Doubt and certainty

I read this Richard Cohen column in yesterday's Journal Gazette, and it really ticked me off, which, I suppose, is a better way than some to make sure one is awake enough to leave the house and get into the car:

If I were not forced to choose a person as my person of the year, I might choose a concept: certainty. It is the one concept we cannot afford. Certainty is where we all get into trouble. We were so certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that it was reason enough to go to war. And once we went to war, we were certain that we would be welcomed in Baghdad by adoring throngs of Iraqis. And all that certainty was itself preceded by the fervid certainty of a president that he had been chosen for this war, this moment, this task. This was the worst certainty of them all.

So, Cohen's goal is to go through life full of doubt, certain of nothing? And that's the kind of leaders he wants? No, I realized, such people really aren't full of doubt. They are certain, too, and certain that the problem with the people who don't agree with them is that they are too certain.

Then, later in the morning, a column came across the wire by Jonah Goldberg (which will be in today's News-Sentinel, one small benefit of having a two-newspaper town), and he answered Cohen and his fellow doubters far better than I could:

This ultimately is my problem with the anti-certainty chorus; they aren't offended by conviction per se, but by convictions they do not hold. Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that "hell is other people." Well, for the new "liberal" champions of skepticism and philosophical humility, hell is the certainty of other people. "Closed-minded" has come to mean "people who disagree with me." (This is a corollary to the popular tendency of defining "diversity" as a bunch of people who look different but think alike). So, for example, pro-lifers have an unshakable "dogmatic" and "faith-based" certainty that abortion is wrong. But, we are told, pro-choicers are merely open-minded and realists. People who are certain gay marriage is good are "enlightened" people, while those whose convictions point elsewhere are zealots.

In other words, certainty has become code among the intellectual priesthood for people and ideas that can be dismissed out of hand. That's what is so offensive about this fashionable nonsense: It breeds the very closed-mindedness it pretends to fight.

I wrote a column for the editorial page a few years ago, and it's even truer now, that the older I get, the fewer things I am certain of. But I am more and more certain of those few things. That seems to me to be a normal progression, the way thinking people change. As we learn, we discard the certitude that comes from prejudice, our parent's views, "the way things have always been" and all sorts of other reflexive responses, and remain certain of only those things our experience tells us is true. As we have been discussing in a previous post, if doesn't matter what you believe but what you have accumulated the evidence to support. The goal should be to seek certainty through the available facts, then act on it, not dismiss the certainty of people we don't agree with. What they believe doesn't matter, either -- only what they can convince us is true.