Sweet retort! Rhetorically, at least. And there may well be a lot of truth in that, for all I know.

But I am genuinely curious… Dilettante that I am, I’m anxious to learn, and wonder if there’s a substantive basis lurking somewhere beneath the double disciplinary slander, or if it’s simply parroted from overheard academic infighting.

However, it might be argued that your example can be interpreted as an example of preservative beliefs. True, the professors are already immortal, in that they have tenure; but what good is tenured immortality if nobody listens to them anymore? To an academic, this is the empty immortality of Xanadu. Their fight is one for the preservation of an influential academic existence, and the trappings that come with it (just, for fun, to go all the way with the sociobiological importance of the privileges of status).

I might also point out that while you’ve repeated your claim of the importance of identifying “constitutive beliefs,” the bare repetition of this assertion (albeit with an additional putative example) has made no progress towards answering your questions: What makes people come to have these beliefs, and why are they so emotionally attached to them? I went out on a limb with a story of explanation; you don’t like it, that’s fine; but substantive argument against it would be interesting, and an alternative theory even more interesting. I think at the end of the day, it’s not “It’s me!” that matters, but “the preservation of me” that haunts us.

As to eternal progression, I don’t know if you subscribe to the traditional literal interpretation of spirit progeny, and if so, if you have a reconciliation it with evolution. (I understand not everyone cares about this, but if by chance you do have a reconciliation I’d be interested to hear it.)

One problem with your thesis is that I don’t think that constiutitve beliefs are confined to religion. Hence, I don’t think that they are necessarily tied to concerns about Answers and Stories and Problems. For example, a while back there was a book published by a poltiical scientist (forget name; sorry) entitled _The Hollow Hope_. The basic thesis was that civil rights litigation in the 1950s and the 1960s was essentially irrelevent. The courts issued opinions but no schools were desegregated. Nothing much happened in terms of real social change. Then there were race riots. Congress acted, and the south began to desegregate. The conclusion: Courts are pretty sorry insturments of social change.

This book drove a large percentage of the law professoriate batty. They fell over themselves condemning and attacking it. They couldn’t say enough awful things about the book, its conclusions, or its author. In my mind the response seemed a bit disproportionate. My theory is that the idea of successful cause lawyering was an absolutely constitutive belief for these law professors. Their faith in the ability of heroic civil rights lawyers and enlightened courts to transform society for the better was fundemental to their understanding of themselves as lawyers and thinkers. Yet I don’t see that this belief is predictive in any sense. It wasn’t necessarily the lack of feedback that made their beliefs so intense. It was the role of the beliefs in self-definition.

As for evolution, I suspect that it has less to do with inerrantism or anything else than with the fact that I was taught at a very early age that Elder McConkie’s theology was suspect and not authoritiative, that the Church took no position on evolution, etc. etc. This is basically the stuff that my father taught me when I was a kid watching nature shows on PBS about evolution. This early experience then became the core of both my reaction to evolution and my sense of its place in Mormon theology. I don’t believe in Inerrant Scripture (I don’t think that any Mormon should). I do think that obedience to divine command is necessary, and I have a pretty literal view about the after life. I think we’ll be resurrected, recieve the glory that God has prepared for us, and go forward with eternal progression. I don’t think of this stuff as metaphorical mumbo jumbo or cosmic myth in a kind of Joseph Cambell way. I’m pretty literal about this.

You’ve labeled certain beliefs “constitutive” because they are formative to our identity in some way, but I think we have to go a little further. The beliefs that really matter do not just form our identity, they determine the future welfare of that identity. In this sense, they might profitably be labeled some other way, maybe “predictive”, or probably better “preservative”. “Predictive” is too closely associated with the “objective” epistemology of hard science; as I’ll explain below, by “preservative” I might hope to connote both the subjective nature of and emotional commitment to the beliefs in question.

