When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World 
by 

Leon Festinger, 

 

Henry W. Riecken, 

 

Stanley Schachter

 

BlackOxford's review 

Jan 29, 2021  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: american, epistemology-language, sociology, church 

The Deadliness of Faith

When Prophecy Fails was written almost three quarters of a century ago. It has been criticised as incomplete in terms of theory and inadequate in terms of method since. But whatever its academic flaws, its central findings remain important. The authors pointedly avoid precise dates in their exposition. This is fortunate since it allows the reader to consider their findings in terms of recent events. And the relevance to these events is apparent - growing Christian evangelicalism, conspiracy theories, voter fraud rumours, the spread of white supremacism are all related to the phenomenon documented and analysed in the book. So I think it’s appropriate to generalise from the work described and draw some implications for current conditions.

The link among the apparently disparate groups is not any particular goal or state of affairs in the world. They don’t not aim to achieve specific kinds of behaviour toward themselves or others. Rather, their motive is the acceptance of various ideas by others. They want others to share what they already ‘possess,’ namely, Faith in those ideas. 

Faith, the unwavering commitment to an idea, is the morbid social disease of the age, and grows apace with the technology that promotes it. Faith extends trust and confidence from a disposition of conditional acceptance to one of obsession. Faith does not open a new reality but severely limits the reality that can be expressed, and therefore that can be experienced. Faith is literally unreasonable, not in the sense that it contradicts any particular definition of reason but because it abjures any reason except itself. And faith kills. 

The authors pinpoint the factors which make Faith attractive. First it claims to be able to satisfy some social, psychological or spiritual need. Frequently Faith defines that need - fulfilment, social success, or salvation, for example - or it may simply adopt the inadequacies of the individual involved as the target of Faith’s remedial powers.

Second, Faith is always social. It only exists within a group. Such a group provides acceptance to an individual conditional upon their acceptance of a set of beliefs that are progressively established within the group. Faith is demonstrated by members of the group through the use of authorised vocabulary which may be expressed in credal statements as the group matures.

The interaction of obsessive commitment and enforcement of that commitment in a community is a well-known source of violent, often lethal, behaviour. Faith provokes the need to confirm itself by increasing the size of its community - voluntarily (through ‘missionary’ work), and coercively (through crusades). Resistance to both kinds of effort increases the strength of internal community bonds, and thus the intensity of commitment.

The object of Faith varies widely but is irrelevant to the sorts of behaviour Faith promotes. From the persecution of Jews and other non-Christians, to the literally unreasonable adventisms of the 19th century, to the space-alien cults of the 20th century, to Trumpism and QAnon of the 21st, Faith typically anticipates some event which promises to justify itself and its apparent irrationality - the Second Coming, the Apocalypse, the Thousand Year Reich, the arrival of extraterrestrials, or the outing and destruction of some global conspiracy (or election fraud).

The failure of such an event to occur is not considered as a failure of Faith but a failure of the commitment of the faithful. Failure is rationalised as a demand for increased Faith. The repeated ‘disappointments’ among the mid-19th century Millerite Adventists, for example, were explained ultimately as a sort of punishment for the celebration of the weekly Lord’s Day on a Sunday rather than the biblically correct Saturday. This was sufficient to convince a rather large cohort of the faithful to shift observances in the hope of a quick annihilation.

Faith has no antonym. The opposite of Faith is not opposition to Faith but its mere absence. Faith in nothing, nihilism, for example, has a long history and is one of its strongest forms. Nihilists seek the destruction of whatever social structures exist outside their own community. Nihilists take various forms - devotees to the idea of the independent ‘pioneer spirit,’ believers in the ‘Objectivist’ philosophy of Ayn Rand, economic liberalists like Rand Paul, or the disenchanted ‘Deplorables’ who make up a portion of the followers of Trump, to name but several. In the heart of every nihilist is an idea he or she seeks to impose on the rest of the world.

Faith is the antithesis of democratic politics. By restricting the range of legitimate interests, Faith undermines the inclusiveness that is necessary for democracy. By insisting on the absolute correctness of its ideas, Faith refuses to participate in compromise. And by perceiving that the rejection of its ideas by others as an offence and a betrayal, Faith becomes hostile, frequently violent, to the institutions of democracy. The effects of Faith - in a variety of disparate ideas - were demonstrated recently in the American riot in the Capitol. The QAnon motto of “Trust the Plan,” could hardly be a more explicit declaration of nihilist Faith since no one has any idea what the plan is.

Faith is impervious to argument. As the authors point out, “when people are committed to a belief and a course of action, clear disconfirming evidence may simply result in deepened conviction and increased proselyting.”Faith provides a way to reduce “cognitive dissonance,”explaining the otherwise unexplainable even when that explanation makes outrageous and unverified claims about the state of the world. In other words, Faith, is therefore a fundamentally selfish activity through which an individual’s confusion, neediness, incompetence, or other inadequacies are assuaged at the expense of consideration of the wider community who do not share the ideology of the faithful.

