Bias

Friday, November 21, 2025

Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

 (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Bias

Seeing is not necessarily believing. Or rather, we don’t see the same thing, even when it’s front of all our eyes. Brian McLaren says, “We may live in the same country, the same city, or even under the same roof, but we live in different realities.” – from Learning How to See

Because this is so (even though we often can’t believe that it is so) we habitually disregard or refuse to believe another point of view regardless of evidence. Every form of social media encourages this endless dispute, and the bitter disagreement between us prevents even major problems from being solved.

“People see what they can’t see,” continues McLaren, “and we are almost always unconscious of this. We are blind to what blinds us. The name for these unconscious internal obstacles in bias.”

McLaren lists 16 specific biases (all of which coincidentally belong to the letter C):

1. Confirmation bias (confirming our present standard)
2. Complexity bias (keep it simple, sweetheart, or I won’t listen)
3. Community bias (if my tribe believes, it must be true)
4. Complementarity bias (if you are hostile, I will be too)
5. Competency bias (Garrison Keillor spoke of Lake Wobegon that all the children are above average. We’re pretty sure we are too, but others are not)
6. Consciousness bias (I don’t know-it-all already, but I think I do)
7. Comfort or Complacency bias (please don’t rock my boat, I’m trying to sleep)
8. Conservative/liberal bias (I unconsciously lean toward either nurturing fairness and kindness or toward strict enforcement of purity, loyalty, liberty and authority)
9. Confidence bias (I prefer a bold lie to hesitant truth. “I have confidence in confidence … as the nun Maria sang)
10. Catastrophe Bias (remember the awful and assume things will only get worse. Gradual declines or improvements become invisible.)
11. Contact bias (without sustained contact, the “other” doesn’t really exist or matter)
12. Cash bias (it’s hard to see something when my way of making a living requires me not to see it)
13. Conspiracy bias (when I’m stressed or ashamed, I seek a story that portrays me as an innocent victim. It’s someone else’s fault, someone else is evil)
14. Constancy/baseline bias (way back when I was young my brain established a “baseline of normalcy” and nothing else is acceptable to me
15. Certainty/closure bias (can we just make up our minds and get on with it? Even a pessimistic certainty beats an optimistic uncertainty)
16. Cleverness bias (habitual late-night show sarcasm generally rejects that which is good or encouraging. Don’t be naïve. Avoid disappointment by never hoping in the positive)

 

I am discouraged by Brian’s analysis. Negative bias lives in every corner of my world, within me and outside. Moving away from bias and toward listening becomes more important than I realized. Who knew?

In school from 1^st grade on, we are taught mostly how to write, then how to speak, and finally how to listen. That order should be reversed, but it is not.

Here’s a poem for us from Maine:

Listening is a door

You listen,

as the forest listens to the wind,

as the ocean hears the river.

You listen to someone, not just their speaking

but their being.

Your listening is a door,

through which they enter you.

The more fully, openly, spaciously you listen,

the more of them comes in,

what they’re saying and not saying,

and can’t say, what they may not even know

until they hear it being heard.

The door that is your listening becomes

the whole space, a house, a temple.

It holds the world.

In this temple, beneath the words,

beneath the cries and silences,

you hear the voice of God—

without words, a wind. A music,

enveloping all, the full sound.

In someone’s story, even their pain,

is the world’s vast joy and agony.

In your listening the whole sanctuary

resounds with the glory of God. – Steve Garnaas-Holmes

I am a great lover of words and always have been. When words evoke poetry in me and pluck the strings of my heart, I feel more whole and more holy. But speaking takes a second row and listening gets the best seat. Steve calls what we listen to … the voice of God – without words, a wind, a music.

The story of Judas’ victory in 1 Maccabees 4, requires an annual eight-day celebration of Hannukah to honor the history. This year that will be December 14 through 22. Of course there will be words, but mostly there will be silence, and a wind, and above all music.

Blessed may you be, O Lord,

God of Israel our father

From eternity to eternity.

Yours, O Lord, are grandeur and power,

Majesty, splendor and glory,

For all in heaven and on earth are yours.

(1 Maccabees 4, 1 Chronicles 29, John 10, Luke 19)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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