AS WE WAIT in limbo between political election season and religious holiday season, it is a well-known yet underappreciated fact that most people inherit their most passionately held beliefs from their friends, family and parents. If you're a devout Christian, that's probably largely because your parents are. Had you been born to a family in the Middle East or India, you'd be overwhelmingly statistically likely to be a devout Muslim or Hindu. The same model applies in the political realm, where "open-minded" Democrats and traditionalist Republicans alike routinely parrot the values and ideas of their parents with an astonishingly high fidelity.
Despite some exceptions, this overall trend should give us considerable pause because it demonstrates an unsettling truth. To paraphrase the 18th century essayist Samuel Johnson, we usually come to believe what we believe through contagion instead of reasoned contemplation. Dogma and prejudice appear to be the bullies of the block in some of the most central areas of our lives. Many would do well to take this as a jumping-off point for some serious self-reflection.
At the same time, however, the fact that you believe what your parents believe doesn't necessarily make you wrong. The story of how you come to your beliefs is entirely separate and distinct from whether or not they are true. Truth-claims stand or fall on their own merits, regardless of what anyone subjectively thinks, feels or believes.
And yet it is still uncomfortable to acknowledge that so much of what we think, believe and argue about comes to us from some thoroughly non-rational sources. The implications are different in kind but equally jarring for both religious and political views.
In the religious realm, most beliefs seem straightforwardly to be matters of truth or falsity. Either there is a God or there isn't. Jesus died for our sins and was resurrected, or he didn't and wasn't. I'm going to go to Hell when I die, or I'm not. For many true believers, dispassionate reflection on these questions is difficult, if not impossible.
It is no small task to peel yourself out of the shoes of your upbringing and consider religious matters as an objective arbiter of truth. Millions of Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus all think they have the best arguments to support what they percieve to be mutually exclusive views. It would be quite a coincidence if all of their rational faculties were functioning free from prejudice, and all happened to confirm the tenets of the religions that they were born with.
In the political realm, the situation is much different. Political conflicts usually do not purely concern questions of truth and falsity, but instead arise largely from competing values of right and wrong. Some say abortion is always wrong, while others say it isn't. If there is a correct answer to be found here, it is far from clear how we should go about finding it.
Clearly, there are some truth-based arguments in politics, such as economic disputes about whether or not certain types of government action will hurt a nation's economy. But it becomes more complex to consider whether or not economic efficiency is more valuable or choice-worthy than ensuring the welfare of the poor through tax-funded government handouts. At bottom it can seem to come down to a matter of taste, so that you might as well try to argue in support of your favorite color.
The doctrine of moral relativism maintains that moral beliefs ultimately are just like our preferences for favorite colors. The difference, relativists say, is that we cling to our moral beliefs much more strongly, and we erroneously take them to be somehow objectively true. This relativist doctrine, that morality is just a matter of prejudice and preference, fits well with the fact of how children inherit moral beliefs from parents
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