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Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Certainties
What can we be certain of from history? That human beings have been wrong innumerable times, by vast amounts, and with catastrophic results. Yet today there are still people who think that anyone who disagrees with them must be either bad or not know what he is talking about. -- Thomas Sowell
An honest, intelligent man who's properly humble before the evidence so copiously provided by reality cannot help but know that certainty about any general proposition is a highly risky posture. Yet it is a feature of our time that those who have the least claim even to low-level factual knowledge about a subject are usually those most certain about their opinions on it.
The absurdity reaches its zenith when the matter at issue is someone's motivations:
The church is curiously ambivalent about exorcism. It believes that the devil and his agents can be active in the world, it has a rite of exorcism, and it has exorcists. On the other hand, it is reluctant to certify possessions and authorize exorcisms, and it avoids publicity on the issue. It's like those supporters of Intelligent Design who privately believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, but publicly distance themselves from it because that would undermine their plausibility in the wider world. [From Roger Ebert's review of The Exorcism Of Emily Rose]
Roger Ebert orates from a curious perch: his job is to write opinions about the movies he's seen. If he possesses any other "expertise" -- yes, those are "sneer quotes" -- your Curmudgeon is unaware of it. If he has any claim to special insight about the thinking of believing Christians or the decision-making processes of Church authorities, that too is hidden from public view. But he's unabashed in his claims about their motivations.
This is quite commonly observed from persons in the "arts community." Filmmakers and actors are perhaps the worst. Quoth Andrea Harris:
Even those films that purport to be full of ironic, postmodern “questioning of our assumptions” have a base of smug surety in the rightness of the filmmakers’ viewpoints, and leave unexamined several current notions that are as sacred today as the dreaded triumvirate of mother-country-God supposedly was in the past.
Perhaps those who purvey cheap certainties believe themselves to have special insight into the minds of others. Or perhaps they're simply untroubled by the possibility that they're wrong. In any case, their certainty can be quite disturbing, particularly when the evidence that they're wildly wrong is ready to hand.
The social problem in this connection is that to the unschooled and unreflective, certainty is both attractive and persuasive.
We want certainty almost as much as we want food, love, and Super Bowl tickets. Even in small matters, uncertainty makes us uncomfortable. When it touches upon critical things, it deprives us of a basis for planning our most important decisions. When it touches upon things not of this world -- and it always does, no matter how strong one's faith -- it reaves us of a comfort we yearn for in the most intimate places in our hearts.
But what value could there be in a certainty that's like as not to be wrong?
(With regard to the world of the spirit and the possibility of a life to come, your Curmudgeon has a horse in this race, and so is not impartial. But it's instructive and more to note that one of Mankind's true geniuses, Blaise Pascal, observed that if we live as if God is real and His Commandments are true, then even if it proves to be otherwise, we will have lost nothing. And that was three centuries before the term "minimax" was coined.)
In tandem with the unceasing and ever more shrill pronunciations of social, political, and religious certainties -- certainties that run counter to traditional American convictions and to the evidence of our senses, at that -- by persons who'd have trouble finding the rest room without a twelve-man retinue of assistants, publicists, and make-up artists, we suffer from an unparalleled tendency among "educators" at all levels to indoctrinate captive audiences full of defenseless students with their own certainties, while simultaneously withholding or obscuring the factual knowledge and disciplines of mind that would permit those students to reach their own conclusions. If the idea weren't quite so uncharitable, one would almost suspect them of working hand-in-glove with their ideological allies in the entertainment world.
Comments
You are far too easy going on those who deserve a more curmudgeonly upbraid. You feeling well? Or is this your day to grant indulgences?
Posted by Pascal Fervor on 09/20/2005 at 06:03 PMI agree with PF. Because of the essential and self-evident Truth in Pascal’s Wager, it seems clear to me that those who—like Ebert—behave with palpable hostility toward the very idea of faith deserve no quarter. Their motives can only be suspect, ulterior… let’s say it: EVIL.
No quarter.
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 09/20/2005 at 08:17 PM
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