The question: Can we choose what we believe?

Choice is rarely black and white | Julian Baggini | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Imagine that I hooked you up to an infallible lie detector and asked you to say that you believed the moon was made of cheese. If the machine said you were being honest, I would give you £1m. Could you do it?

It certainly wouldn't be easy. You can pretend to believe whatever you want, but real belief requires some conviction, and this cannot be turned on or off at will. I don't believe in God because certain reasons and arguments weigh more heavily in my mind than others, not because I have wilfully decided to reject my creator, as many religious people seem to think. I could no more simply decide to believe in God than I could decide to like beetroot, just like that.

But that does not mean belief involves no significant element of choice. No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch, today. You can't decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you've made in your life to date. You may have tried to overcome an aversion to beetroot and grown to like it, which would make your liking of beetroot in part a choice. Your genuine preference for a healthy option may have resulted from a decision to get into certain habits, so that healthier choices have come to be more natural and appealing than others. So even though, at the moment of decision, you cannot change what you actually prefer, those preferences are themselves cultivated by other choices you have made.

Belief is very similar. You don't choose what you believe moment to moment, but choices you have made do shape what you come to believe. That's why, given time, you could pass that lie detector test. For instance, you could decide that all language is metaphorical, and so understand the statement that the moon is made of cheese in such a way that you could sincerely believe it. Or, like Humpty Dumpty, you might decide that words can mean what you want them to mean, and pull off a similar trick.

But how could you choose to believe those things about language in the first place? The answer to that is that there are arguments for any belief that at least some intelligent people find compelling, and we come to accept the ones we do because of a combination of our powers of reasoning and our motivations. Unfortunately for those who value reason, it seems very clear that in a straight fight between the two, motivation usually wins. The desire for £1m could easily make the argument that all language is metaphorical seem more compelling than it should.

So, you do have a choice about what to believe in one very important respect. You could choose to strive to overcome distorting desires to believe what it suits you to believe, and cultivate the desire to want your beliefs to be well-grounded. The beliefs you would then come to hold would be chosen in the sense that they would be the result of choices you had made about what kinds of reasons to value and how far you were willing to question and challenge your motivations.

It should be obvious that this process can never be traced back to a pure, unconditioned choice. If you ask why we decide to value reason or to challenge self-serving justification, the answer will always involve facts about ourselves that are not the product of own choices. It is difficult to see what it would even mean to say that who we are and what we believe is wholly down to ourselves. A power a pure will, unconditioned by heredity or environment, makes no sense.

The capacity to make free choices is not something we either have entirely or not at all. Rather, choices become freer the more they are the result of our own capacity to reflect on and assess facts and arguments. Beliefs based on ignorance or whim are thus less freely chosen than those held in full knowledge and on reflection. So to take one of the biggest belief choices of all, we do not choose to believe in God or not, but we can choose how much we attend to inconvenient facts, distorting self-motivations, and the rationality of arguments. In that sense, we are responsible for what we freely believe.

Cyclists v drivers? They're often the same people

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/aug/10/cycling-boom-survey

Research suggests a boom in cycling among affluent 'mid-life crisis' men and car owner

Much has been written about a war between cyclists and drivers, as if the two groups were such polar opposites that they could never cross in a Venn diagram. But according to new research, people who cycle the most are likely to own at least two cars.

Regular cyclists – those who cycle at least once a week – are also disproportionately likely to read broadsheet newspapers, be well educated, have a household income of at least £50,000 per year and shop at Waitrose, claims the latest Mintel report, Bicycles in the UK 2010. In addition, they are twice as likely to be men as women.

"Thirty or 40 years ago, people would ride a bike for economic reasons, but our research suggests that nowadays a bicycle is more a lifestyle addition, a way of demonstrating how affluent you are," said Michael Oliver, who wrote the report for market researchers Mintel.

His research reveals that bike sales are being driven by 35- to 45-year-old family men. Where this age group might once have treated themselves to a sports car – in an attempt to hang on to their youth – they now invest in a luxury bike instead.

The report dubs the upsurge in cycle sales among this demographic as "the noughties version of the mid-life crisis".

Men of a certain age now pride themselves on their bicycle collection. In a documentary last year, Alan Sugar showed off the full-carbon Pinarello machines he has bought for his many residences at a cost of many thousands of pounds each.

