I don’t believe it

Sometimes it is useful to substitute one word for another, rather different word and see where it takes us. So here we go.

Children protest over climate change and environment

A global campaign calling for action over climate change saw thousands of British children walk out of school to take part and protest.

Politics Live heard from some of those outside Parliament on what they wanted to achieve and why they were not in school.

Putting aside the monumental silliness and cynical dishonesty behind this stunt we could ask two questions.

a) Have the children been taught to believe that their future requires climate change mitigation policies?

b) Have the children been taught to advocate climate change mitigation policies?

It’s belief versus advocacy. If we use Occam’s Razor and opt for the simpler question then that would be (b). It also makes more sense because we have a pretty good idea that those children do not understand the pros and cons behind climate science, let alone the political machinations of the UN nor the numerous and complex financial and professional imperatives which keep the whole thing alive.

We could say that they have been taught to believe but it is simpler and probably more accurate to say they have been taught to advocate. A key aspect of what we call belief is more like advocacy and it seems obvious enough that those children are advocates not believers. It just makes more sense to put it that way. People proclaim their beliefs to their family, social group or even the whole world. Even children can do it because they are taught to do it and always have been. Church choirs for example.

People also proclaim their beliefs to themselves. How widely they proclaim them to the outside world varies enormously but without some kind of advocacy the idea of having beliefs doesn’t quite make sense. Or at least belief without any form of advocacy has no impact on the outside world which for current purposes will do.

An attraction of shifting from an idea of belief to the idea of advocacy is that advocacy feels shallower and closer to what we are. It feels more improvised, more like a repertoire of flexible responses linked only by the advocacy driving those responses. With advocacy we may begin to cut away those deep but unrealistic notions of mental structures which belief seems to assume. Shallow belief may be no more satisfactory than shallow advocacy, yet beliefs we seem to encounter in the real world frequently are shallow. So often they seem to be based on little more than the acceptance of some consensus. In other words - advocacy.

Advocacy seems to bring out common features of belief, its shallowness, its links with a wider social standpoint and the way supporting arguments often seem to come after the belief rather than being reasons for it. Those climate kids are doing the advocacy first – as their teachers probably did. The justifications and arguments may come later. Or one hopes - not at all.

Political life provides numerous examples where belief is clearly no more than advocacy. As advocacy it may be very deeply ingrained. Within a wider social and political standpoint it may be impossible to change, but deeply ingrained does not necessarily imply deeply analysed. It does not necessarily imply deeply understood either. With advocacy only the brief has to be understood, or at least memorised. Or at least the bullet points have to be memorised. Or at least some of them have to be memorised.

Sticking with climate change for a moment, most politicians obviously have almost no understanding of the science supposedly supporting the mainstream climate change narrative. How can they be said to believe it? The simple answer is that they don’t believe it. They advocate it because their political and social networks compel them to advocate it. There is no depth because depth isn’t required. At best, depth is limited to a few special interests.

Yet the temptation here is to assume that politicians are not like ordinary people even though those climate kids are ordinary people. It is suggested that politicians are particularly cynical and prepared to advocate ideas they do not actually believe. Yet a simpler approach is to assume that politicians are much the same as ordinary people in this respect. Ordinary people also advocate ideas they do not believe in much the same sense. They advocate ideas under social and political influences just as politicians and those climate kids do.

As with the political classes, ordinary people do not need to understand the ideas they advocate. Advocacy is frequently shallow because it has to be. If it wasn’t shallow hardly anyone would ever advocate anything because they would be forever analysing. Or in more conventional terms, hardly anyone would ever believe anything.

To take another example – how many voters understand the issues surrounding Brexit? How many understood those issues when they supposedly expressed their beliefs in the EU Referendum? Did they need to understand the issues before voting?

No - because that would render the whole referendum impossibly complex. Voters were required to advocate a course of action, a much shallower but far more pragmatic requirement. If we are honest, advocacy is all we expect of most MPs so why would we expect anything more of voters?

This is why the May government made a mess of its Brexit negotiations. Belief is advocacy and Team May effectively pretended that it could put its pro-EU beliefs to one side and advocate an orderly withdrawal from the EU. Unfortunately that never made sense. Belief as advocacy is woven into the fabric of what we are, what our social obligations and standing are.

Advocacy may be shallow but we are shallow, too shallow to put aside what we are without becoming in a very real sense someone else. This is also why interesting people are often those who analyse and criticise but tend not to advocate. Because advocacy is shallow and shallow is uninteresting.