Nobody Has a Get-Out-of-Politics Card

Neil deGrasse Tyson has a line he is fond of, and he once put it to Richard Dawkins as a challenge: I only care what people believe when they use those beliefs to make laws. Otherwise, believe whatever you like — that is the basis of a free society. Why do you care what they believe, as long as they are not turning it into public policy?

It sounds tolerant and grown-up, and it is wrong twice over. Once about how politics works, and once about what freedom of belief actually is.

Beliefs Are Always Counted

The first error is the assumption that a private belief can stay private.

Take the person Tyson has in mind: a man in Iowa who believes the world is six thousand years old and sincerely does not want religion written into law. He is, on Tyson's account, harmless. His belief is his own business.

But that man votes. And when he votes, he does not vote on the age of the earth; he votes for a candidate, and the candidate belongs to a camp, and the camp has a platform. His creationism is highly correlated with everything else about him politically, and the party that receives his vote knows it. It counts him — not as a nuanced individual who separates his cosmology from his civics, but as one more unit of a bloc. Power wants control, and it will use his voice to legislate against abortion, against gay marriage, for religion in schools, whether or not that is what he personally intended.

He does not get to opt out of this. Nobody does. Beliefs are aggregated into camps and camps are converted into policy, and the conversion does not consult the individual believer about which of his beliefs he meant to be political. None of us has a get-out-of-politics card. We are all in this together and we all influence each other, including when we would rather not.

So "as long as he is not making laws" describes nobody. Everyone is making laws, one vote at a time, and the beliefs that drive the vote are exactly the ones Tyson says he does not care about.

Freedom of Belief Is Choosing From a Menu

The second error is deeper and I find it more interesting.

Tyson's "free society" in which people "believe whatever they like" assumes a kind of freedom that does not exist. People do not pick beliefs from the infinite space of possible beliefs. They pick from a menu — a short one — that their society hands them.

Here is the proof. There are no worshippers of Zeus in the United States. None. Not because Americans examined the Olympian pantheon and found it wanting; they never examined it. It was not on offer. Jesus was on offer, in every town, in a building with a steeple, taught to children before they could read. The distribution of belief in a society is the distribution of what was on the menu, and the menu was written by other people long before any individual got to "choose."

This is not a small qualification. It means that a fight over beliefs is not a fight over what any one person may think. It is a fight over what will be on the menu at all, in what font size, and how much respect each item carries. And that menu is set by everybody: by parents, by schools, by television, by the neighbour who says something at a barbecue. The man in Iowa who wants no religious laws is still shaping what his children, his neighbours and his rivals will find on offer. He is not a bystander to the menu. He is part of the kitchen.

Why This Licenses Arguing With Everyone

Put the two points together and Tyson's rule reverses.

If beliefs always become votes, and if what people can believe is set by what those around them believe, then there is no category of "private belief that harms no one." There is only belief that has not yet been counted, and belief that has not yet shaped someone else's options. Both will.

So the atheist who argues with the harmless creationist is not overstepping. He is doing the only thing that changes the menu: adding an item, raising its font size, lowering the font size of another. That is what the believer's pastor is doing too. The competition over what people believe is the competition over what people will be able to believe, and abstaining from it does not make you neutral. It makes you absent.

Is This Suppressing Freedom?

Only if you hold the libertarian picture of a person who could believe anything and is being pressured to believe one thing. That person does not exist. Everyone is already being pressured; the menu is the pressure.

Once you see freedom of belief as it really is — picking among a small set of options that your society, your schooling, the internet and the media have put in front of you — then the fight to change the options is not an attack on freedom. It is the only form the exercise of freedom has ever taken. Tyson's refusal to care is not tolerance. It is leaving the menu to whoever is still writing it, and they have never once shown the same restraint.