Our beliefs shape how we interpret experience

jNotes

David Foster Wallace told a story during his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College about two guys sitting in a bar in Alaska:

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says:

“Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’”

And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

– David Foster Wallace

This “didactic little story” as Wallace called it shows how our beliefs shape how we interpret our experiences. The same event can be seen as divine intervention or random chance, depending on the lens through which we view the world. But where did we get the lenses? Were we born with them or given to us by our parents, our communities, or peers? Can we ever change them and see things differently?

The meaning we assign to events is often less about truth and more about the stories we’re inclined to believe.

Maybe it was God. Maybe it was chance. Maybe it was both; A world created by God filled with chance. Maybe it was neither… but I’m not quite ready to get into determinism yet.

Maybe it doesn’t matter which lens we’re looking through, so long as:

  • we are aware that lenses exist,
  • we know other lenses are out there,
  • and we use this knowledge to choose which lens we look through, or at least be aware that during any experience, we are in fact looking through a lens.

It’s is not about choosing what to think, but choosing how to think. Wallace called this lack of awareness the “default setting”. To begin to override it is to become aware, to pay attention, and to recognize that our default settings may blind us to other perspectives.

We are what we eat; and what we once ate, we were fed.