I was going to give this essay the more clickbait-friendly title “My Most Controversial Beliefs,” after Alexander Kruel’s list on his Axis of Ordinary Substack, but I was educated as a philosopher: I wouldn't be delivering value for your time unless I challenged the very idea of the topic.
“Controversial” is a relative term, linking an idea and its holder with a context. It is also continuously valued rather than a binary value: it’s not a matter of
0 - unquestionable common sense, or
1 - burn ’em at the stake heresy,
but a continuous value (0.5, 0.51, 0.5112…).
Even within societies where a belief B is closer to 0 than to 1, there will be sub societies within it—academic faculties, religious communities, friend groups—where the common belief and standard of being a member is holding Not-B, and holding Not-B very strongly.
There are also times and places where a Belief B, if we put it through our Controversial function:
C(belief, place, time) = ?
yields a Null value. Believing that The Phantom Menace is superior to A New Hope will get you uncomprehending stares in Pharaonic Egypt; even today, there are tributaries of the Amazon River or jungle valleys in New Guinea where people will ask you what the hell you are talking about.
There is also another factor: the degree of reaction that stating a belief evokes. If you are not a Trinitarian in modern-day United States, few people are going to care (very few will even know what you are talking about). One can have broadly controversial beliefs but not evoke much of a stir, and beliefs in overwhelmingly confirmed scientific facts that will get you expelled from an academic job.
Given this time and place and intensity relativity, I’m not sure how to judge how controversial or not my beliefs are. Is the reference set my family? My neighborhood? People on Reddit? The editorial staff of the New York Times? Because most of the things I have beliefs about are going to yield a Null value if brought up in any of those places.
Having a controversial belief is, perversely, a mark of status among some people.
The enthymeme runs something like this:
Major Premise: [Smart people in the past] believed things that were [controversial in their time]
Minor Premise: I believe [controversial thing in my time]
Conclusion: Therefore, I am smart.
Mutual admiration societies can form around these self-acknowledged controversial beliefs, where in stating “we believe that X,” the “we believe” part is more important than the truth value of the X part. Compare the bonds that form between young atheists in overwhelmingly Evangelical middle schools or Evangelicals at modern secular universities. No one calls you brave—and you get no points for belonging—when everyone just says “yeah, that's true,” or “Sir, this is a Wendy's drive-thru; are you going to place an order or not?”
I am not critiquing people for wanting to belong, to have friends, to meet girls or guys, but I would rather it were not at the expense of epistemic truth.
Because the thing that strikes me about all of these beliefs that get celebrated as controversial—and “controversial speaker” is a better way to promote a talk than “speaker who is actually correct if you bother to do your research”—is that they are light-years away from anyone's day-to-day life. I have written before about the idea of costless beliefs, and I will summarize it here:
There is a large class of beliefs, likely most of the explicit things any of us believe or think about on a day-to-day basis, where there is no empirical check. It is not that the beliefs are, in a Popperian sense, incapable of being shown to be false, but that the effort of doing so is so enormous, and the stakes for being right or wrong so remote, that it doesn't practically matter what one believes. People then are free to believe whatever helps them fit in.
Often, the unthinking criticize this as people believing what they want. It is not as simple as that. People believe many things that make them depressed and unhappy, even if there is no direct evidence for those beliefs. Many would gladly believe something different if they could. It is more a matter of whether the beliefs are of use: they help a person fit in, they close down routes of inquiry that would be disturbing to the group, they are like wearing the right clothes to fit in with your clique.
And those facts make it the case that they cannot believe something else, at least unless something changes, either in them or in the world around them. Which in turn raises the interesting question of what makes people change their minds.