The space-alien cult described in When Prophecy Fails can be dismissed as an amusing anomaly when considered in isolation. But as a phenomenon of Faith it is frighteningly typical - not just of fringe groups but also of large-scale movements. Faith is a dangerous thing. It destroys communities, inevitably creates hostility, often leads to violence, sometimes involving suicide and homicide. Isn’t it time to stop calling Faith a virtue and recognise it for what it really is: a way to exert power over others to make ourselves feel better?

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Gringa Porn

According to Jeanine Cummins: Mexico is a pervasively narco-state; Honduran refugees with no formal education are highly articulate and impeccably grammatical; at least some drug lords have great literary taste; the dream destination for almost all of Central America is el norte, and their preferred method of transportation isn’t long distance bus services but La Bestia, the unscheduled freight railway, which rates even lower on customer amenities than Greyhound.

I have no idea how accurate her descriptions of Mexican sociology or criminal organisation are. But if the cartels are as effective in infiltrating every aspect of society, providing real-time intelligence to its leaders, and organising virtually instantaneous response to events, I suggest that they should be considered for the management contract at DisneyWorld. The penalties for littering might become a bit onerous, but costs would be way down.

Seriously, the central difference between the corporate society of Mexico and that of Los Estados Unidós is the bonus structure. Both are equally ruthless about their employees. It’s up or out. But fewer Mexican pension plans vest because of higher mortality rates. It’s obvious that this is a mark of greater consciousness about business efficiency for the Mexicans. They’ve created a solid supply chain for a vast pharmaceuticals range and are not about to let wing wing sissies threaten their franchise.

Aside from Cummins’s apparent attempt to cripple the Mexican tourist trade, I can’t understand her reason for writing the book. Although there is a speech by a pastor to some migrants in which he warns his destitute flock: “If it’s only a better life you seek, seek it elsewhere,” than in el norte. But given that the book was written in English, the admonition certainly must be rhetorical.

So not a literary event, even if it has made the best seller lists. Give it a miss. Unless of course you’re planning a weekend in Acapulco.

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White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Real Family Values

Here’s what Robert Jones has to say: Christianity in America has been and remains the single most important source of racial prejudice and active bias against the black population of the country. His sub-points, supported by enormous amounts of data, studies, and reports, are roughly as follows:

1. Historically the Christian churches of America have consistently used religious doctrine to justify both slavery and white supremacy.
2. These same churches have institutionalised racism within their own organisations by segregating congregations, educational facilities, and church leadership.
3. More recently, the political campaign for ‘Christian family values,’ which unites Catholic and Protestant sects is a thinly veiled attempt to promote continuing white cultural dominance.

This is undoubtedly news for some. But not for those who remember the Christian complicity with Nazism and the Holocaust. Or for those who are sufficiently educated to know that the French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese churches were the front-line forces for the subjugation and elimination of the native populations of North and South America as well as large parts of Africa and Asia. And not for the single mothers of Ireland, or the Conversos of Spain and Portugal, or the pedophile-victims in Mexico, or the gay folk of Poland, or the atheists of any town in Red State America.

The facts of Christian-inspired racial injustice assembled by Jones are important, however, not because they are news but because they compel an important conclusion that few Christians want to recognise: the crimes of Christianity are the rule not the exception. Christianity promotes a doctrine of love; it lives a consistent policy of hatefulness. That this has been so even in its most primitive stages of development is clear in its own scriptures and history. And to the degree that any culture has been influenced by Christian thought, hatefulness and oppression has increased proportionally.

This persistent inhumanness of Christianity is not a function of any particular doctrine but of what it means to be a Christian. Whatever sect or congregation, a Christian is identified by the idea of belief. It is faith, ostensibly faith in a formula of words, which makes a Christian. The specific creeds may vary, but having one is what all forms of Christianity uniquely have in common.

Creeds are the focal points for Christian communities. Being formulated in words, creeds demand continuous interpretation - from language to language, culture to culture and situation to situation. From this comes the need for organisation - a process, structure of authority and method of enforcement for ‘correct’ interpretation.

And religious organisation is unavoidably political, not just internally regarding the interpretations to be accepted by believers, but also externally in the religious organisations relations with the rest of society. The greater the role played by a religious organisation in society, the greater this function of external politics becomes.

But here is where things get particularly sticky in two distinct ways. The first rule of all organisational leadership is to maintain the power of leadership. Religious leaders typically claim the source of their organisational power in God. Hence the degeneration of large religious organisation into impenetrable bureaucracies, and smaller ones into cultic strangeness.

But it a different problem which Christianity has historically failed to cope with. The politics of faith has always been a prime target of secular politicians. And as a matter of historical record, Christian institutions have been consistently co-opted by secular politics. From Constantine to Donald Trump, there is no period of institutional Christianity that has been immune from enlistment into secular interests.

