Descending Babel: Chapter 1

From Birth to the Age of Six

Life Magazine I was born several weeks premature at the height of the Baby Boom in the middle of the 'fifties and spent the first ten-weeks of my life in an incubator. Eventually I was brought home to a sleepy bedroom community just north of Seattle. Already in the simple act of birth was the groundwork being laid for what was to become my belief system. Almost immediately were the influential materials of my beliefs gathered together, and comprised of several key elements: geographical location, era, geo-political location, race, gender, personal health, parental health, parental income, parental intelligence and education, parental religious affiliation, parental ethics, familial roles, sibling birth order, and non-familial outside interaction and/or interference.

Because I was born prematurely my lungs were not fully developed and I was susceptible to various illnesses and disease. I acquired asthma, and for the first five years of my life suffered from the croup, acute bronchitis, pneumonia, and other respiratory ailments. On at least a dozen occasions, I remember being rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night to be placed in an oxygen tent. Because of my assorted illnesses I was not allowed to "get excited" so was confined to the couch where I could watch TV, listen to records, or read books. For lack of anything else to do, I became a voracious reader, a habit to which I've subscribed even to this day.

My parents were middle-class, or liked to believe they were—their aspirations buoyed them above the merest hand-to-mouth existence—both of them were children of the Great Depression and forever stigmatized by childhood apparitions of scarcity and need. Because we had food on the table, clothes on our backs, and a warm place to sleep, I was raised to think of myself as a prince of the realm. In actuality, because of my various illnesses and trips to the hospital and chest of medicines, my parents struggled each month to make ends meet. Because I never went without, I knew no better, and had no other life toward which to compare but my own.

My mother was raised in a large family of stolid Scandinavian Lutherans and my father quietly adopted her religious protocol. By the time I was three years old, I was already attending Lutheran Sunday School and being indoctrinated into the faith. Because grown-ups were teaching me about Adam and Eve, talking serpents, angels, Noah's Ark, the worldwide Flood, Moses and the Exodus, the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, who was I to question? I didn't know any better or know differently. As a young child, I was to taught to 'believe' before I knew how to reason, to ask skeptical questions, to be critical. Why would grown-ups want to lie to me or tell me things that didn't make sense? Because I was a young child I trusted them implicitly, with my life and continued well-being. And so, like millions of children around the world, I was taught to believe before I knew enough to ask why. I was expected to accept all the stories at face value and warned that although the stories I was taught were true there were other stories out there that were untrue and even evil. It made no difference where I was born to be given this message—whether Seattle, Russia, Iraq, China—because the message is always the same: our way of believing is correct and true although everybody else's is wrong. Every child is given a similar message. Only the stories they are told are different.

By the time I was five years old, I was completely indoctrinated into the Lutheran faith. I was a Christian. I attended Sunday School while the grown-ups attended church, and learned all the stories of the Bible (at least those stories they picked-and-choosed for me to hear). I believed all of it. I had no reason not to. Although it was Jesus I was taught about, it could just as easily have been Mohammed or Buddha or Krishna or Confucius. Only the geographical hapinstance of the place of my birth made the difference as to which God I was taught to worship, which holy book to read, which songs to sing. And so, ever an obedient child, I closed my eyes and lowered my head and rooted for the home team.

Influences Listed from Birth to Age 5

Geographical: Born in Chehalis, but raised in suburb of Seattle, Washington, United States.
Era: Mid-1950s
Geo-Political: American. Western Washington (Puget Sound area) leans mostly centrist 'Democratic'
Race: White
Gender: Male
Personal Health: Sickly. Born several weeks premature, with various respiratory ailments. Spent first ten weeks of life in incubator. Spent next five years in and out of doctor's office and hospital. Confined to living-room sofa and bed, only permitted to play outdoors with other children during the summer months.
Parental Health: Father healthy, but suffered from severe bouts of hayfever. Mother healthy, but birth defect left her with one leg shorter than the other and a limp.
Parental Income: Middle class. Father worked for telephone company. Mother stayed at home, baby-sat two other children to make ends meet.
Parental Intelligence and Education: Father of average intelligence, high school graduate. Mother of above average intelligence, high school graduate. No advanced education.
Parental Religious Affiliation: Lutheran (Missouri Synod)
Parental Ethics: Both parents honest and caring. Both parents teetotalers of drugs and alcohol (at request of mother). Father smoked cigarettes.
Familial Roles: Two parent family. Father youngest of three children. Mother youngest of seven children. Father worked outside the home, mother stay-at-home.
Sibling Birth Order: First-born child. Seven years difference between self and younger brother.
Outside Interaction: Occasionally grandparents, aunts and uncles, older cousins. Neighbors. Sunday school teachers. Children mother would babysit.