To lay the groundwork, a big story behind why stories are so important: Consider two faculties that were important for humanity to make its particular way in the great competition among species—the abilities to (1) imagine the future, and scheme and plan accordingly, and (2) raise cooperative enterprises. Both of these require “storytelling”: (1) is essentially the generation of a plot (note the dual meaning), and (2) requires the convincing narration of that plot.

So we develop these faculties for generating and telling “stories” (with a small “s”), faculties which are necessary for us to solve day-to-day problems (with a small “p”).

But these faculties, initially selected for because of their utility in our day-to-day survival, have an “unintended” consequence. Being conscious and concerned for our future, we cannot help deploying these faculties beyond their original utility; we imagine not just the outcome of tomorrow’s group hunt or next fall’s harvest, but also our Ultimate Fate. And so we generate “Stories” (with a big “S”), to cope with this Problem (with a big “P”).

Despite the common motivation and mechanisms of generation, there is a major difference between “stories” and “Stories”. Quick feedback is provided on the former, so that they are continually tested, refined and improved, and there is little controversy as to which are “true” (in the architecht’s sense: “in line” with the real world) and which are “false”. But “Stories”, while giving us the expectation of having solved “Problems”, are untestable on mortal timescales. Attached to “Stories” are the emotional imperatives that selection bequeathed us as a means of ensuring we would latch onto “stories”; but as “Stories” remain untested in the real world, they proliferate unchecked, with their emotionally attached adherents finding themselves in unresolvable conflict (as in this Saturday Nite Live video).

Note that beliefs you labeled as obviously constitutive—There is loving God and we are his children. He has a plan for our happiness and progress—might not have any emotional power whatsoever to a thoroughgoing secularist, because these ideas are not part of her Story.

Finally, to come to your example of evolution: Accidental, or Preservative? For you, it’s apparently accidental. Since I’ve indulged in armchair psychologizing of Elder McConkie before on one of your threads, let me speculate on why it might conceivably be Preservative for him.

Elder McConkie’s Story is that his eternal destiny is contingent upon exacting, precise obedience to the commandments of God. But precise obedience is only possible with precise knowledge of God’s will, which he believes is available in the scriptures. Hence he becomes the embodiment of dedicated concern with systematization and harmonization of all scripture and practice, ancient and modern. An idea like evolution, that is not readily harmonized with scripture, threatens the integrity and reliability of the Word of God, which threatens his ability to know and obey the Word of God, which threatens his eternal destiny. Hence he attacks it, essentially out of self-preservation.

We might be more daring, and get more specific and speculative. Part of his received doctrinal matrix is the expectation of unbounded literal procreation of spirit children, and the right to live polygamy (he says definitively in Mormon Doctrine, It Shall Return). Denied its practice for now because of the oppression of man, he manages his disappointment at living under the restriction of the natural privileges of God’s elect by savoring the anticipation of its enjoyment in eternity. Now, he’s no fool when it comes to the implications of evolution; he’s thought it through carefully, and realizes it’s difficult to reconcile with the traditional (scriptural, for him) notion of literal spirit progeny (and also divine procreation of Adam). This undermining of his eternal expectations is unbearable; in order to preserve his hard-fought eternal expectations, once again evolution becomes anathema.

All in good fun, to put my theory to the test: Is Nate existentially concerned with precise, exacting obedience to the Inerrant Word? Is he wedded to the expectation of literal spirit procreation and polygamy in eternity? If not, maybe this is why evolution is accidental for him. ;)

DISCLAIMER: I am not a trained and qualified literary critic, biologist, psychologist, theologian, or biographer of either Elder McConkie or Nate Oman, so everyone should blow off these ruminations accordingly.

What I was thinking of was attempts to use seemingly clumsy generalizations from psychology to dismiss or explain away otherwise significant questions or arguments. Perhaps my suspicion noted above is only a reaction to shoddy pop-psychology. Also, perhaps it is pointess to attempt to evaluate an entire profession or field of study without engaging any particular ideas or achievements. I suppose I would be interested to read some kind of introduction to psychology for the non-specialist.

