THE MAD WILL TO BELIEVE.

........................................................by Stanley

.....An ideology is how we would like to believe things are; good sense is letting experience tell us how they really are. Sometimes the will to believe an idea is so strong that it overwhelms what experience would otherwise tell us. It’s a kind of madness.
.....A wonderful example of this was Josef Stalin’s hatred of genetics. He hated it because the idea of genes as physical structures passed down through the generations meant that human nature wasn't changeable just by training and indoctrination. The Russian dictator wanted to believe that he could change humanity and create the perfect socialist society where everyone was a perfectly satisfied communist. He would create a new breed of humans: homo sovieticus ! [1]
......He favoured a wily biologist named Lysenko who fed him a phony biological theory that Stalin wanted to hear and who promised that with it he could turn Russian agriculture into a land of plenty. To western biologists Lysenko was a joke; his theory was ignoring the fundamental biological principle that acquired characteristics are not inheritable. Never mind that - the Kremlin embarked on a massive nation-wide revolutionary program of agricultural ‘reform’ based on Lysenko’s theories. Josef Stalin unveiled a "great breakthrough," the first ambitious five-year plan to modernize the Soviet Union. Agriculture was to be collectivised and Lysenko theories were to be put into practice. Several dissenting Soviet biologists who disagreed with Lysenko were whisked off to the Gulag Archipelago and the Russian Academy of Science meekly towed the line. The result was a nationwide collapse of agriculture and a disastrous famine in which millions of peasants died of starvation. It was a catastrophe from which Russia never recovered and finally contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union.
......This lethal combination of pseudo-science and ideology we see again today in the modern so-called ‘creationists’ who insist that the bible can teach us about evolution. They have to inject the Bible myths into science at any cost, and insist that it be taught in school science classes as an ‘alternative to Darwinism’.
......Although the outcome of such educational corruption may not be as dramatic as the Stalin/Lysenko debacle, the damage is none the less serious, modeling a mindset of intellectual dishonesty for young people – training them to skew facts to fit belief, schooling them in religious bigotry. Hanging on to the belief that the earth is only six thousand years old in spite of all evidence to the contrary is part of modern ‘creationist science’.
...... If John McCain kicks bucket – he is 71 – the president of the U.S., the most influential and powerful nation on the planet, may well be an ignorant bimbo who actually believes this nonsense. She also believes the U.S. invasion Iraq was the will of God. She believes, too, that in her lifetime the Son of Man will come in all His glory, and all the angels with Him…and He will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. This same Sarah Palin could be Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces. That is simply not safe.
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......The opposite of the mad will to believe is an openness to experience, allowing facts to influence the way we think, often to show us we are wrong. A colleague was once upset when a theory of Carl Rogers did not measure up to empirical tests. Rogers replied: ‘Facts are never unfriendly’.
......I’m not pushing science – it’s an attitude I am talking about. I’m sure psychotherapy can never be an exact science, but it must have the essential attitude that belief is junior to experience. We must be modest in our claims. What is important is letting life and nature teach and allow them to contradict our cherished ideas. It’s a matter of attitude.
......The human will to believe that disregards experiential evidence is always potentially dangerous. Some things in life we have to believe without evidence: like the sun will rise in the morning. But there are no guarantees – tomorrow my sun may rise, but yours may not.

[1] The story of the Lysenko/Stalin affair you can read in a review of a new book at: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts/2008/09/05/370710.htm