Brief Analysis of Above Influences

It is evident from the aforementioned influences that the location of my birth should have a profound influence on the construction of my belief system. For the most part a person born in Riyadh becomes a Muslim, a person born in Tel-Aviv a Jew, in Salt Lake City a Mormon, in Milan a Roman Catholic, and so it goes from country to country, city to city, household to household all around the world. Statistically most people embrace the faith of their parents who in turn have embraced their parents' faith, receding further back in a long generational queue. Believers traditionally believe the way they do simply because of where and how they were raised, and most conversion experiences are nothing more than an acceptance of childhood's god and the sacred book used to extol that god. Simply put, if I had been born in Iran would I be raised to be as sure, confident, and defensive of my religious traditions there as I was in Seattle? Indubitably so.

All over the world people in a sweeping variety of cultures have been taught what to believe but not how to believe nor have they been given the intellectual skills necessary to strategically question why they believe the very way they do. Have they embraced Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc, because, after rationally and deliberately weighing and testing all the evidence available to them, they've determined no other explanation makes sense, or simply because they were born into a Christian, Muslim, Mormon, etc, household? Most believers have not been taught the underlying mechanics of belief nor the thousand inherent assumptions built into the often-naïve belief process, only the blanket notion that “believing” a particular way is good and the questioning and/or testing of that belief somehow inherently evil.

Understanding the nature of human belief requires much more than religious posturing or doctrinal finger-pointing, an appeal to inconspicuous deities or ancient anonymously-written books, because at the heart of the matter lays an inherent sense of trust, a core set of beliefs imparted without our consent while we were small children, indoctrinated and inculcated at a time when we had no capacity to question, evaluate, test, or reject. Because we trusted our parents, our elders, other family members, the culture into which we were born, we had no reason to doubt the information instilled upon us and which continued to influence us (both consciously and unconsciously) as we grew older. As young adults we may have had the opportunity to evaluate these core beliefs as we tried on autonomy, even challenged some of them, but for the most part (and to the extent they've annealed and become an abstract condition of our reality) it is difficult for us to consider our beliefs dispassionately or objectively. We were taught how to believe before we learned how to evaluate, and so it is upon this foundation of core beliefs that our thought processes were progressively constructed, the knotty neural networks laid out. As adults when we, on those rarest of occasions, actually think about thinking or assume our thought process can approach some degree of objectivity, what we are unable to imagine (or less likely consider) is the extent by which our underlying belief system is influencing our ability to think plainly and clearly, ultimately subjectifying what we interpret to be straight-forward and matter-of-fact. Without putting our beliefs to the task, without digging backwards far enough or deeply enough, we will never approach the kind of objectivity necessary for critical thinking or to achieve any real sense of mindful honesty. We are in fact directly burdened by our childhood past, as much by a missing parent, spiteful divorce, death in the family, abuse or neglect, as by the unexamined patterns of thought sown there. And make no mistake about it—ten years, twenty years, thirty years after the fact—many of us cling to comforting beliefs and contorted arguments as an attempt to shield ourselves or neutralize sticky feelings still percolating along the painful edge of memory.

