Knowing, Believing, Understanding

The upcoming election has led me to spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to understand something. When political candidates say that global warming is a myth, for example, I can’t help but wonder what they’re thinking. Do they know it isn’t a myth, but choose to say what they think will get them votes? Or do they genuinely not understand the piles of data that show global temperatures increasing, and so really believe what they say? Either option is equally alarming, so I’ve been trying to come up with a third explanation.

Here is my latest theory.

There are three levels of knowledge acquisition: knowing, believing, and understanding.

To know is simply to be aware of a fact, claim, or opinion. The things that allow us to know are passive forms of learning: reading, hearing, watching, mimicking.

To believe is to assign validity or invalidity to a fact, claim, or opinion. The things that allow us to believe are choices: how we choose to interpret what we know.

To understand is to be aware of the complete context around a fact, claim, or opinion. The things that allow us to understand are experiences: things that happen to us and, in some cases, to those near and dear to us.

My own recent experiences related to a couple of divisive national issues – namely, the stigmas about mental illness and rampant sexism – will help me explain my thoughts on this. Let’s start with mental illness.

I have known for a long time that depression and anxiety disorders existed. I took psychology courses in college, for one thing, and also heard them discussed in other contexts. I never disbelieved in their existence, per se, but did hear plenty of people saying they were sensationalized, and so I didn’t really hold any strong beliefs in either direction.

But then my father got treatment for depression, and he became an entirely different person. Then a close friend suffered through a terrible bout of depression and her whole demeanor spoke of struggle. I saw these things, and I made a decision. I believed in the terrible power of depression and anxiety and stopped being afraid to take a side.

This seems like it could be the end of the story, but it isn’t. Roughly a year ago, I can safely say I knew depression and anxiety were real problems, and believed it, but I did not yet understand it. It was only when I slipped into my own bout of depression that I really began to understand.

When I started to feel the depression coming on, I knew what it was immediately. But despite knowing that treatments existed and believing there was no shame in seeking them, I did not understand how bad it was going to get. I told myself I could power through it. I thought if I just faked it in public, I would be fine. However, I was completely, utterly wrong. I spiraled into a pit of despair. I woke up in the morning saying, “Oh God, it hurts it hurts it hurts” without even knowing what I was talking about. I counted hours and minutes and seconds until I could be back in my apartment, on my couch, which was the only place I felt somewhat safe.

Then I went to the doctor and got a prescription. I started taking it, and things got better. And that was when I got it. Not until I experienced depression did I really understand it – and the understanding definitely strengthened my belief in it.

It was similar with sexism. I’ve been interested in women’s rights for most of my adult life, so I heard all the stories of double standards in the workplace, catcalling on the street, and the like. I knew all of this was happening, and I wanted to believe it. But loathe as I am to admit it, I didn’t believe it right away. All of it seemed a bit exaggerated to me. How could men just be directly repeating what women said in meetings as if they hadn’t heard them say it? How could the same suggestion be lauded when offered by a man and scorned when offered by a woman? I just couldn’t picture these things happening. Certainly people were not this blatant in their sexism.

Then both of the aforementioned things happened to me in the space of a week. It was as if the things coming out of my mouth were being somehow transformed before reaching male ears. I had always pictured men as being deliberately disrespectful when this happened, and I think that fueled my reluctance to believe. I didn’t buy that they could get away with such things. When it happened to me, though, it was clear that my male coworkers had no idea they were doing it. It seemed like an SNL sketch, but it was 100% real. They get away with these things because they don’t realize they are happening. It's just that ingrained in our culture. This does not make it any better – worse, in many ways – but it did change my thinking about it. After I experienced these forms of sexism, I understood the problem. And I believed sexism was a rampant problem.

In short, these experiences showed me that there is are differences between knowing, understanding, and believing. Knowing is easy. Knowing is generally not the problem. Understanding and believing are the critical pieces. It is possible to believe without understanding, I think. After my experiences with unspoken sexism, for example, I wholeheartedly believe that unspoken racism is an equally rampant problem – despite knowing I’ll never experience it and so never fully understand it. (When it came to blatant racism, of course, I never had any doubts about its existence.)  Is it possible to understand without believing? Perhaps, but I think it must be rare. It is hard to deny truths that affect you directly. Experiences are critically important and influential to beliefs.

This realization helped me make sense of (though not approve of!) so much of what goes on in our political process. Suddenly I could explain to myself how so many educated politicians could be faced with so much data pointing to global warming and still assert that it is a myth. They see the data. Plenty of people force the data in front of their faces, and so these politicians know that global warming is happening. But because they were not the ones to collect the data, because they weren’t the ones to discover the temperatures climbing and the ice melting, because they weren’t the ones to experience that – these politicians do not understand it and have chosen not to believe it.

