I once took a graduate level theology course. Our first assignment was to write a paper outlining our presuppositions. The professor defined presuppositions as those things you believe to be true that are not provable by science. As you would expect in a theology class, most of the students began by stating that they believed in the existence of a supreme deity and went on to describe what their god was like – all-knowing, all-seeing, loving, caring, angry, vengeful, etc. The next step was to address how their god communicates with humans. Do you believe a certain holy book to be God’s word? Do you believe certain prophets throughout history speak accurately for God? Is nature enough to validate God’s existence? All of these questions are answered with presuppositions.
I prefer the term constructs to presuppositions. Talking heads on the cable news channels often refer to them as narratives or paradigms. I like construct because it reminds me that these ideas are created or constructed by humans. Describing something as a construct does not imply that it is not true. We all accept some constructs and reject others. Constructs act as a bridge between what we observe in life and our emotional brain. Let’s take a look at some simple human constructs to better understand how they affect our individual and group behaviors.
Luck is one of my favorites. When something unexpectedly goes our way, we often call it luck. You find a $5 bill laying on a sidewalk or your favorite team wins a game as a result of an unusual play or bounce of the ball, we humans refer to this as being lucky. At some point in time, someone found a four-leaf clover and then something positive happened for them and they attributed the good fortune to finding the special clover. I knew a guy in college who would wear his lucky shoes when he took an exam. He attributed some type of special power to those shoes. Did he actually believe they were lucky or was it just a way for him to manufacture confidence prior to the test?
It can be either. Take another construct, Astrology, for example. The number of people who actually believe that the astrological signs affect our daily lives is probably relatively small compared to the participants in major religions of the world. However, for those who do believe in the fundamentals of Astrology, this construct is no doubt very important to them and they look to the answers provided by this construct when making important decisions in their lives. I can’t prove Astrology to be true or false, but in general most of us reject the constructs within Astrology even if we occasionally read our horoscopes. Ultimately, you have to believe that Astrology is true to believe its teachings to be true.
Christian-Muslim conflict has been a part of life in the Middle East since the 7th century and Jewish-Arab conflict has affected that area even longer – according to some scholars since the 6th century BCE. The conflict boils down to constructs. Each group believes that their god gave them rights to that land. Each can only prove its point by referencing a religious document and the constructs that were developed around those texts. Since the truth of those documents lies in the eyes of the believers, and the constructs don’t really allow for compromise, there is essentially no solution to the conflict.
In the U.S racial conflict has existed from the landing of the first Europeans. The Europeans had constructs related to Christianity that drove their behaviors, namely that their expansion was commissioned by God and that converting the native peoples was holy work. They soon used what they believed to be scripture-sanctioned constructs to justify slavery as a means to an end that resulted in bringing millions of Africans to North America in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. This decision guaranteed a racial divide for centuries, even after the eventual rejection of the constructs that justified slavery.
Humans are emotionally connected to their constructs, and as a result, it is difficult to convince someone to evaluate or change constructs. But it is this emotional connection to our constructs and unwillingness to analyze them critically, with a sprinkle of logic, that is holding both America and the world back from what could be a fantastic and profitable future for humankind.