Ophelia Benson

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Francis Bacon said of Elizabeth I, "Her Majesty, not liking to make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts, except the abundance of them did overflow into overt express acts and affirmations, tempered her law so as it restraineth only manifest disobedience," which a Hollywood scriptwriter translated into the eloquent and more familiar "I have no desire to make windows into men's souls." This seems an admirable sentiment, especially for a powerful monarch, especially at a time of intense religious conflict, with war and burning at the stake always a looming possibility. Elizabeth's declaration sounds like the voice of sanity in the aftermath of her sister's reign. And yet - there are difficulties.

Belief as belief seems at first blush like something that does belong purely to the self, that others have neither right nor reason to interfere with. If one places any value at all in rights and freedoms, the inside of our own heads seems to be one place they should certainly prevail. If we're not free to believe whatever we choose to believe, we're hardly free at all.

And yet - there are difficulties. Beliefs don't always stay inside individual heads - which was of course Queen Elizabeth's point: she didn't want to peer inside, but she made no promise not to meddle with the outside.

Beliefs, in short, tend to influence actions, in fact it would be hard to think of any non-trivial action that didn't rely on beliefs of some kind. In some cases beliefs can motivate resistance to social goals, for good or ill. One thing that happens in such cases is that people try very hard to change - to interfere with - one another's beliefs. The people who went on 'freedom rides' on buses in the segregated South in 1964 were motivated by their beliefs and were trying to change the beliefs (and actions) of other people. They would have settled for a change of actions, and a change of actions is probably all anyone expected at first, but there can be little doubt that an change of beliefs - a change of mind, a change of heart - is what was wanted in the long term. Angry people allowing, with gritted teeth, desegregated schools and lunch counters and buses would have to do at first, but for the long haul, the hope has to be that people will gradually stop hating each other: will gradually change their beliefs such that hatred no longer feels inevitable.

But the people who resisted all that were also motivated by beliefs, and they too acted on their beliefs, and made some attempt to change the beliefs of their opponents, even if their efforts weren't up to much (variations on 'our coloureds are happy' and 'you know what will happen to you if you do register to vote' don't quite measure up to 'I've been to the mountaintop, and I've seen the promised land'). Beliefs were in play on both sides, on all sides; without any beliefs, all the struggle wouldn't have happened.

And, of course, we try to interfere with each other's beliefs all the time. The mass media are packed full of such attempts in the form of advertising. Education is all about interfering with beliefs. Political campaigns have a little to do with beliefs, though they have a lot more to do with emotions and attitudes.

The Tudor queen was of course talking about state power and force, not argument and persuasion. But the borders between the two aren't always clearly marked, and there is a strong current of thought that maintains beliefs should be left alone because it's actions that matter. That makes sense as a matter of triage, in a dire emergency; if someone is actually sprinting toward you holding a machete aloft, Socratic dialogue is not the best solution to your problem. But when events are unfolding a little more slowly, there is time to notice that beliefs are the root of actions and that it's really not always best to leave them alone. If parents believe their girl children are inferior to their boy children and should be raised accordingly, that belief will have many consequences for those children. It's not at all clear that beliefs of that kind (and they are myriad, as the newspapers keep showing us) are purely personal and thus sacrosanct.

Ophelia Benson is editor of ButterfliesandWheels.Com. She can be contacted here.