Beliefs Grow Like Fingernails

Beliefs grow like fingernails. They start out small, and they can’t dig in and clutch anything. As they grow stronger, their grip improves. And when life seems like you’re trying to climb a sheer cliff with nothing to hold on with than your fingernails, it’s good to have strong ones. But it’s a funny thing about fingernails and beliefs. You don’t will them to grow. They just do. They may grow strong and straight, or they may grow crooked and weak. But they grow as they grow. You believe what you believe because…well, just because. You can’t choose to believe something or to not believe something just because you’d like to. Your beliefs will change, but they change through experience and thought, not because you want them to change.

I can pinpoint the moment that my beliefs, still scattered and weak, coalesced into a way of thinking about the world. I was a preacher’s kid, and like many preacher’s kids, I was a weird amalgam of the holy and the holy terror. When I was small, I thought that I would become a clergyman. By the time I was a teenager, I had rejected that ambition. I always accepted religious beliefs about morality, but never any of the supernatural beliefs that went along with organized Christianity. Who knows why? I never believed in Santa Claus either. Never. I was born a confirmed skeptic.

The moment that changed my somewhat mixed-up conglomeration of beliefs into a direction came when I was in college in the late 1960s. The catalyst for this alteration was Dick Gregory. He came to the campus of the regional state university in Kentucky that I was attending and delivered what was, to me, a tranformative lecture on the importance of activism. I don’t remember a single word that he spoke that night. I only know that I left the lecture hall a changed person. Up until then, my beliefs about politics, war and social justice were, as Socrates would have described them, unexamined. I left Gregory’s speech with a determination to examine those beliefs, to learn as much as I could about what was going on in the world during those turbulent times, and to get involved.

As with most young men of that era, the war in Vietnam was an absorbing concern. I had a strong belief in the fundamental wrongness of war. Indeed, my father had been a conscientious objector during World War II. But I was very confused about what my beliefs about war meant. Was I also a conscientious objector? What criteria would my beliefs about war need to meet to answer that question? I struggled with this issue for many months, and ultimately decided that I was, indeed, a conscientious objector, despite the fact that I did not have any conventional religious beliefs. And after years of effort, I was ultimately granted conscientious objector status by the Selective Service System’s Presidential Appeal Board – one thing I can thank then-President Richard Nixon for, I suppose.

So what was the basis of my belief about the wrongness of war? Well, it was there all along, but it only became clear to me as I worked through the message given by Dick Gregory. I came to a realization that war only existed because of people’s willingness to fight. Few, if any, of the soldiers who participate in wars have a desire to fight – they are only willing to fight because, in a classic vicious circle, those on the other side are willing to fight. And this willingness to fight can only exist if we believe that there is an “us” and a “them”. I believe, like John Steinbeck, that all humanity is a single social organism. There is no “us and them” – there is only us. I have a belief in the “us-ness” of humanity. And if I see it that way, then I have no choice but to be unwilling to fight in a war. I believe that the only hope for an end to war is for all of “us” – all the peoples of the world – to decide that we, as individuals, won’t participate. This I believe.