And therein lays the root of the problem. Down how many branches of the family tree must we trace to determine from how far back our core beliefs have been tapped like syrup, pressed from parent to progeny, over and again, through generations of children too young to ask why, before seeing it is our distant ancestors (wide-eyed and primitive by today's standards) from whom we've inherited our oldest beliefs, whether cherished, irrational, untested, or otherwise. From the shadows of our youth there lingers a vestige of antiquity and superstition reaching across the world, bewitching our perception of reality, encrypting it still with totems and taboos, gods and goddesses, devils, angels, miracles, magic. Like a taproot teasing drink from deep chthonic streams, we siphon belief from the aboriginal past, when the world was flat and the center of the universe and human beings the crowning centerpiece of creation.

When I was six years old I learned that three things I'd been taught to believe as true by my parents and my society were in fact utterly false. There'd been talk on the playground that there was no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, and no Tooth Fairy. How could this be? Not only was I taught by my parents (whom I trusted implicitly) to believe in the validity of these three fantastic entities, but I had what I took to be incontestable physical proof of their existence: I sat on Santa's lap, spoke to him, and received presents on Christmas morning; I discovered candied eggs hidden throughout the house on Easter Sunday; I found money underneath my pillow whenever I lost a tooth. And because they were magical—because they could fly without wings and shrink in size and become invisible—this meant the world was also magical, imbued with magic at the structural level, susceptible to the whims and wonder of magical entities. And so I couldn't believe the rumors I'd heard. There was just too much evidence prevalent in the world for it not to be true. I remember going home and carefully phrasing my words to my parents so I wouldn't appear too foolish. "I heard something kinda funny in school today," I began. "I heard there's no such thing as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. Isn't that silly?" I remember my mother and father looking at each other in a kind of sad forlorn way, then asking me to join them on the couch. Uh, oh, I thought. This doesn't look good. And then I started to cry.

Minutes later, after both parents conceded duplicity in deceiving me, I asked them why grown-ups would want to do such a thing to poor unsuspecting kids (I really did word it this way). "Because of tradition," they explained. "That's the way we were taught when we were children and we're just carrying on the tradition." "Even though it's not true?" I wailed. My father looked doubtful, until my mother answered. "It's not a matter or being true or not true. It's a tradition. We're just passing down what was passed down to us." I was heart-broken. "So there's no such thing as magic?" I sniffed. "None," my father said. "And what about miracles and angels? Noah's Ark. Baby Jesus?" My mother jumped right in. "Oh, those are all still true," she beamed, confident. "But how do you know they're true," I asked, becoming more and more incredulous. "Because they're in the Bible," she explained. But suddenly I was doubtful. "And how do you know the Bible is true?" I asked. My mother blurted before catching herself, "Because the Bible says it's true and because of tradition."

But the seeds of newfound skepticism had already been planted.

Brief Analysis of Above

From the moment we are conceived we are being enculturated in the traditions of the society into which we happen to find ourselves born. Without deliberate analysis, a commitment to the truth, and an often fearsome self-awareness and honesty, the belief systems, worldviews, and preconceived notions ingrained during our childhoods will influence us our entire lives.

How does this early indoctrination affect our view of reality?

If the preconceptions and presuppositions are strong enough, they can control our very perceptions of what is real or unreal.

Why is it so difficult to break out from these preconceptions?

Because early childhood indoctrination is so much more than the influence of social symbols and cultural tradition. It affects our biology, the neural pathways in our brains, the roles of perception, intuition (neural network pattern recognition), brain hemisphere dominance, and problem-solving heursitics. Our mental mechanisms are adversely influenced by a 'biology of belief', wherein our believing something to be true causes a perceptual bias that unconsciously supports that belief. In other words, belief alters perception and perception reinforces belief, so mistakes in perception can be self-perpetuating (i.e., incorrectly believing a thing to be true can cause "behavior" that reinforces the incorrect belief) and incredibly difficult to overcome, alter, or depolarize.

Given the very nature of this 'biology of belief' how is one ever able to rise above perceptual bias and unconscious mental support?

Most people don't, because the requirements to do so are difficult, precarious, and fraught with discomfort. One must be willing to admit that everything they were taught based on words, language, and socio-cultural tradition may in fact not only be wrong but nothing more than abstract mental inventions with no basis in reality (not certifiable in the 'real world').