Extreme belief systems

In Kirill Srebrennikov’s 2016 film, The Student, Venia, a lonely high school student begins to intensely read the bible and appeal to it for everything he says and does. Through this, he becomes a disruptive presence in his school, interrupting classes and physical education. Venia radicalises himself and becomes a religious extremist. His biology teacher tries to talk him out of this and convince him, but she fails.

The film, based on the Marius von Mayenburg 2012 play Martyrs, raises many issues about extremism. From Venia’s loneliness and troubles with his family, across oppressive social institutions like his Russian high school, to social dynamics as the attention that Venia receives for his unusual behaviour. Here, however, I want to focus on a single particular issue that plays a mostly implicit role in the film: Venia’s beliefs. In this post, I will simply assume here that people usually use the term “extremist” to refer to actions or beliefs that are bad because they are extreme. Hence, not everything that is extreme is also extremist.

When Venia quotes scripture, he offers his world view about what is true and moral. This world view diverges from everybody else’s views. How should we understand what Venia believes, and the role it plays in his behaviour? The thing is, Venia was not born an extremist. He presumably originally had beliefs akin to those of his classmates and behaved in similar ways. How should we understand his world-view in relation to and contrast with the others’ world-views as a source of his behaviour; for instance, when he tries to heal a classmate through prayer?

Venia adopts certain passages from the bible as absolute truths. These biblical beliefs then influence his other beliefs and his whole behaviour. He begins rejecting the things he is being taught in school as falsehood and he campaigns for stricter moral codes. While his new extreme beliefs may not be the only explanation for why he becomes an extremist – as mentioned his personal situation and social dynamics also play a role – they do explain why he does certain extreme things like disrupting the swimming class with a sermon. Venia treats these beliefs as certainties about which he does not allow any doubt. These biblical certainties then influence all his other beliefs. He presupposes that the bible in its literal interpretation is correct and that it justifies his other beliefs.

If you examine the kinds of things that Venia believes, then you can see how some things presuppose others and how they depend on each other. For instance, his campaigning against bikinis in swimming lessons is justified by his conviction that girls should dress modestly, which presupposes that any public expression of sexuality is sinful. This presupposition itself is justified by his conviction that anything not sanctioned by the bible is sinful. In this way, we can trace his ever more fundamental convictions to certain core convictions, such as that the bible should be taken as literal truth.

In the preceding paragraph I have unravelled a particular strand in Venia’s belief system that represents how his beliefs hang together for their justifications and presuppositions. Our beliefs are not just isolated pieces that each stand on their own. Rather, they are nodes in a net of many other beliefs. For instance, the belief that you haven’t watered your plants for two weeks justifies your belief that you need to water your plants. These beliefs presuppose that plants are alive and that they would die without water. I have explained how Venia’s beliefs also hang together with other more fundamental beliefs within his belief system.

Now, if we follow Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (1969), these fundamental beliefs stand fixed for Venia – they are unjustified certainties that form the basis for everything else. From Wittgenstein’s notes we can learn that the most fundamental beliefs in our belief system play a special role and work differently than our other beliefs. Given that everything else presupposes them, they cannot be justified without presupposing them already. Additionally, they must stand fast – be certain – otherwise one’s whole belief system could be overthrown by changing them and things would stop making sense. Such changes are possible, but not rationally; they are like religious conversions. Imagine, for example, that you changed your most fundamental convictions about how old the world is. If, instead of believing that the world has existed for billions of years, you started believing that it is a few thousand years old, then suddenly all your ordinary beliefs about dinosaurs, the origins of petrol, and the nature of the universe would change. What could even be an adequate reason for this change? Your certainties about a very old world are presupposed for so many of your beliefs that it would be very strange to doubt them – they are in Wittgenstein’s terms like hinges on which the door of your ordinary beliefs turns. These hinges are fundamental certainties that determine how the rest of our belief system is structured.

