Humility and the lessons of history

It’s rare for a religious discussion to remain in our mediaculture for long, but that’s been the case for President Obama’s comments at the annual National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 5. Obama gave a speech in which he compared Islamic violence with historic Christian violence. Political opponents expressed outrage. Jim Gilmore, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the remarks “the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime.” 

In the speech, Obama said that “during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” He then brought his historical analogy closer to home: “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
From what I’ve seen, historians who’ve responded to the claims don’t take issue with his statements. Others, though, don’t like him criticizing Christianity or America. 

This raises a question: Is it valuable to practice self-reflection (and self-criticism) as Christians?
A second question is, Is it fair to even call what was done in the Crusades, the Inquisition and in the American South Christian? Most Muslims would deny that what ISIS is doing reflects Islam.
In a Feb. 10 article at Slate.com, Jamelle Bouie explores the facts behind Obama’s statement about Jim Crow. He makes two basic points: (1) it was worse than we may have thought, and (2) it was a religious ritual.
“In a recent report,” Bouie writes, “the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative documents nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia—between 1877 and 1950, which the group notes is “at least 700 more lynchings in these states than previously reported.”
He goes on to offer descriptions of a few of these “lynchings” (the word doesn’t capture the brutality of the torture and butchery), which are too horrible to quote here.
Bouie then notes that these lynchings weren’t just vigilante punishments or “celebratory acts of racial control and domination.” They were rituals. He quotes historian Amy Louise Wood, who writes in her book Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940: “Christianity was the primary lens through which most southerners conceptualized and made sense of suffering and death of any sort.”
Another historian, Donald G. Mathews, writes in the Journal of Southern Religion: “Religion permeated communal lynching because the act occurred within the context of a sacred order designed to sustain holiness.” 

But why bring this up? What purpose does it serve?
Perhaps it’s a lesson in humility and a warning against self-righteousness. Jesus certainly had plenty to say about the perils of self-righteousness (see Matthew 23).
What ISIS has done is horrible—and comparable to what those “Christian” lynch mobs did. But let’s not judge all Muslims by that group. We don’t want all Christians judged by what other so-called Christians have done.
And let’s do some self-analysis as well. Are we not all prone to acts of domination or violence? Can we learn from our past in order to not practice such violence?
Maybe we need to practice confession and repentance on occasion.

We think we know more than we do

We’ve all done this, right—pretended we know something that we really don’t? Or we’ve argued for a position we’re sure about, but if we’re honest we’d have to admit that we really don’t know all that much about the subject.

That word “we” is important in David Dunning’s article “We Are All Confident Idiots” (Pacific Standard, November/December 2014) because it helps us realize he’s not looking down on us. This false confidence is a human trait.

Dunning is a professor of psychology at Cornell University, and his article draws on research from various sources.

But he begins with a couple of humorous examples. Last March at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, he writes, “the late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! sent a camera crew out into the streets to catch hipsters bluffing.” 

Since people at such festivals pride themselves on knowing the new acts, the crew played a trick on them. They asked one man about Contact Dermatitis, “Do you think he has what it takes to really make it to the big time?”

“Absolutely,” the fan said.

However, there’s no such act.

The crew asked a young woman what she knew about Tonya and the Hardings. Not getting the joke, the woman launched into an elaborate response about the fictitious band.

For more than 20 years, Dunning has researched people’s understanding of their own expertise. His research has led him to the conclusion that “to a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance,” he writes.

In 1999, he and a graduate student published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people “cannot recognize just how incompetent they are.”

What’s curious, he writes, is that rather than leaving people disoriented, perplexed or cautious, “the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels like knowledge.”

We all tend to overestimate our knowledge and performance, Dunning writes, “whether it’s grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating or financial knowledge.”

We may like to call others idiots, but we’re all guilty of this. Dunning says one should not think of the ignorant mind as uninformed but as “misinformed.”

So how do we address this ignorance?

Traditionally we think of ignorance as lack of knowledge and appeal to more education. But education, writes Dunning, “even when done skillfully, can produce illusory confidence.”

He offers the example of driver’s education courses, which, “particularly those aimed at handling emergency maneuvers, tend to increase rather than decrease accident rates.” Training people to handle snow and ice, for example, leaves them feeling like they’re experts at it, when in fact their skills usually erode rapidly after they leave the course.

“The most difficult misconceptions to dispel,” Dunning writes, “are those that reflect sacrosanct beliefs.” This is because calling such a belief into question calls the entire self into question. This can be addressed, however, by shoring up the person’s identity elsewhere.

Studies have shown that people are more open to alternative beliefs when, for example, they’ve written an essay about an important aspect of themselves.

Knowledge of our own ignorance is hard to come by, especially when our heads are full of immense knowledge. Sometimes the best response we can give to a question is, “I don’t know.”