The heroism of doubt…
May 9th, 2010
Jackson Pollock, Number One 1948
When we look at the chaotic dribblings of paint on a work of modern art, we become restless. We don’t know how to engage it. We call it ridiculous. Not worth our time. Childish. We shrug it off with simple judgments, and hurry on to more self-evident, prettier, less ambiguous pictures.
Grant Wood, American Gothic
We love certainty. Certainty keeps our world tidy. Predictable. The world and our actions shine in the glow of self-evidence. Certainty allows us to think and act quickly. The problem with human consciousness is that it takes effort and time. Better to remain unconscious and certain. It’s simpler that way.
When we say “I know”, we’ve given ourselves over to judgment. We’ve decided. There’s no more light to let in. We’ve pruned away enough complexity and ambiguity to fit all there is for us to know on a bumper sticker, or a 10 second news spot, or twitter feed. What we don’t know, or are too lazy to find out? To hell with it. Complexity is a nuisance. We must prove to the world our convictions by wrapping them in the mantel of certainty. “I think, therefore I know.”
Certainty is an illusion, a trick we play on ourselves. Certainty is an emotion that prunes away all the hundreds of millions of informational bytes taken into our senses. It’s a feeling hardwired into our emotional brains to allow us to act without having to face a mess. We can pick what we need, or what we believe we need. Certainty is not born of a series of self-evident truths. It’s a chimera whose purpose it is to make it easier to blame, to run, to fight, to scream, to love, to stay, to go. There is no courage in certainty. No heroism. There is no hard choice to make.
At times, the problems we face in our own lives feel as daunting as those chaotic scribbles on a piece of modern art. There’s too much information, too much we don’t, can’t, or refuse to try and understand. We can’t possibly take it all in. Moreover, there’s the element of chance to dash all those odds we calculated to come our way. There’s timing. There’s our incapacity to foretell the future. There are other people’s intentions, about which we can only tell ourselves stories to bolster the certainty of what we choose to believe. We become self-justifying informational processing machines.
“I know, and am too knowing, too strong, too courageous, to doubt.”
Doubt is not a problem of strength or conviction. Doubt is the light that humbles us in face of our perceptual biases and limitations. The real heroism shows when we stand squarely in front of doubt. It shows when we face our times of chaos and inner turmoil with the humility afforded by doubt’s light. When we courageously proclaim, “Yes, I doubt; and, still I choose.”
