I’ve been thinking a lot about doubt, lately, triggered in part by the great Learned Hand quote below:
“The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right…,”
and thinking about why that matters so much.
I tend to see way to much self-certainty around me, on the Right, Left, Libertarian, Young Socialist, or whatever. In reality, the world is messy and uncertain. One of my favorite examples ever is from Henry V; not the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech, but the scene at the end of the battle:

EXETER. Here comes the herald of the French, my liege.
GLOUCESTER. His eyes are humbler than they us’d to be.
KING HENRY. How now! What means this, herald? know’st thou not
That I have fin’d these bones of mine for ransom?
Com’st thou again for ransom?
MONTJOY. No, great King;
I come to thee for charitable licence,
That we may wander o’er this bloody field
To book our dead, and then to bury them;
To sort our nobles from our common men;
For many of our princes- woe the while!-
Lie drown’d and soak’d in mercenary blood;
So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs
In blood of princes; and their wounded steeds
Fret fetlock deep in gore, and with wild rage
Yerk out their armed heels at their dead masters,
Killing them twice. O, give us leave, great King,
To view the field in safety, and dispose
Of their dead bodies!
KING HENRY. I tell thee truly, herald,
I know not if the day be ours or no;
For yet a many of your horsemen peer
And gallop o’er the field.
MONTJOY. The day is yours.

I know not if the day be ours or no;
You don’t know. You don’t know if you’re winning until after you’ve won, and still you have to press on in the face of that not knowing. That’s a pretty good statement of the human condition.
There is something about ‘not knowing’ that seems to terrify many people, so they do soemthing about it: the decide to ‘know’, and close their eyes to anything that might contradict their knowing, and then they try to live their lives with their eyes closed.
Look I’m not going to collapse a thousand years of the philosophy of knowledge into one blog post, even if I could. But let me suggest some things in broad strokes.
I often feel like what is going on in the world of politics is a clash of ideas more than a clash of people. I meet people with whom I sometimes violently disagree, and I find them warm, personable, decent human beings. And yet we – all of us – get hung on someone’s idea that doesn’t fit into our constellation of ideas, and we get intensely focussed on refuting it or on beating them into submission to get them to give up the ‘bad idea’ that posesses them.
And so one of the traits I despise in modern politics, and that is blossoming in the blogoverse is the neglect that the other folks are people, with all the subtlety, complexity, contradictions, and history which that involves. Instead, they become proxies for their idea, and the battles between people become battles between ideas.
I could take half and hour pull a thousand citations from blogs on the left, right, and radical center to demonstrate this. I won’t, because then it becomes an attack on them, on the author and I’m suddenly doing exactly what I’m trying to criticize by attacking them as a person for a snippet of one thing that they said at one point in their lives.
This matters a lot because we have to find a way to deal with each other if we are to live together, and to do that we are going to have to become tolerant of doubt, uncertainty, and complexity.
This ties in with one of my earliest themes, the idea of a ‘4th Generation” liberalism, in that it is an effort to unite my core political values (liberalism) with a recognition of uncertainty and complexity.
So in the next few days, I’m going to try and explain what this is, why it is an issue, and what we might do about it.
Next: THE WORLD IS BIGGER THAN YOU IMAGINE IT TO BE