Belief is what we substitute for hard won, scientific knowledge. When we do not have enough information, we use belief as a place holder, until we know more.
So, until man discovered micro organisms, we believed in evil humors, or the universe being out of balance or hexes or whatever to explain illness. Then we discovered bacteria, and then viruses. Cancer was caused by unhealthy habits, until we discovered genes played a major role.
Then there are the social beliefs, which new knowledge hardly touches.
John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina Congressman and eventual Vice President, believed in slavery. He argued no society beyond the primitives ever existed which did not have one group dominating another, and in the North, there were the owners, bosses, capitalists who dominated the slave wage factory workers. Calhoun insisted the white slave owner treated his slaves far more kindly than Northern capitalists treated their workers. Slave owners provided food and shelter and kindness to their workers, whereas in the North all the workers got was wages, which often provided little food or shelter.
Of course, Calhoun neglected to consider the slaves who saw their children sold away from them, the overseers with their whips and guns and the runaway slaves, who "voted with their feet" to escape the kind, gentle slave owners, and who were dragged home in chains by slave catchers. Calhoun's benign images of slavery did not explain the throngs of slaves who followed the union armies as they marched through slave country, slaves who wept with joy at their liberation.
Margaret Mitchell, writing about 90 years later, embraced the "Lost Cause" myth, which said the slaves were far happier and better off enslaved than free,
"The former slaves were now the lords of creation and, with the aid of the Yankees, the lowest and most ignorant were on top...Thousands of house servants, the highest caste in the slave population, remained with their white folks, doing manual labor which had been beneath them in the old days. Many loyal field hands also refused to avail themselves of the new freedom, but the hoarders of 'trashy free issue niggers' who were causing most of the trouble, were drawn largely from the field-hand class...The least energetic, the least honest and trustworthy, the most vicious and brutish. And now this class, the lowest in the black social order, was making life misery for the South...There they conducted themselves as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do...Packed into squalid cabins, smallpox, typhoid and tuberculosis broke out among them. Accustomed to the care of their mistresses when they were ill in the slave days, they did not know how to nurse themselves or their sick. Relying upon their masters in the old days to care for their aged and their babies, they now had no sense of responsibility for their helpless...Abandoned negro children ran like frightened animals about the town until kind hearted white people took them into their kitchens to raise. Aged country darkies, deserted by their children, bewildered and panic stricken in the bustling town, sat on the curbs and cried to the ladies who passed, "Mistis, please Ma'm, write my old Marster down in Fayette County dat Ah's up hyah. He'll come tek dis old nigger home agin. Fo' Gawd, Ah done got nuff of dis freedom!'"
That passage is from "Gone With The Wind," a novel which was embraced by the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and much of the country in 1936, and while fewer read it than ever saw the sanitized version, the Clark Gable/Vivien Leigh movie, the idea that slaves were happy as slaves lived then, as it does now, in many American minds.
The idea that all men are created equal was laughable to the Southern aristocrat, and that core belief was attacked categorically by the white supremacists of the antebellum South, as it is today by their spiritual descendants in the Dakotas and the Mountain West.
The mind experiment I have been trying to play out is to put myself in that frame of mind and to try to experience the world seen through those lenses. The average American can do that watching those gorgeous scenes in GWTW, imagining what it would be to dress like those aristocrats, to ride about on horses and court Scarlet O'Hara.
Similarly, it is possible to imagine seeing the world through the eyes of a Hitler disciple: The world is divided into the dominators and the dominated, and the white, clean limbed, blond Germans had to follow the call of history to dominate the subhuman Slavs, Jews and Gypsies, as the Cromagnon man had to vanquish and extinguish the Neanderthals.
You can almost thrill to those rallies with all those scarlet flags and bold Swastikas, and you can see how one might get swept way.
For some reason, I've had the notion--you might call it a belief--that in this universe we know where most everything seems to be part of a cycle, that once I die, I'd be recycled, perhaps back in time, or perhaps forward, but, in any case, if there is some sort of core justice, if I had been a Mississippi white supremacist, I'd be reborn as a Black woman, or if I had been a Nazi, I'd be reborn as a Jew, but in any case, whatever was true for me in the past, I would be made to live the life of whom I'd most reviled.
But, in any case, whatever belief I had found most comfortable, would provide the basis for my new life of discomfort.
Now, we have a movement called, "Parents Rights," which aims to inculcate into all kids in public American schools certain beliefs--for Ron DeSantis, that means we do not teach kids about the dark corners of the American past. Anything we find objectionable about our ancestors is scrubbed out of school curriculum, and the only "facts" provided our children to learn and memorize are those which make us heroes and saints.
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