Fall/Winter 2005: Belief

Beyond Belief

A curious quest for democracy

by David S. Gutterman

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowledge.--Philip Roth, The Human Stain

We are living in a time when people are less and less willing to proclaim, "I don't know." In times of great turmoil, such as our own, one might think that acknowledging the limits of one's understanding would be a sensible and familiar response. And yet, the opposite is more common: in the face of disorderly transformations, people across the political spectrum seem much more inclined to grasp for definitive conclusions. In such conditions, knowing is commonly portrayed as a sign of strength, doubt and ambivalence as markers of weakness. And in times of transformation and fear, the weakness implied by doubt cannot be countenanced.

In a 1996 Nobel Lecture, Wislawa Szymborska proclaimed that the sensibility of the poet, indeed of all those whose vocations are inspired by "love, imagination ... [and] continuous adventure," begins with the phrase "I don't know." Szymborska's great hope is that the recognition of the limits of one's understanding is an animating force, the beginning of a curious quest. Instead, Szymborska fears, we often move quickly from this unsettled place where we are confronted by the limits of our understanding either to the denial of the importance of that which we do not know or to the acceptance of the "knowledge" of others. Each of these options marks an all-too-familiar flight from thinking to belief.

The danger of such an abrupt flight to belief, of course, is not simply that hasty conclusions are likely to be wrong. The danger is that proclamations of such "knowledge" eliminate doubts--and those who encourage doubting. As Szymborska warns:

All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues ... know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don't want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments' force. And any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

Knowledge that does not lead to new questions ossifies into mere belief. It leads to the self-satisfied end of curiosity--and, Szymborska argues, this acceptance "poses a lethal threat to society."

Now let's be clear: the phrase "I don't know" does also pose a threat--a different sort of threat. Those whose power rests on the capacity to "explain" the world authoritatively to others are at risk when their audiences respond with the humble, but defiant "I don't know"--and the ensuing desire to inquire and learn more. As philosopher Michel Foucault says, curiosity entails "a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way, ... a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental." Foucault's celebration of curiosity poses a direct challenge to belief as a sole or primary guide to action; creative engagement with the world begins with a willingness to "think otherwise," to reflect and act. Curiosity is vital as a means of both curbing the force of habit and welcoming the possibility of creating new directions for the future. Indeed, few attitudes, if any, could be more disconcerting than curiosity to those whose prominence rests on preserving tradition, convention, and the status quo. And the length to which such figures will go to protect themselves and their power against curiosity, speculation, and critical reflection should by now be of no surprise. All too often in our society, curiosity and thinking are demeaned; devout belief in the "knowledge" of others is celebrated and rewarded.

Writer Philip Roth describes this cultural condition in which intellectual indolence meets smug moral superiority as an era pervaded by the "ecstasy of sanctimony." Roth is right to call it "ecstasy," for there is a pleasure in the self-righteousness that condemns the immorality or stupidity of others. But it is an ecstatic pleasure that eliminates thinking, that leaves us passionately reacting but unable to listen to or recognize others--unable, in other words, to engage in the type of democratic conversation we commonly purport to value so highly. The evidence of this condition is hard to miss. Crossfire, talk radio, bumper sticker wars, the ease with which we denounce those with whom we disagree as "Nazis" or "terrorists" or "evil," the President's adamant refusal to meet with anyone who does not already agree with his policies, NARAL's guilt-by-loose-association indictment of John Roberts as a clinic bomber--these are but a few vivid illustrations of this phenomenon.

One of the most powerful ways of propounding this ecstasy of sanctimony is by telling tightly bound narratives that narrowly portray the meaning of the past, define the terms of a present crisis, and predict an imminent and inevitable future--stories that, in other words, carry what Frank Kermode calls the "sense of an ending." Such stories are exceedingly familiar in the United States today, perhaps most prominently in Christian narratives about Armageddon plainly evident in the extraordinary popularity of the rapture story told in the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. These are the types of stories that are seductively appealing in times of confusion and fear. They generate belief but not thought, resolution but not dialogue, arrogance but not humility. These are powerful stories that bear the potential to generate great good or great ill, but in so doing they eliminate the space from which one might critically reflect on what is good or ill, on how these terms might be determined. Keeping disorder at bay, such narratives provide comfort and security, but do so by closing down not only perspectives but also possibilities for different understandings of events--and different futures themselves.

