On Certainty
“The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard.”
-Yehuda Amichai
I used to have a Subaru with a bumper sticker given to me by a medieval music scholar that said “Militant Agnostic: I Don’t Know and Neither Do You.” The juxtaposition of “militant” against the mealiness of agnosticism was catnip to this snarky Gen Xer. We have no idea.
Voltaire said, “Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” I believe our natural inclination towards certainty is the root cause of a great deal of our current individual and societal suffering.
Anthropology¹: What a wondrous and terrifying universe our naked species dropped into. To respond to the countless natural and social phenomena we don’t understand but have to survive, we created infrastructures of thought, in the form of legal systems, rituals, philosophies, even science and technology. Over time, these systems under which we collectively agreed to live become invisible; they become reality. What started as a collection and imposition of ideas eventually becomes what we understand to be truth, serving the critical role of protecting us from the unknown, from the deep discomfort of ambiguity and from the tribal and civilization-fracturing forces of doubt.
Psychology: Certainty functions as an emotional state, not an intellectual one². Much conspires to dissuade us from exploring nuance, complexity and contradiction: social media, confirmation bias, a longing to belong to our tribe, and vast commercial forces that have a vested interest in controlling the information to which we are exposed. Countless others have written on this topic, but it’s important to make note of everything conspiring in our daily lives to put us in the intellectual equivalent of Temple Grandin’s cow chute³.
History: History is littered with the consequences of governments and other power centers acting from certainty. Pogroms and ethnic cleansing start with the certainty that the other is a threat. Some of the greatest harms of the modern era have come not from cruelty but from a blind confidence in progress: the belief that efficiency, scale or dominion over the previously unknown justified decisions that deprioritized the interests of the lives they would impact. Consider urban renewal projects, eminent domain that destroys communities, and immoral medical interventions or bodily autonomy overreach that would (or should) be unthinkable today.
But it’s hard sledding to live in the not-knowing. Forces conspire to strip our lives of what once might have been called meaning. Our attention is fragmented across what I recently saw referred to as the “slot and slop economy” (slot = algorithms mimic the dopamine hit of slot machines; slop = the avalanche of AI-generated content to which we’re subjected).
We battle to protect our children from the harms caused by social media and its predatory manipulation of their impressionable brains. We fear being replaced in our professional identities by AI. Our communities are pitted against one another by market and state powers who have an interest in sowing division.
Is it any wonder we mistake the comfort and refuge of like-minded conviction for truth? Is it surprising or discomfiting that anyone would seek out communities who share their beliefs and unite against perceived threat?
People talk of history as a pendulum. When we broadened the aperture to embrace a truly global society, much of what we saw was scary: increasing Sino-imperialism and economic dominance, poverty, disease and suffering on an unmanageable scale, untractable wars with thousand-year origins in faraway places, the arbitrage of labor to countries that place less of a premium on human “resources”. Is it any wonder we turn away and look inward, trying to find refuge in affinity, whether that looks like nationalism, party affiliation or most uncomfortably, race? But just because an idea is widely held doesn’t make it true. Conviction is not truth.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
-W.B. Yeats
With a respectful nod to Oprah Winfrey, the older I get, the less I know for sure. I’m a militant agnostic about all kinds of things. Though I am far from one of Yeats’ “best”, I do lack conviction, and I hope to explore some of the areas where complexity leaves me most uncertain in subsequent posts.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to pay attention to those moments when I feel compelled to double down and speak my truth. Or when I find myself making a snap judgment about someone else. The Jungian scholar James Hollis considers these moments among the most valuable in terms of identifying your own shadow; in Jung’s words, the shadow self is not good or bad, it is simply “what we do not wish to be" ⁴.
When a comment, news story, or relative “triggers” you into setting the record straight, notice and pause. Ask yourself if the point of view you are feeling called to espouse or defend is indeed objectively true, if it needs to be articulated in that moment, if you are the right person to do so, and whether what you are feeling is absolute certainty, or more of a moral conviction. Would the dialogue be enhanced by conviction or curiosity? In this moment, do you find yourself hardening or softening?
There are universal truths, but our relationship to them is healthiest when it remains open and inquisitive. Consider the genius framing of Thomas Jefferson’s words, “we hold these truths to be self-evident" ⁵. He is not merely declaring them as true (though they are about as close to a universal truth as it gets), he is binding us to them ethically, asking the reader for a gut check and in doing so, making us a partner in his argument. Some things are unimpeachably true. The problem comes when believing ourselves to be right becomes more important than remaining responsible for the consequences of that belief. That is when the place becomes hard and trampled like a yard.
When you feel you’ve come across one of your own certainties, test it:
Does it invite responsibility or shut down questioning?
Does it expand our moral obligation or reduce it?
Is there any room for curiosity to add texture to your point of view?
Curiosity is the potent counterforce. Curiosity begets conversation. Conversation begets understanding. Amichai calls these chinks in the armor “doubts and loves”. They soften the ground for planting and building. They replace the shouting with a whisper. Lean in and listen.
“But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.”
Footnotes
¹ Matthew Carey and Morten Axel Pedersen, “Infrastructures of Certainty and Doubt”, University of Copenhagen (2017).
² Steven Stosny, Ph.D., “The Epidemic of Certainty”, Psychology Today (2021).
³ Temple Grandin, “Cattle Handling Systems and Layout of Cattle Corrals and Races” (1998).
⁴ James Hollis “A Life of Meaning” (2023).
⁵ The Declaration of Independence (1776)