It’s the same with women’s rights. At the first republican debate earlier this month, several of the candidates said that they supported the idea of making abortion illegal, talking at length about the unborn child’s right to protection under the law. What struck me the most was not their assertion that a fertilized egg is a life that needs protecting. Rather, it was the fact that not once did any of the candidates acknowledge that the woman carrying the egg was a life worth protecting. The only mention of women at all was when the moderator pressed the candidates into saying whether they thought abortion should be illegal even when the life of the mother is at stake. Some of them said yes, repeating again that the fetus is a life that needs to be protected, without even mentioning the life of the woman.

The politicians know there are a myriad of circumstances that can lead to an unplanned pregnancy that extend far beyond unprotected casual sex. But they will never be a woman facing such a pregnancy, and so they don’t understand what it is like to make the choice to abort, or to not have that choice. For that reason, they continue to believe that the circumstances of the pregnancy don’t matter, and that the life of the unborn child should always trump a woman’s right to choose. The fact that a woman’s life may hang in the balance – the pregnancy may physically kill her, affect her psychologically for the rest of her life, or destroy a livelihood she’s worked her whole life to build – just does not matter.

So this is the state of things. There are things that the people in power do not understand, and so despite what they know, they believe things that are to the contrary to what they know. Those beliefs will always guide their decisions.

How do we fix this? If experiences are the key to understanding and the safest pathway to belief, then it seems that pressing those in power to experience the things they are discussing would solve many of our problems. Unfortunately, it's not that simple, as no one can experience everything. Sometimes there is simply a lack of opportunity. Other times, forcing a particular experience on someone is unethical. Still other times, it is a physical impossibility. For the most part, a man will never be a woman, and a white person will never be of color. No one can experience what it’s like to be everyone, and so there are a great many things that many people will never fully understand. That’s just the way it is.

The situation seemed quite bleak to me when my thought process got this far. Is there nothing we can do about this? Will nothing ever change?

As I was considering this question, a seemingly unrelated memory came back to me. Several years ago, my colleagues and I spent many hours discussing the most productive and helpful changes that should be made to our curricular materials for the next edition. A particularly iconic piece of the curriculum, a multiplication algorithm that appeared in our materials and almost nowhere else, was on the table as a potential cut. One of my committees had written the recommendation to cut it, and I had many solid arguments against it. It was a black box; kids didn’t really understand how it worked. It takes up a lot of paper and it takes some visual and motor coordination to keep the work straight. Parents and teachers issue a lot of complaints about it. And so on.

Despite what I thought was a solid case, several of my colleagues fought to keep the algorithm. This was utterly bewildering to me for a long stretch of time, and then suddenly one coworker said something that I’ll never forget.

“You don’t understand what it’s like to watch a kid struggle and struggle and struggle with multiplication and then finally be successful!” she said. “You don’t understand what a difference it makes to have this one as an option. You don’t understand how joyful and proud they are when they find a way to get the right answer!”

I stopped arguing immediately, because she was right. I didn’t understand it. I have never experienced being in a classroom when a struggling student suddenly found that this algorithm was their path to success. I didn’t understand the importance of the algorithm – but at that moment, I believed it. I shut up, and I let the former teachers in my midst make the call about the fate of the algorithm. I knew I wasn’t the right person to make the call.

Here is the point I’d like to direct at today’s politicians: It may be impossible for you to understand some things, because some experiences aren’t accessible to you. And often, it is understanding that leads to belief. But it’s important to remember that beliefs are choices, and you can choose to believe something even when you don’t understand it. Equally important, when choosing to believe something you don’t fully understand, is acknowledging that you don’t understand it. And finally, perhaps most important, is recognizing the truth of this statement:

If you do not understand something, you have no business being the one to make decisions about it – particularly if you are refusing to thoughtfully and fully consider the advice of the people who do understand.

The older I get, the more I believe that the way to accomplish the most is not to gain more expertise, but to know the limits of your own expertise and seek out the help and advice of others when you need it. This is what gains the respect of intelligent people. This is what leads to real progress and change.

You won’t win my vote by telling me about your long political record. You won’t win my vote by telling me you’re not a politician at all. You won’t win my vote by spouting off a bunch of disconnected facts. You’ll win my respect, and my vote, by demonstrating that you are aware of what you don’t understand and who the people are that understand what you don’t.

No one understands everything, but everyone can understand the fact that they don’t understand everything.