In contrast, when we recognize the open range of possibilities the future holds, we can begin to engage in democratic conversations. I call these conversations "democratic" not because they involve voting (which is a shallow marker of democracy that often serves as a surrogate for a richer and more demanding conception of democratic politics). Rather, these conversations are democratic because they require the acknowledgement of a plurality of ideas and opinions expressed by individuals situated differently in the world we share. Moreover, democratic politics contain a sense that not only is the knowledge of the future the providence of no one person but also is, in large part, a shared human creation. In this process, a free and democratic people ought to err on the side of inviting as many stories to be told as possible, rather than too few. Not, as crass critics of a crude depiction of relativism argue, because all opinions are equally valid and beyond judgment, but rather precisely because our capacity for judgment is enhanced by the encounter with other ideas that might challenge or further legitimate our own. As John Stuart Mill argues in "On Liberty":

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Mill warns against those who "refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, [they] assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility." Mill's lesson here is that free and democratic expression rests on pluralism and dissent and resists narratives that close off challenges to any given "known truth." And though, of course, we must continue to act and to render judgments, such actions and judgments, based as they must be on imperfect understanding, ought to remain open to critical analysis and reflection.

To illustrate Mill's point, let us consider current debates regarding the theory of evolution and the notion of intelligent design (ID). At the most basic level, proponents of ID hold that the complexity of life must be a result of intentional creation rather than merely an accretion of mutations and natural selection acting on those mutations over the course of millennia. At first glance, this debate can be framed as a matter of science versus belief: those who accept the theory of evolution dismiss the proponents of ID as engaging in a concerted faith-based attack on science. However, mainstream scientists and their supporters get caught up in their own "ecstasy of sanctimony," scoffing at the rubes who seek to promote ignorant beliefs at the expense of science. This ecstasy becomes more fervent in direct proportion to the concern that supporters of ID might be winning over the public. Yet, supporters of evolution are too often so dismissive that they resent being pulled into the public debate at all. However, we should ask how well most casual critics of ID actually understand ID, let alone evolution. Indeed, to what extent does the remaining popular commitment to evolution rest on a faith in the authority of science rather than a thoughtful understanding of evolution?

I am by no means arguing that ID offers a viable critique of the theory of evolution nor that it should be taught in biology classes across the country. Rather, I am suggesting that the acceptance of belief as a final arbiter in public debates and the susceptibility of the ecstasy of sanctimony cross the political spectrum. If we are going to recalibrate the current imbalance between thinking and believing and engage in the reasoned discourse Mill extols, we would do well to examine where our beliefs (religious, scientific, or otherwise) interfere with pluralist democratic discussion--and how often these beliefs are expressed through stories that have a sense of the ending.

To illustrate this latter point, let's analyze the concerns and mode of argument common to proponents of intelligent design. One of the primary reasons why ID supporters are so critical of the theory of evolution is because this theory does not just promote an ambiguous past but necessarily argues that the future of all species is undetermined and unknowable. ID proponents are most concerned with the lack of intentionality in the development of species that is central to the theory of evolution. For supporters of ID, even if humans may not be able to comprehend how or why the intelligent designer created life as we know it, there is security in knowing that life (especially human life) was created intentionally. We may not know the mission, but we are comforted in believing that there is a reason--so comforted that supporters of ID are ready to dismiss a well-established scientific theory of accident and randomness for an unscientific theory of intentionality. The faith or belief in intentionality--a product of the longing for stable meaning--is thus mistakenly celebrated as "science" for answering questions and responding to feelings that are outside the purview of the scientific enterprise.

