March 01, 2004

I seem to have missed Astonished Head's second blogiversary. I was working on this post last week for publication on February 28, thinking that was the anniversary date. As it turns out, the anniversary date was February 22. Then, something extraordinargrily funny happened on Friday which knocked me out of the post's serious mood for three days. But, in one of those peculiar coincidences that I am pleased to have in my life, I received an e-mail today that was a near-perfect illustration of the post's subject matter. Thus: I was back in the mood, and could finish the post off and move on with my life.

Two years ago, on February 22 (not February 28), I wrote the first words for this site. Ostensibly about the situation in the Middle East, the brief post was more about my fascination with unfounded certainty. I concluded:

It has occurred to me, as I’ve flipped through the pages of FrontPage, Salon, Drudge and others over the past two weeks, how much easier it must be to simply adopt a position on something and then move on [...] think about it: with The Position, one need not be concerned with fresh developments. They all fit into the Position. Everything simply reinforces it.

Perhaps I should go get one. I wonder where they’re sold?

Two years on, I still don't have a Position. I don't have an ideology into which all events, facts, figures, statistics, and arguments must necessarily be stuffed.

That seems a bit hard to believe, doesn't it? There's been a fair amount of frothing invective here. I could easily be mistaken for a raging partisan ideologue with no more right to inhabit God's green earth than a weasel.

But, as I very recently told a correspondent whose idea of starting a dialogue was to call me a paranoid racist, advocacy is not the same the same as True Belief. The latter implies certainty, the former does not.

I do not take refuge in the ease of certainty. It seems to me that the overwhelming majority of people in this country--and elsewhere, for that matter--are afflicted with an epistemelogical fear that drives them to claim as certainty what is actually faith. By that, I mean that there is an insurmountable division between faith, which is belief without empirical proof that has ultimate mystery at its heart, and certainty, which is or ought to be based upon empirically verifiable fact. In our culture, that vast chasm is being ignored, and this ignorance is destroying civil debate and crippling our public discourse.

To understand what I mean, contrast the certainty of someone who knows the boiling point of water with the certainty of someone who knows that God created the heavens and the earth.

The first certainty is a self-contained unit of knowledge: it is a numerical value based upon a human-created scale of heat measurement and is subject to quantifiable mathematical variables of atmospheric pressure. Within the confines of those mathematical variables its truth is undeniable. The physical property exists, and is located at a certain point on the scale. The mathematical formula used to describe the boiling point and its pressure variations is simply a name for the phenomenon, the equivalent of calling a chunk of cold magma "rock" or "roche."

The second certainty has no such name. Despite the assertions of many theists, there is no self-evident phenomenon to which we can point and then describe using a system that is self-contained. Any description of divine creation requires God, and anyone of mature faith will admit the essential, unknowable mystery that lies at the center of their belief in that God. That mystery is the defining element of faith. Living a life of faith means contending with doubt. Such a life is burdened with paradox, uncertainty, and risk. That risk comes from the psychological stress of squarely confronting the unknown and the insecurity that arises from the possibility of being mistaken about matters of ultimate consequence.

This is why I have far more respect for a person of mature faith than I do for a dogmatic atheist. The person of mature faith will admit uncertainty, and contend with the ever-present threat of despair in the face of unknowing. The atheist will claim certainty, and enjoy simplistic comfort. Similarly, I have little regard for those who claim as certainty what is more properly called faith, who admit no real doubt at the heart of their faith, and thereby cheaply achieve a similar ease of mind.

Our culture is rife with faith mistaken for certainty. Our public discourse is crammed to bursting with individuals who loudly affirm their certainty with no more claim to that certainty than an infant. These people are the True Believers, and they occupy the entirety of the political spectrum.

Adopting an idea or set of beliefs is, properly, an active process. The idea must be used, and worked with. There is no other way to explore an idea's permutations, or to see how it fits in with other ideas. This entails arguing as though the idea is true, while admitting the possibility that it might not be. I call this advocacy, and our culture has forgotten how to do it: in the public square, there is certainty or nothing. Witness the strange reluctance of the current administration to acknowledge their intelligence failures regarding Iraqi WMD, even when such an admission would be an excellent opportunity to restate and reaffirm the many other reasons for toppling the Hussein regime.

My criticism might seem difficult to reconcile with the profusion of punditious certitude (PPC) that exists on these pages, but I think that the explanation is simple enough.

