Our politics are more heated than ever before, and fed by our belief that we’re right while others are wrong. William James shows us that our beliefs aren’t a rational appraisal of the facts, but influenced by our emotional temperament. We shouldn’t rely on ideology to decide what is true, but look at what works in practice instead.
There are times and places when multiple beliefs and ideologies compete for our attention. We’re in one of them today – scroll the internet, and much of the noisiest and most engaging content is political. Elon Musk’s recent interview with Trump gained 95 million views, while political movements across the world, from left to right and from uprisings in Bangladesh and Kenya to riots and counter-protests in the UK, find new adherents online.
The late-nineteenth-century United States was its own melting pot, with an influx of immigrants seeking economic opportunities, religious freedom, and political refuge. Waves of new Americans brought diverse languages, ways of life and religions to cities and small towns across the county. As a result of this, new Americans adopted new religions. The religions they had left behind in their countries of origin weren’t just making metaphysical claims – they were social and political institutions that governed states and regions. In their place, new and diverse beliefs flourished, allowing more personalised versions of the religious experience.
As a result of this, it wasn’t uncommon for new Americans to adopt new religions. The religions Americans had left behind in their countries of origin weren’t just making metaphysical claims – they were social and political institutions that governed states and regions. In their place, new and diverse beliefs flourished, allowing more personalised versions of the religious experience.
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James also observed that temperament tended to impact the religious experience, and that people seemed to adopt religious viewpoints that confirmed their emotional hunches about the world
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The philosopher and psychologist William James examined this phenomenon in a series of lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience. James believed that religious experiences were the primary source of religious belief. These experiences might involve feelings of awe, a sense of unity with the divine, or moments of profound insight, and often left a profound impact on the individual, leading them to embrace particular beliefs.
James also observed that temperament tended to impact the religious experience, and that people seemed to adopt religious viewpoints that confirmed their emotional hunches about the world. James identified two temperamental extremes, the “sick soul” and the “healthy-minded”, which were characterised respectively by being very high and very low in what the Big Five model of personality traits would now call neuroticism.
If you’re high in trait neuroticism – someone who experiences a lot of negative emotions – you’re more likely to see evil everywhere, and Puritanism might make sense of that. For James, the original Protestant sick soul was Martin Luther, whose overwhelming experience of guilt and fear of damnation led him to seek salvation in faith alone. On the other hand, if you were the sort of infuriatingly upbeat low-neuroticism type whose experience of the world consisted solely of beauty and love, you might end up as a Quaker, or take a universal view of God as immanent in everything like pantheistically inclined poet Walt Whitman.
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