THE PROBLEM WITH FAITH IN POLITICS

By Peter McKnight

[This article was published in The Vancouver Sun, September 27, 2004. Peter McKnight’s email address is: pmcknight@png.canwest.com.]




I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions. What physicist who was already active in 1900 would dream of boasting that his opinions had not changed during the last half century?

- Bertrand Russell

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?

- John Maynard Keynes

If this is Saturday, Senator John Kerry must be for the war in Iraq. During the US presidential campaign, Kerry has changed his opinion as often as he’s changed his underwear which means his hygiene is a lot more admirable than his politics.

At least, that’s what US President George W. Bush and his supporters would like you to believe.

Bush’s official campaign website devotes an entire section to Kenny’s putative flip-flops, and accuses the senator of changing his mind on everything from the Iraq war to trade with China, to the US Patriot Act, to the first Gulf War, to who his favorite Spice Girl is. (Okay, that last one isn’t really up on the website. Yet.)

Not surprisingly, Kerry denies the changes. He’s always been consistent on matters of policy, he maintains, and he never opposed the Iraq war but only objected to how it has been prosecuted.

Now, I have no idea who’s telling the truth here. Nor do I care, since neither Bush nor Kerry would get my vote, even if I had one. Besides, I think this whole controversy reveals a much more important phenomenon. It seems that changing your mind has become, at least for politicians, the new cardinal sin, much more damning than getting a little hoochie-koochie in the Oval Office or a little hooch out of it.

Here in kinder, gentler, but no less dogmatic Canada, changing your mind is also a mortal sin. Four years ago, the House of Commons adopted a motion that defined “marriage” as the union of a man and a woman. Then last year, the Canadian Alliance brought forward a similar motion to shame any Liberal MPs who might have been tempted to flip-flop on the matter.

Sure enough, the vote revealed that some MPs had the temerity to change their minds. Oh, the humanity!

That politicians see standing by one’s convictions as a virtue – even when confronted by new facts or novel arguments – and changing one’s mind as a cause for shame reveals that they see politics as closer to faith than science.

After all, scientists frequently change their minds so that their theories fit the data, as was evidenced by Cambridge mathematician Stephen Hawking’s recent admission that his theory of black holes wasn’t quite right after all.

In contrast, people of religious faith believe that eternal, absolute truths have been revealed to them through the scriptures or the saints. If so, then changing their minds is more than just irrational-it can get them into big trouble not only in the here-and-now but also in the hereafter.

I have no problem with religious faith if it serves your purposes, but by refusing to change their minds on political matters, politicians are suggesting that politics itself is a form of faith, that it involves absolute truths we must accept on trust rather than on a rational appraisal of the evidence.

Politics as faith was abundantly clear at the recent Republican national convention. While religious symbolism was kept to a minimum, and while conservative Christians-who make up a large part of Bush’s base-were largely shut out of the convention, faith in politics, rather than faith in God, was on the podium throughout the affair.

So when discussing the Iraq war -was anything else even mentioned?- Bush conveniently ignored the evidence about how badly things are going. We didn’t hear about the more than 1,000 American troops or the estimated tens of thousands of Iraqis who have died so far.

Nor did we hear much about what needs to be done to turn things around. Instead, Bush repeatedly told us that we must have faith in the war, faith in the troops, faith in America. Now it might be comforting to have faith when you’re facing death in a foxhole, but only a coherent war strategy will get you out of one alive.

Even California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has always kept a safe ideological distance from Bush, got in on the action. Rousing the crowd like a revivalist preacher, Arnie counseled them to have faith in the economy and the American people.

To be fair to the governor, faith is fundamentally important to a robust economy since the economy is literally built on trust. But Arnold’s playing down of the evidence reflected the tone of the convention speeches, which favored faith over facts, emotion over evidence, romance over reason.

When Bush was first elected, many people worried that, in light of his strong religious faith, he would gradually hammer away at the wall separating church and state, eventually replacing the secular state with a theocratic one.

No one suggested the real problem is that the “wall” is little more than a smokescreen, a cloud obscuring the fact that politics itself has become a religion.

There is, of course, a sense in which this has always been true. After all, the constitutions of both Canada and the US are treated as sacred scriptures, with conservatives and liberals battling over whether to interpret them strictly or broadly.

And politics has its own icons: Americans are told to discard their tattered and torn flags by burning them, much as the Catholics are instructed to dispense with blessed palm by burning it, rather than by chucking it in the garbage.

But while certain political artifacts have always had a religious flavor, the religious fervor of some contemporary politicians is much more troubling.

When politicians tell us to support a war or the economy on the basis of faith, and when they accuse others who change their minds of bad faith, they are drawing us into a new Dark Age, one from which only the light of reason will help us to escape.