First: I'm not claiming that I am a genius of philosophical detachment. The pursuit of truth, and of proper methods to use in that pursuit, is an ongoing process of which I have a loose grasp at best. I muddle through as best I can.

Second: advocacy is a rhetorical tool. As I mentioned, it requires arguing as if a given idea is true, but it also requires participatory dialogue in good faith to reveal the failures of that idea. Many of the people who read this site already agree with what I write and, quite frankly, most of those who strongly disagree and have been motivated enough to write to me have demonstrated a poor grasp of what it means to engage in constructive dialogue and no grasp of how to construct a cogent argument. Just because I believe that an idea of mine hasn't been effectively challenged doesn't mean that I'm wedded to it.

Finally, PPC is easy to write. It requires no caveats or qualifications. It flows, and it's less work. If I vetted every word I wrote with the ideal amount of consideration, this would be a monthly site, if that.

What allows me to offer my criticism in good conscience is that, as a general rule, I try to hold my opinions lightly. In the past, I have argued fiercely for this or that idea. More recently, I have come to see the futility of arguing with True Believers of any persuasion. I don't enjoy bashing my head into a concrete bridge abutment. Similarly, I find little incentive to begin a discussion with someone who doesn't care enough about the pursuit of truth to learn how to establish a premise, argue with cogent civility, or avoid making crass assumptions.

I've found that most people who claim to "love to argue" simply love to talk, to express their own ideas. They're not truly interested in much of anything beyond establishing the primacy of their own opinions. They seek the validation of their own intellectual processes through the rhetorical domination of others. They do not want to face the chasm of doubt, but instead seek the comfort of certainty, by any means.

I recognize this in others because I have recognized it in myself.

However, the more I chipped away at my own "certainties," the more I realized that I was willing to do what most, it seems to me, are not: creep up to the edge of the cliff, peer down into the black depths of the division between true certainty and faith...and remain there. The heart of my epistemology lies down there, somewhere, and it drives my psychology. Chronic uncertainty, like cognitive dissonance, can make a person neurotic and prone to anxiety. In my case, I became fond of any substance that might enable me to quell the trembling. Alcohol, cannabis, opiates...anything that would blind me to the terrible vacuum of unknowing at my center. But, now that I have disposed of those things as solutions, I am left with my skepticism and my anxiety. It is not especially pleasant...but I find it preferable.

False certainty is comfortable. It is grounding, and lends one a sense of security. The more important the chosen idea, the greater the comfort of its supposed Truth, and the more violent the upheaval when the false certainty is threatened. Some people seem to attach vast importance to ideas that are, to my mind, trivial at best: where Bush spent his National Guard years, whether Clinton was a draft-dodger, and so forth. Closer examination of the furious tumult surrounding these non-issues generally reveals a fine web of connections to other ideas: Bush is evil, Clinton is amoral. These ideas, in turn, are connected by thick, rope-like strands to a critical network of self-regarding concepts, usually involving a person's own character and moral standing.

People make the mistake of intimately connecting their own self-worth--even their deeply-held metaphysical views of how the universe works--to these ephemeral, flitting issues. Thus, the disputation of an idea about where a rich man's son spent the Vietnam war reverberates throughout a person's entire network of established ideas and self-regarding concepts, causing discomfort and deep distress.

This phenomenon repeats, over and over again. You can see it in the protestors at the San Francisco courthouse with their GOD HATES FAGS signage, and in the Seattle protestors with their BUSH=HITLER banners. You'll find it on Fox News and in the comments at MoveOn.org. It's on the Op-Ed pages and the television talk-shows and, of course, it's everywhere on the Internet. And this is just among the people who claim to care about the truth. The vast bulk of the population is content to let this "pundit class" do the thinking for them, and then they choose to adopt and defend the ideas that fit in most comfortably with what they already believe.

The dishonesty occurs when, in any discussion or argument, they defend "their" ideas with conviction, unaware that they are people of faith, not certainty. They are not advocates: they are Believers. Their inability to truly confront uncertainty and live with real doubt, at any level, gives rise to the shrill cacophony of rude shouting that passes for modern public discourse.

I am an advocate and a person of faith, which is to say that I know nothing for certain. Today, I believe things that are ridiculous, and I will believe other, equally ridiculous things tomorrow.

This site documents my movement through the ridiculous, and is, I think, a depiction of my struggle to remain belly-down on the cliff's edge.