This is an interesting question that I have thought about a bit of late. I have been working for the last several months on an article on the philosophy of contract law, which is currently being considered for publication at several law reviews. In it I attack some arguments put forward by a duo of moderately prominent law professors. Today, one of these professors finally got back to me with his response and critique of my article. It was long, polite, and in many ways quite generous. However, it was also essentially unremittingly hostile to my central thesis. I didn’t have any stong personal reaction to this criticism. The prof clearly thinks that my argument is wrongheaded and a bit silly, and I think that he makes several valid points. However, other than the unavoidable fear of the silent claim “Your argument is wrong, therefore you are stupid for making it,” I didn’t feel personally attacked or upset.

On the other hand, I have often had the sort of visceral reaction to criticism that you identify. I suspect it comes because there are certain beliefs and opinions which we hold that we think of as constituting ourselves in some way, while we have other beliefs and opinions which are essentially accidental to our identity. The problem with constituitive beliefs is that they leave us particularlly vulnerable to criticism. Attacks on those beliefs will be experienced as personal attacks, attacks on our identity. By and large, religion is more likely, I think, to form such a constitutive belief. Indeed, that is one of its chief virtues and attractions. It seems to me that there are a couple of ways of coping with discussion of these sorts of constiuitive beliefs:

1. We can become hyper-defensive, vehemently responding to every criticism as a way of shoring up our own identity.

2. We can simply withdraw from conversations in which our constitutive beliefs will be challenged.

3. We can abandon the constitutive aspect of those beliefs. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we no longer believe that X is true, but rather it means that our belief in the truth of X is no longer central to our identity. One can continue to believe that X is true without that belief being constituitive.

4. We can cultivate some set of intellectual and conversational “virtues” that allow us to manage challenges to constitutive beliefs. It seems to me that there are several potential candidates here. We might cultivate a sense of arrogance, whereby we feel comfortable dismissing certain challenges. Ironically, it seems that we can also respond by cultivating humility and charity, so that whether that shielding ourselves in contempt, we shield ourselves with personal charity toward the critic. Finally, we might cultivate a sense of daring in which we enjoy the possibility of challenge to our constitutive beliefs, a sort of intellectual bungee jumping.

It seems to me that calls to be objective about religion amount to calls for response 3. The problem with this response, however, is that it involves a certain constriction of one’s self, a real loss of something important and valuable. The virtue-based responses in 4 are more difficult and none of them is entirely satisfactory. I think that 1 and 2 are not without their own conversational difficulties. I suspect that ultimately, there is no good solution to this problem. To have constitutive beliefs is to live with pain. One can only avoid the pain by avoiding such beliefs entirely, but this option leaves you in a position in which you are never defined by your beliefs and convictions matter. One might think of it as a kind of intellectual version of Lehi’s teachings on the Fall (Cf. 2. Nephi 2). By the fall comes pain, but the pain is a necessary condition for the possibility of joy. The trick is to learn how to cope with pain in such away that one does not destroy oneself or others, which is, of course, one of the things that Christ teaches.

I’m not aware of any relation to Neil Ferrin, though it’s not unlikely. The one I usually get is “any relation to Arnie Ferrin?” (a U of U basketball player about 40 years ago).

To respond in a general way to some of the above comments (probably the best I can do first thing in the morning), I was attracted to psychology precisely because of its connections (or “intrusions”) to so many other disciplines. I consider psychology, clinical work in particular, to be a considerable help to many people in understanding the nature of their own feelings and behaviors, particularly when their lack of awareness has led to problematic patterns in their lives.

I do not consider psychological theory to be on par with spiritual ways of knowing, but I do think it has much to offer. I find its contributions at least as useful as what I’ve been exposed to in philosophy, literary theory, etc.