Khajuraho, India
You can't travel a mile in India without feeling the weight of religion. The shrines along the sidewalks, the pictures on the dashboards of taxis, the ritual facial markings practiced even by agnostics the traditions are palpable.
Gods in all shapes and sizes are material and profuse, or their signs are. Human and animal forms patrol the temples. Whatever exactly people think and mean when they pray, chant, genuflect, and otherwise pause in their daily rounds for some contact with the gods, they are accustomed to take leaps in the dark to bear witness to the existence of realms that are intangible yet (or so people believe) have tangible consequences. This faith that all lines can be crossed is the paradox of all religions, yet it is the paradox they bank on.
Hindus have more gods than anyone else (by a factor of thousands or millions), but there is a primal faith nestled in the heart of all religions: that the tangible points to the intangible, as earthly life points to something passing beyond life, be it Heaven, Brahma, Nirvana, the Great All or the immeasurable Whatever. The language and music of worship evoke the ineffable. The believer stands, sits, kneels on material ground in hope of being transported elsewhere. Famously, this crossing of boundaries from the profane to the sacred is what makes all religions phenomena not so much of testimony as of faith.
You start with faith that the gods exist, and then a lot of reality falls into place. Experience is recast as miraculous. The apparent evidence of the senses becomes proof of what was already more or less taken for granted. An imprint in a rock is the mark of Mohammad stepping off into Heaven. Recovery from an illness is a mark that Jesus Christ is at work. And so on.
Which brings me to the subject of this week's column, in case you were wondering: the power of faith to create fancies that live in the mind.
The news from home is that a March poll conducted by the University of Maryland's reliable Program in International Policy Attitudes discloses that 57% of Americans think that Saddam Hussein, while in power, gave substantial support to al-Qaida. Forty-five percent think that clear evidence found in Iraq buttresses this position. The same percentage, 45 %, believe that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction before the war.
This is, of course, fantasy. There is no such clear evidence. Close to half of America is living in fantasy. This happens to be the near half that is represented by George W. Bush and his government. What shall we make of a faith-based superpower?
The University of Michigan historian-blogger Juan Cole calls this a case of two-party epistemology: More than half of America is bending its second-hand ideas of reality in order to make them conform to their allegiance to George W. Bush. (Meanwhile, the lesser half, schooled in the Enlightenment, fumbles along with a funky old pre-postmodern concern for facts.)
Cole elaborates: If it were accepted that Saddam had virtually nothing to do with al-Qaeda, that he had no weapons of mass destruction (nor any significant programs for producing them), and that no evidence for such things has been uncovered after the US and its allies have had a year to comb through Baath documents if all that is accepted, then President Bush's credibility would suffer. For his partisans, it is absolutely crucial that the president retain his credibility. Therefore, rather than face reality, they re-jigger it to create a fantasy world in which Saddam and Usama (Osama bin Laden) are buddies...and in which David Kay (of whom respondents say they've never heard) never recanted his earlier belief that the WMD was there somewhere.
In other words, the principle of cognitive dissonance is hard at work. The true believers, faced with pesky evidence that counters their faith, wish it away the evidence, that is. If they notice irritating counterevidence in the newspaper, they skim. If they hear the words on TV, they forget them. If anything, as the psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter wrote in their classic study, When Prophecy Fails, the less their predictions pan out, the more some of them will redouble their energies, harden their faith, recommit themselves to proselytize.
It is a stupendous fact about the United States of America, one that many of the Indian and Turkish colleagues I've met over recent weeks have repeatedly queried me about: How can you be a superpower if your people are so ignorant? George W. Bush's answer is: Easily.
Why should they worry? For them, faith works if it works if it brings power. They are their own gods, though they may call them Jesus Christ. In this spirit, the truest of true believers have been running the government of the most powerful nation in the history of the world running it, backing it, financing its route to power.
But there aren't enough Republicans to make up the not-so-grand total of 57% who think that Saddam was backing al-Qaeda. So Cole argues this way: If 57% of Americans believe that Saddam was supporting Usama in the late 1990s through 2003, it means that not insignificant numbers of Democrats believe this. It shows that the Democratic party leadership has not developed an effective critique of Bush administration approaches to the 'war on terror,' and that, in effect, the Republicans are poaching on Democratic territory successfully in this regard.
John Kerry has wisely chosen to fight Bush on multiple grounds. (America too has a cast of many gods.) Among them: the ground that presidential bravado is no gift to the nation's security. Predictably, the warrior who ducked military service in the early 1970s, when the ducking was convenient, responds by wheeling out his surrogates to smear Kerry.
But Kerry has to do more than chide Bush for prevaricating and posturing. Most of the faith-impacted are pretty far gone to the land of melodramatic fantasies, but this election will hang and hang for months, and hang, and hang on a smaller but decisive crowd: Americans who aren't ready to let faith do their thinking for them. Kerry has to keep faith with voters who know the limits of faith.
