BELIEF SERIES LECTURE

I Believe, Therefore I Am:

Values, citizenship & personal identity

Professor Helen Haste

University of Harvard & University of Bath

8 December 2004

Why do we believe?

What we believe is what we value. Do our values change? Or has the world changed, whereas our values remained the same?

In 1989, the world changed. What happened in the Soviet block countries? They all rediscovered their national identities. Among the young voters in the eastern block, there was no apathy: the left-right divide has changed shape.

Before 1990, psychologists and sociologists, tended to think about politics as though it was something fairly fixed. Once you had become a conservative, by the age of 12 or 15, because your parents were, you’d go on being a conservative, or whatever viewpoint it might be. So one would assume that people’s values were somehow fixed, a bit like their eye-colour or their height, something that belonged to them. Once you believe that people’s’ values are relatively fixed and enduring, what can we say about how values go together? What does an ideology look like? What correlates with what? Psychologists used a mapping process which assumed fixed values: seeing a person, for instance, as a left wing person, or a compassionate person with strong beliefs about social issues, or a Christian, or whatever.

Having seen the value clusters, they then asked: ‘What purpose do values serve?’ For example, quite a lot of research suggested that people who held very right wing views were actually compensating for insecurity. A big study on ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ was donein the 50s to discover how a whole nation apparently could behave so appallingly as did the Germans during the Hitler era. The question, as to whether there was a personality type more prevalent in Germany than elsewhere, didn’t happen to get anywhere, but it did focus on the matter as to whether values serve a function. For instance, if I have certain beliefs, am I compensating for my own insecurities? In the past, one might have dealt with one’s own insecurity by reasoning ‘at least I’m not as bad; I’m better-off, than this or that ethnic group’ and then wanting to make sure that they remained positioned as socially and economically inferior. So values could serve the function of maintaining one’s confidence, one’s sense of self, and also permitting one to exclude certain people on whatever grounds - not just ethnically, but also for beliefs not shared, showing them to be not necessarily inferior, just different. For instance, people with different religious beliefs might appear not to be ‘part of us’ but to be ‘other’. Thus in a southern Baptist perspective, by excluding from one’s social life say Jews, or Catholics, or Muslims, might seem like a safe thing to do, to hold values which allow one to shape one’s world, and to see those values as performing that function. That, of course, would assume that values were fixed, enduring, and remained the same.

We must also consider whether values predict action. Research was conducted as to whether people’s admitted values mean that they behave in a particular way. When I asked whether people who care about people, actually give money, it raised a grin. We don’t. Indeed, we find in psychology that values don’t predict action very well. Can a person’s attitudes tell us that they will give money to charity, or vote for Bloggs rather than Higginbottom, or write a letter about some dreadful happening in Bath? The answer is that there is a small relationship between values and action, but a much more effective relationship between values and one’s interpretation of action, one’s own or another’s, and often after the event. So values do not accurately allow us to predict giving, but do fairly accurately predict reaction to someone else not giving. So values shape our view of the world, and our response to the world.

This is a shift. Values aren’t any longer copies of our selves, they are lenses through which we interpret, and make sense of the world. Rather than being a prophesy of me, my values are the way through which I interact with the world, a process for making sense of the world, and of my identity. By sharing those values with others, I am seeking to establish connections, common wavelengths. My values are not properties of me, but properties of my interaction with the world. That doesn’t make them less valid: it is the different way of seeing them that matters.

Rather than mapping values, measuring the strength of beliefs and ideologies, studying their relationship to social class, religion or whatever - for instance, are Catholics more likely to believe one thing or Protestants another? – we should see values as processes; as narrative. Which stories do we tell, and get our children to tell? We all grew up with certain heroic-type stories. Who read GA Henty? (The chair and others) – good, that’s a male thing! Who read The Fifth Form at Mallory Towers (Enid Blyton) or equivalent? Who read Georgette Heyer? Who read Mickey Stellane? (A male-female split.) You might think they’re just fiction. They are full of values, stories, narratives; the heroic, imperialist depictions in GA Henty are particularly interesting because - though not written didactically - they reproduce a particular world view which, if children read, they will grow up with the important and familiar narratives which support and underpin their values. I am a great believer in the power of narrative, both for good and for evil.

We don’t hold values in isolation; we embed them in a story, a narrative, a historical example. It’s easy to make points about historical narrative. How many of you have read French accounts of Waterloo? (Aren’t they different? Yes, very, very different.) An entirely different battle took place. History is factual, but its importance is how we use it as part of - and to make sense of - our identity. We tell the stories that are meaningful to us. Those of you in this room who did not grew up in Britain will know that the stories about your country encountered in Britain are somewhat different from those you encountered as children. Thus we see how values operate as processes, and how narratives sustain and reflect those values and reproduce them.