Of course the Christians involved in such outflanking by their secular counterparts don’t even suspect their situation. In fact they consider themselves to be influencing social and cultural policy. Theirs is a willing, often passionate, naïveté which allows them to think they maintain control over the interpretations their creeds and the social matrix in which these creeds are explicated.

So it is hardly surprising that Christianity is the primary social vector for American racism. America is an inherently racist place. Its religious institutions are unlikely to be otherwise. Christianity is easy for evil to infiltrate, and very difficult to spot much less eradicate once embedded. Ah, the delights of faith. As every secular politician knows, anyone who believes in the Virgin Birth will believe in birtherism or any other racial slur with only the slightest provocation.

This is the point that I don’t think Jones gets. ‘True’ Christianity is not something other than what is practised in America. Christianity by its very constitution of faith is always this way. That the very different American constitution was formulated by atheists and deists ended up in such a Christian mess is one of the more interesting ironies of the country.

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The Serpent and the Rainbow 
by 

Wade Davis

 

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Wade Davis has written an entertaining, at times profound, tale of his research into the zombi-phenomenon in Haiti. As an ethnobiologist, he has sympathetically brought together the country’s history and sociology, conventional medicine and pharmacology, religious ritual, and his own personal experience in a nail-biting narrative. Your typical swashbuckling hero has nothing on Davis - except perhaps a little self-effacement.*

What I find most compelling about The Serpent and the Rainbow, though, is Wade’s appreciation for the theological import of the uniquely Haitian way of life signified by Voodoo. That Voodoo is a religion is often challenged by other religions originating outside of Haiti, especially, for historical reasons, Christianity. But despite objections, it is clear that Voodoo has not only a central spiritual purpose but also a rather sophisticated theological structure. I’ll try to enumerate my reasons for this conclusion based on Davis’s observations.

1. Voodoo is intensely syncretistic. It absorbs almost every spiritual belief it encounters and transforms the original into an aspect of its comprehensive worldview.
2. Consequently Voodoo has no fixed doctrine or dogma. It’s expression in prayer and ritual may vary greatly and yet still be recognisable for what it is. 
3. This absence of fixed doctrine is accompanied by an interesting association between symbolic ritual and physical causality; or, if one prefers, between the psychological and the material.
4. While it is without doctrine, Voodoo maintains itself through tradition. Its West African origins are evident in its vocabulary, ritual, and spiritual cosmology.
5. In Voodoo, while spirits of various sorts exist and affect daily life through their presence in material things or events, these things or events are not the spirits themselves.
6. Neither do various ritual prayers and actions cause the presence of spirits. Spirits are merely invited, often begged, to participate in human activities. It is a mistake to term ritual aspects of Voodoo ‘magic.’ They are the equivalent of what can be called psychic or spiritual therapy: “... the human form is by no means just an empty vessel for the gods. Rather it is the critical and single locus where a number of sacred forces may converge, and within the overall vodoun quest for unity it is the fulcrum upon which harmony and balance may be finally achieved.”
7. There are no moral absolutes in Voodoo. Good shades into Evil. In fact Good and Evil often inhabit the same situation in a sort of Zen condition. Davis quotes one of his sources: “Good and Evil are the same; but do not confuse them.”
8. While Good and Evil cohabit in Voodoo, there is nevertheless Justice. Before anyone is punished or condemned, correct procedure must be followed. This involves listening to those who are aggrieved as well as to those who are more sympathetic, and only then forming a consensus on guilt.
9. Despite its pervasiveness in Haiti, Voodoo is not an established religion. It has no clerical hierarchy, no fixed structure whatsoever. And although it has been infiltrated from time to time by governmental elements (like the Ton Ton Macoute), it remains an independent force in Haitian society.

No wonder the that other religions find Voodoo so disturbing. It defies all the presumptions of ‘global religions.’ It is democratic, decentralised, non-coercive, therapeutic, respectful of dissent, and able to exist without state support. A real marriage of heaven and hell.


————————
*Some of Davis’s historical material is astoundingly revealing. For example, in the ten years prior to the Haitian Revolution in 1793, over 400,000 Africans were imported into the country. These were part of the 5 million Africans brought to the Caribbean (The entire population of The United States was 2.5 million at the time of the American Revolution). A white population of less than 10% of this number drove the most successful colonial enterprise on the planet, accounting for economic activity greater than that of the whole of the newly formed United States. 

The Haitian Revolution also had profound effects for the future of the young United States. Napoleon had dispatched two armies, totalling in excess of 40,000 troops, to reinforce French settlements along the entire Mississippi valley. He also ordered them to mop up the continuing mess in Haiti. Both armies were destroyed in Haiti and never arrived in New Orleans. In a pivot to Plan B, Napoleon agreed the Louisiana Purchase with the Jefferson administration. One can only speculate what the inhibition to American migration would have meant to the entire West if the Haitians had been subdued.