are so many false ones.

There are also many followers these days of so many different prophets and persuasions spread out across the globe. And every true believer naturally remains convinced of the truth of his convictions. Without that fervor, much good would never have been done, many hospitals would never have been built, poor and despairing human beings would never have been helped, prayers would never have been said. Those dedicated in their faith are often people who make considerable sacrifices for the lives of others. For every crazy adolescent there are dozens of loving people quietly giving of themselves in the service of their God. And without that confidence in the revelations of religion, those persons wouldn’t be here--and we would all be even more selfish than we are.

Unfortunately, there is a difference between being a true believer and believing in truth. Just because one feels absolutely certain about something doesn’t mean that one is right. The way things really are, with God, the world or even politics, we cannot be captive to our own convictions, no matter how confident we are of them.

Inner confidence can also lead to a certain mutual intoleration toward the beliefs of others. Ordinary people may be perfectly free to disagree about ordinary matters, when they are in the dark about them. Yet once a person is convinced he has the corner on the truth concerning the way things really are, it becomes positively irrational for that person to be measured by his subsequent devotion, whether devotion to a particular theology or an atheistic ideology, or whether such a simple matter as allegiance to a football team. Truth is a hard and intolerant master, even though it makes us free.

For this reason the religious enthusiast or the ideological believer has absolutely no patience with weak and fickle minds for failing to live up to the objects of their devotions. Those who have not seen the truth nor understood it are not to be listened to and their views are not to be respected. Some enthusiasts scorn the very persons who fail to believe what is plainly there before them. Others pay no heed to them and their false convictions. It is the character of any rational person to embrace the truth as he perceives it. It is the character of zealotry to carry that devotion to its ideological conclusion, to be unswerving in the faith. And it is easy to applaud the zealot’s point of view--if you share the truth of his convictions.

Millions of human beings have died in religious wars and ideological struggles, from persecutions against the early Christians to persecutions against Armenians, Biafrans or the people of Cambodia. Unfortunately, it is a history too easily forgotten with the rise of every new conviction. How many Americans alive today know anything of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572? How many younger Americans know much of the pogroms against the Jews, or even as much as their fathers knew?

Our Founding Fathers had sufficiently strong memories of religious struggles to provide freedom of religion for our citizens. In doing so they made a compromise toward skepticism that would be unthinkable to a zealot: namely, that others might be right and that we might be wrong in the most cherished of our faiths. The First Amendment establishes a place for the respect of persons and their views that cannot be compromised even by divine devotion and God’s own revelation--even by the truth. We tolerate false prophets so that true ones might survive. We tolerate the rights of others to espouse what we ourselves are certain must be false.

To each his own is a doctrine of a secular society. It has also brought us considerable domestic harmony. We have been spared blood baths in the streets that Europeans are still a witness to, acts of terrorism that happen almost daily, the carnage that is the scourge of Ireland and the Middle East. The peace so apparent in our land is a result of concession in our Constitution that others might be right. For that is what freedom of speech amounts to: the entitlement of others to their own convictions in the face of ours. To a religious zealot it is a wishy-washy stance that is hard to comprehend. To a dedicated revolutionary it is heresy.

A zealot cannot embrace restraint. Our Founding Fathers found themselves more or less able to, because for the most part they lacked particular convictions in particular theologies and ideologies and believed in a God they knew not who. So Aristophanes and Chaucer found their way into the Library of Congress and there even was a Library of Congress filled with books of various persuasions, while today’s zealots would have school boards expunge those authors as abhorrent to their religious sensibilities. They see little need for general libraries and acquaintance with the heathen or a reading knowledge of those that they consider apostate.

Politicians, too, have their own religions and their own sincerely held beliefs. They, too, have their views on the ways things should be run and the nature of societies. And so the possibility of zealotry and intoleration repeats itself across the globe, from Ulster to the Punjab, from the Soviet Union to the United States. All honest politicians seek to bring us truth but all too often they bring us grief.

Imagine that there are members of our current government who are as politically enthusiastic as the zealots of religion. Imagine what their convictions force them to do upon occasion when the laws of our democracy run counter to their faith. So they ship arms to freedom fighters, despite the will of Congress. On the one hand, it’s perfectly understandable for such laws to be ignored and treaties to be breached. The courage of their convictions insists upon it. On the other hand, those who would disagree must be gotten around somehow. It is not a matter of a particular ideology; it is rather having an all-consuming ideology that matters, one which would not restrain self-confidence with skepticism or a respect for the views of others and the law.

Now imagine that the world is overpopulated with such politicians. There could never be peace among governments. There could only be the Armageddon--or at the very least successive Holy Wars--for there can be no compromise when it comes to truth or room for toleration in matters of religion and political ideology. There can never be respect for political accommodation with the devil. But what if each and every side of the polygon of nations thinks of the others as the devil?

Our Founding Fathers appreciated a paradox of knowledge. We cannot get outside ourselves to compare our own convictions to the way things really are. No matter how fervently we may seek the truth, in the end it all comes down to a matter of self-confidence in our own beliefs. Yet that self-confidence may be imperfectly inspired and misguided. Freedoms--of speech, religion, press--are different words used to describe the very same restraining skepticism written into the Constitution, to mark the difference between the courage of convictions and the possibility of being wrong. It is not that we should abandon all conviction; we should never let our convictions get the better of us.

DR, NANCY OHANIAN / for The Times