Who’s seen or read Harry Potter? Who hasn’t encountered this very interesting phenomenon? (I recommend you do so.) Harry Potter is widely read in various languages, a kind of throwback, presenting values of the 50s in this amazing computer-free school. There are no computers in Hogwarts - magic instead! These were the values I grew up with in the 50s, here quite deliberately reconstructed and lapped up by kids. What’s going on here? Narratives are a negotiation. If I talk with you (though my assumption about you could be wrong ) I assume something of a common culture. With an American audience I would (to enable them to follow me) need to find different areas of connection; and with an audience of very different culture to my own, I must take care to establish their position. My values are unchanged, but to tell the same stories I must start from their position.

In a situation of conflict, such as in Israel and Palestine, there has to be a way of making those two stories compre-hensible to each side. Such has been the way in Northern Ireland, where two quite different narratives, Catholic and Protestant, or the Irish Republican narrative and the Ulster narrative, have seen their different stories rethought, in negotiating conflict and finding resolution, into a common story, where the bad-guy fixation gives way to the good-person model. Values are continually in action, in negotiation.

Let’s consider how we actually do use our values, and look at four processes:

Identity: who am I, how do my values define me? What values would I like people to see in me? What is important to me? What are the things that matter to me? What are the beliefs that make me the person I am? What are the beliefs which - I would like to think - are unchanged in me, though matured? Identity is the core. Values are our core, the lenses through which we interpret the world, like a gauze curtain through which we interact. Identity is crucial.

Narrative: the narratives of history, of democracy. To quote the philosopher Alastair Macintyre (1981): ‘It’s through hearing stories that children learn what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they may have been born, and what the ways of the world are.’ Narratives are vital to our understanding. If we tell a story to an eighteen-month-old child and loose our way, they will know just what comes next, and get terribly upset. Four or five years later, we start trying to teach them logic. We are much more tuned in - we respond much more - to narrative than to logic. The story comes to us much younger, and more centrally. Logic, indeed, is more easily taught through a story, than in formal terms. (I blame my own profession of psychology for having focused on logical cognitive processes, which we can only do at eight or nine years old anyway, as though all of thinking is a logical process. It isn’t.) Thinking is actually intertwined logic, but the powerful thing is narrative, which encompasses causality and consequence, and the more emotional, affective side of our lives, inseparable of course from cognition. If you want to teach someone something, use a narrative. Between grandparents, parents and children etc, we are powerfully tuned in. Narrative works; it is crucial. The more abstract things can come later.

Positioning: how we talk to, about, and interact with other people. Experience from working on gender has shown me, in this most recent wave of feminism, when they began to assert equality and to redefine the gender roles, that women refused to be positioned as before, not just by men, individually or collectively, but by the culture. Their culture positions men and women in a particular way. A young man, even without GA Henty, was not expected to cry; he was expected to protect (particularly women), to be brave, to parade his courage in front of others in the classroom and the playground, and to be a little soldier or a hero. As a little girl, as I recollect without immodesty, I was quite a bright kid, who at eleven or twelve began voraciously to read what one might call popular philosophy and anthropology and social science, and I continually encountered a problem: ‘every schoolboy knows…’, ‘man thinks this…’, ‘when people do this, he will do such-and-such.’ There was no female pronoun, no assumption that the human being sometimes was female, and that I could be an intelligent person with things to think about and say, because I didn’t have the right pronoun. It wasn’t that there weren’t any women role models, there were a few – be virgins. In one’s teens there seemed to be the rather un-heroic option to be a virgin and become famous, or to marry and have children. I did in fact manage children and celebrity, but the culture didn’t tell me that I could do it. (I see many nodding!) At the age of nine, the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’ weren’t to be found in philosophy, anthropology, psychology and the works I read. There was no space for me. Just as a non-white person might feel somehow inhuman in a world of supposedly white humans, so it felt as a girl growing up, trying to read that literature.

So positioning is crucial. It’s how we shape ourselves,our identity and that in other people - for instance our children.

Efficacy: as with my concern about citizenship, how do we become a competent human being? What makes us able to do something? Having values isn’t enough, we must feel able to have an impact, to get our voices heard, make things happen. When you study people who have made things happen, not necessarily the very famous, but those who have involved themselves in some kind of protest, or activism, or running an organisation like the BRLSI - people who have done things, who have shown that they feel efficacious - you find that they grew up with the experience of being effective. Frequently their parents had assumed that people are effective, expected that that their children would be effective and showed them how to be. So, if a child notices litter on the way to school, the parent could agree that it is disgusting; could suggest that they could clean it up, or - if the child suggests writing to the council – reply, ‘Yes, you write it!’ Thus the child learns that he or she can do things, can have an effect, and learns some of the skills.