Everybody has such fundamental certainties that they must presuppose relative to their world-views; we all cannot help but take some fundamental things for granted. So let us consider Venia again: He presupposes something like “the bible contains absolute unquestionable truth” as such a fundamental certainty. This explains his less fundamental beliefs that homosexuality is a sin, that evolution is a lie, and that girls should dress modestly. It also explains why he cannot be convinced otherwise through either social pressure or explanation and argument. These convictions form the bedrock of his belief system, something that he cannot simply abandon without having his worldview overturned.

Venia’s biblical certainties are not that different from your (putative) certainty that the world is very old. You both just take it for granted and any argument in favour of it would already need to presuppose that it is true: any argument for a very old world needs to point to very old things that are part of this old world, and any argument for the authority of the bible needs to point to the bible itself. Even if we take something to be self-evident – say, Venia’s trust in the bible or our certainty that rocks are old as rocks – we must presuppose that this apparent self-evidence is trustworthy.

Still, Venia’s certainties about the bible seem to be problematically different from the mainstream’s ordinary certainties that almost everybody shares. Taking for granted that maths textbooks are accurate seems to lead to less extreme outcomes than Venia’s taking for granted that the bible is literally accurate. How could we explain this difference?

A first, clear contrast between ordinary and extreme certainties appears is the extent to which they differ from common-sense. What do I mean by this? While there can be considerable differences in what everybody believes, everybody or almost everybody would accept and share some very fundamental certainties – for example, that solid objects cannot pass through each other, or that objects do not just disappear into thin air. These shared common-sense certainties play a fundamental role for our life: They enable communication and cooperation, ensuring that we talk about the same things. Certainties that strongly diverge from common-sense certainties have extreme downstream consequences. If you presuppose something completely different from what everybody else takes for granted, then your conclusions will be radically different from everybody else’s – for example, if you are certain about the young earth then petrol is something completely different for you than the liquefied organic matter that it is for everybody else; or if you are certain that atheists have forfeited their soul, then they lack the human dignity that most people would ascribe them.

However, diverging from common-sense does not yet make an extremist. Consider the common-sense certainty that space is regular, that a kilometre is the same distance everywhere. What could be more remote from this certainty than the physicists’ explanation that, according to relativity theory, distances vary according to how fast you are moving? This does not make the physicist an extremist.

A second contrast between ordinary and extreme certainties seems to be that the latter justify and require behaviour that strongly diverges from what is commonly sanctioned. They posit absolute values that ordinary folk do not share; realising these values will therefore appear as extreme behaviour to everybody else. But these extremes are morally neutral; these values can be morally bad as they might justify violence, they can be morally good by encouraging radical selflessness, or they could be neither here nor there and simply be very strange by requiring bizarre rituals. Note, that violence can also be normalised within a society and consequently not extremist – consider slaveholder societies as an example.

As a consequence, neither the extreme certainties’ divergence from the mainstream nor the resulting behaviour’s extremeness is sufficient to classify them as extremist. Everybody has certainties, and whether they are extreme is simply a question of how they relate to the mainstream. Still, if the case of Venia is indicative, then many extremists will have extreme certainties, and the extremeness of their certainties explains part of their extremism. But it seems to take an additional aspect for someone to be called an extremist. I believe that this additional aspect is that the extreme certainties lead to some kind of disproportionate harm to the agent or to others. Note, however, that what is considered disproportionate, and hence called extremist, will again depend on the speaker’s certainties – thus, for Venia himself, his actions are absolutely justified. In sum, no belief system is extremist just because it is based on deeply held certainties – everybody has them. Rather, it results from how these certainties manifest in the agent’s behaviour and how they relate to broader society.

Acknowledgments

This blog is the fourth post of the series “Extreme Beliefs and Behavior.” With thanks to the Extreme Beliefs Project (www.extremebeliefs.com), especially Nastja Tomat and Rik Peels. Research for this post has been made possible through the project Extreme Beliefs: The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) in the program Horizon 2020 (851613), as well as the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Readings

Wittgenstein, L. (1969). Über Gewissheit—On Certainty (G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, Eds.). Blackwell.

Picture: https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/interior-small-church-countryside-with-wooden-benches-opened-door_7678049.htm