In other words, the criticism of evolution offered by proponents of ID commonly begins with a foundational presumption of an intelligent designer and, in turn, conveys a sense of the ending. The ID narrative, with its casual refusal of randomness, ambiguity, and openness, is potent in our era of fear and belief. Today, scientists uncomfortably find themselves in the position of having to defend what is basic to the scientific enterprise, to modernity itself--the value and method of critical reasoning and analysis, the development over time of a theory based on the examination of falsifiable evidence, and the open-endedness of a scientific epistemology itself. When, as documented by CommonDreams.org, a steady stream of career scientists resign from the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, and other government agencies because their findings have been censured or modified to meet a preordained belief established by the political appointees of the Bush Administration, it is apparent that those who think are being silenced by those who "know."

The issue here is not whether natural selection could produce, through a series of random mutations, an organ as complex as the human eye, nor whether an intelligent designer has had a role in the process, but rather the nature of the discussion. Supporters of evolution and intelligent design alike are very busy talking from positions of sanctimonious authority, but neither, unfortunately, is listening. In the end, the fact that intelligent design works on a different set of principles from mainstream science--one that does not demand that its claims be falsifiable--may preclude a full resolution of these two perspectives. But without countenancing each other, without measured speaking and determined listening, something larger is lost: the opportunity for pluralistic discourse in the public realm to lead to greater judgment and communication.

Indeed, in the United States today, the bitter divisiveness in the public sphere that is marked by polemic and suspect judgment seems to be a product of the imbalance between thinking and believing. Most commonly, such beliefs are rooted in a form of religious faith. The passage from Hebrews 11:1 that guides so much of Christianity in America captures the seductive power of adhering to a narrative that invokes believing in a preordained ending: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." This call for belief in the absence of evidence may well be an animating component of religious faith, but as a philosophy of governance, it can become a dangerous ideological claim. An individual life governed by the dominance of believing over thinking has mostly personal consequences, but the impact of such an imbalance between thinking and believing becomes far greater at a social and political level. A polity guided by an unwavering conviction that dismisses the need for evidence--and the opinions of others alike--runs terrible risks of arrogance. Government ruled by passionate conviction unbalanced by critical thinking and the possibility for doubt is perilous and anti-democratic.

We are thus faced with the paradox of political stories that convey an assuring imperative to believe in a particular ending. Such stories have the great advantage of being able to appeal to the fears of citizens in times of disorder and confusion, and can readily generate firm conviction in the "knowledge" of those in authority. However, such stories are most commonly proven false or incomplete in the long run and leave citizens in a position either of reaffirming their faith in authority despite the evidence or of losing faith--both in the veracity of their leaders and in the capacity for judgment by their fellow believing citizens.

Moreover, politics is not a realm--thankfully--in which presumptive endings based on absolute convictions are often borne out. Politics is unruly. Fortuna, Niccolo Machiavelli teaches, is a raging river, and even the most adept leader can be overcome by the flood. Not only must political orders confront unforeseen natural disasters, but they must also address the actions and stories of other political forces. A terror attack, avian flu, the economic growth of China, and on and on--all upset narrative closure, all change the social and political context in ways that demand reflection and adaptation. Despite dramatic stories with definitive endings, in the world of politics the mission is rarely accomplished, and those in the public realm are rarely met with candy and flowers. This unruliness is the only constant in the world. It is such unruliness that we find ourselves confronting all too viscerally, and it is just such unruliness that the stories conveying a sense of the ending are so determined to efface.

Navigating times of confusion demands a careful balance between thinking and believing, between the analysis of the challenges we face and the convictions that might support and guide us in our struggle. Unfortunately, our capacity to confront these challenges--to explore causes and options, to analyze and render judgments that direct action--is severely hampered by the diminished value placed on thinking in a public realm that is so powerfully directed by the force of belief, by the contented confidence in what we "know." The realm of politics should not be a site of dispassionate rationalism unanimated by the force of belief, nor should the public realm be guided principally by believing, not thinking. Reestablishing the balance between thinking and believing is necessary for a healthy and vibrant democracy. Our great longings for truth must be chastened by a pervasive recognition of the limits of our knowledge and understanding. By cultivating a willingness to say, "I don't know," we can renew that curious quest that takes us beyond belief and may yet replenish the democratic ethos of the nation.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2005 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2005 Oregon Council for the Humanities