At the time of the Peace Movement and Greenham Common, and later with Chernobyl, I did some studies, based on work by students, on feelings about the nuclear threat, about everyone being blown up tomorrow. We found four types of responses or clusters of values. These were not types of person but of responses; not boxes, but lenses. We found, as have others, that if you are an activist, particularly in protest against the Establishment, it is very important to be angry. Anger predicts engagement and action. Without anger you will not be active. Anger can be against the Government, against the enemy, against inaction (as over litter in Bath); anger is a crucial motivator. We also found, in relation to the Peace issue and Chernobyl, that anger throws out fear. So we had fun naming our four types:

The Affective Actor (AA) was emotional, angry, engaged; angry with the Government for inaction, or with the nuclear power industry; a combination of anger, and action, and also sensitisation, seeking information, to know more, to be informed, so they can do something.

Powerless Pessimists (PP) were frightened, pessimistic about the future, and about their very survival to adulthood. They felt helpless and hopeless, terrified and powerless (sad things to read from sixteen year old children in Bath schools). Their value cluster, their identity, was one of hopelessness; it was very depressing.

Then came the Deferring Defender (DD) (in the sense of deference rather than putting off, and defending against information they didn’t want to know about), who were scared, but trusted the Government, and their parents. They also showed emotion, but it was fear.

Finally, the Resitant Rationalisers (RR) were apparently without any emotions; having clinically examined the peace issues, they calmly saw peace as ensured by the balance of power.

As others have discovered, we found that two core principles are involved: whether or not you Trust the Government (TG + or - ), and whether or not you Trust Yourself (TY + or - ), and feel personally efficacious. If you don’t trust the Government but do feel personally effective, you are likely to be an Affective Actor. If you trust neither the Government nor yourself, you’ll be a Powerless Pessimest. If you trust the Government but feel ineffective, you will be a Deferring Defender, and if you trust the Government and feel efficacious, you’ll be a Resistant Rationaliser: (this can be represented as:

These response ‘boxes’ actually do work out in relation to the Peace Movement, Chernobyl, and to other later protest activities.

So we have a picture of people using narrative, and using their perceptions of efficacy in the Government and in themselves, forming together a lens through which they will interpret, and possibly act upon (or not) a particular issue of concern.

To bring together all these processes, I’d like to conclude with another example, a study by a woman called Miranda Yates, a psychologist working near Washington DC. This was an interesting educational experiment (which you might like to study yourselves) in a middle class school with predominantly black students (typical of Washington DC, particularly in terms of the categories we have been discussing). It concerned a two-week exercise with young people of 15-16, as part of their citizenship studies, working in soup kitchens for the homeless.

Before they went into the soup kitchens, they identified themselves as being quite effective, well brought-up, educated, middle class, fairly affluent, and privileged, with an obligation to help the poor. They positioned white people as more powerful, suppressive, and richer, and saw many black people as being in the underclass, which they assumed to be black. They saw themselves as black middle class, whose response to white power was individual success. The saw the homeless firstly as in need of their bounty, but also as feckless, morally dubious, probably druggies, alcoholics, generally ineffectual people, to be pitied. These were nice middle class kids going out and being helpful.

They had a very interesting time. When they got to the soup kitchens, first of all, they noticed that quite a lot of the people there were white. Shock horror! White - in the under-class? This jolted their view of the white-black relationship in the States. Secondly, they weren’t feckless, but mostly unfortunate. The students had to rethink their positioning of these people, their own narrative about poverty and moral turpitude or fecklessness, and their own perception of black-white relationships. The people they met did not want to be pitied; it upset them - particularly 60-year olds. From their experience working in the soup kitchens, the students certainly gained even more efficacy by doing useful things and working with real people; they retold the narrative, they repositioned themselves as the middle class giving out bounty to the poor underclass, and they repositioned black versus white in relation to the questions of fortunate or unfortunate, fecklessness and so on. They also became very cross with Washington’s civic organisations (like our local councils) for not doing enough to provide support for the homeless people in Washington DC.

In this story, all these things came together. After this experience, the student’s identity (value systems of who they were, and how they positioned themselves) was transformed. A new narrative had to be learned and drawn upon. Their own sense of efficacy became sharpened and enhanced.

I’d like to go back to citizenship and to reframe my own goals in writing about it. I think that being a good citizen means becoming a competent human being in a particular cultural context; not necessarily knowing the history (although that’s part of it), but being able to function effectively, writing letters to the newspapers, getting involved in running things, protesting or otherwise, being active, voting sensibly, understanding who they are and where they come from; understanding why their identity, as for example a white Catholic, is important in dealing with black Protestants, or whatever. Know who you are in relation to the other cultural, religious and value groups in your society. Children should be aware that they don’t hold a monolithic set of values, that they are always working and negotiating across the whole value spectrum, and should know how to manage that.

Finally, citizenship means being effective in pursuing our values and goals. This concerns efficacy, and knowing how - where necessary - to reposition, and understand how the system can work for us, for others, and for particular social groups; not how to run Parliaments -although that’s useful to know – or know the history of our legal constitution - although some knowledge is useful. Such knowledge will not enable you to manage values and value change, for that is what citizenship should be all about.

Summary by Martin Sturge