Halfords, the UK's biggest bike retailer, confirmed the trend, reporting a rise in interest in all cycles, particularly among top-of-the range products. Premium sales as a whole are up by around 54% in the past two years.

Pashley, a British firm which makes traditional-style bikes, said it had seen sales of some everyday models rise by 50% year-on-year.

However, just 12% of adults questioned by Mintel said they cycled regularly, while 65% said they never rode a bike. One in seven (15%) said they were "lapsed cyclists" who had a bicycle which they no longer rode.

The main reason given for not cycling was safety, with 39% of respondents saying it is too dangerous to ride a bicycle on the road. Women aged 45 or older are the most likely to be put off by the perceived danger of road traffic.

Many people (24%) said they would cycle more often if there were more bicycle lanes, and 14% said while they would like to bike to work, cycling wasn't practical because of a lack of showers or changing facilities.

Ten percent of the sample of 1,557 viewed cyclists as "a nuisance". That increased to 14% among those who regarded cycling as too dangerous. The most antagonism towards cyclists was reported among consumers in the south, south-west and London regions, but there was no real difference among car owners and car-less respondents, said Mintel.

After the success of British cyclists in the Olympic velodrome in Beijing in 2008, there was hope that a new generation of riders would be inspired by the likes of gold medallists Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton. But Mintel's research suggested the effect had been negligible among non-cyclists.

"Successful British cyclists, although arguably more high profile than ever thanks to the success of Sir Chris Hoy, for example, have not managed to inspire the general population, with only 2% of respondents admitting this was an incentive to take up cycling," the report claims.

But at the same time, Mintel's survey reveals that British Cycling – the body which administers the sport in the UK – claims to be the fastest growing cycling organisation in the UK, reporting 25% growth between May 2009 and May 2010.

Another cycling organisation, the CTC (Cyclists' Touring Club), which focuses on leisure cycling, has also experienced recent growth of 8% year-on-year, and now has almost 66,000 members. These members are major enthusiasts; they spend on average £700 plus and own an average of 2.2 bicycles, according to recent CTC figures.

Roger Geffen, Campaigns and Policy Director for the CTC, said the government should do more to make the roads safer for cyclists in a bid to encourage more people to get on their bikes, particularly women.

We know that the higher the level of cycling, the more the gender imbalance evens out," he said. "In the Netherlands and Denmark, where far more people cycle, 55% of all bike trips are made by women."

Mintel estimates that the bike trade will boom over the next five years. Last year 3.6m bikes were sold in the UK. By 2015 Mintel expects that figure to rise to just over 4m.

But Mark Walmsley of the Association of Cycle Traders said there had not yet been a real cycling boom nationwide. "There have been some pockets of the country which have seen an increase in people buying bikes, for example in London, but nationally, there has been no boom. All of this hype that's going on is rubbish."

ambivalence

 | Mail Online

Being unable to deal with ambivalence can result in people being stuck in a swamp of indecision or 'acting out' to get rid of the negative feelings by, for instance, having an affair. Or it can result in people drifting through life. They may say they're 'just going with the flow', but what they are really doing is letting other people make their big life decisions for them because they can't face their own contradictory feelings.

At the same time, when we are unable to tolerate strong conflicting emotions, we tend to put them on a pedestal and see them as completely flawless - or can hardly bear to pass the time of day.

'Like children, many of us still tend to see the world as black and white, good or bad, right or wrong, joyful or depressed'

Like children, many of us still tend to see the world as black and white, good or bad, right or wrong, joyful or depressed. We create heroes and villains. Which means we are not particularly good at living with the anxiety, ambivalence and ambiguity of life in the middle, in the vast grey area.

I've seen too many supposedly happy marriages go down.'

Culture Jammer

For twenty years, the culture jammer movement has been building momentum for a cultural revolution that will topple consumerism. Now Adbusters and our worldwide network of activists (now 86,590 strong) is calling for a Carnivalesque Rebellion this November 22–28.Think of it as an adventure, as therapy, as Buy Nothing Day times a hundred … think of it as the World Cup of global activism – a week of postering and pranks, of talking back at your profs and speaking truth to power. Some of us will poster our schools and neighborhoods and just break our daily routines for a week. Others will chant, spark mayhem in big box stores and provoke mass cognitive dissonance. Others still will engage in the most visceral kind of civil disobedience.In all, millions of people around the world will walk out of their schools, offices and factories for a week and LIVE!
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