What I hear from those in favor of the liberalization of thought (in this context, religious thought), and their criticisms of those who err, as they see it, in their certainty and systematization. The skeptical, or at least effete, criticism of passion and conviction.
A: I’m not taking anything for granted or adding anything. My position isn’t a position, it’s just given.” They’re the nutballs with extreme positions.
B: I don’t have to wrestle with or engage with any of that discussion or be subject to it; I’m free of doubt, because 1. I already have the answer or 2. I know that there isn’t an answer.
Skepticism and absolutism are both easy and convenient. They both make an end run around the trouble of realizing that you have a position, and the resulting need to struggle with other people and their positions, by claiming that there isn’t any struggle to be had, and that their position isn’t a position.
Absolute relativism and absolute absolutism aren’t really that different from one another. Both are a kind of tyranny of the self. Both carve out a space around your own personal feelings and beliefs and ideas that gives you the breathing room we all so desperately crave. One of a perfect defense, and the other is a perfect offense. One keeps out all intrusion because any invasion would be such a big intractable problem, and the other preempts all intrusion by refusing to grant any legitimacy or significance or meaningful claims to outsiders. In fact they’re both doing these things, they just do it differently. The attitude is different, but the trajectory is the same.
The only kind of challenge either approach admits is a kind that isn’t really a challenge. Nothing that truly differs or is opposed is actually considered as a possibility. If real, substantive counterfactuals were let in, they would tear down their neat little system. So people who want to play the game can’t be allowed to make any real claims.
Both approaches make a claim to an uneven playing field. One holds up certainty as a shield. The other hold up uncertainty as a shield. Which tactic you choose depends largely on two things: 1. Your personality, and 2. Your context.
If you’re the sort of person who favors certainty, who needs it, then you’ll use it to protect yourself against uncertainty and as a club against other opposing certainties. And if you’re a person who fear conviction and favors uncertainty and needs that freedom and space, then you’ll use it as a defense against certainty. Both of them fear difference and it’s resulting conflict and cope with it through avoidance or confrontation.
These basic types can gives way to some interesting evolved subtypes. A more certain person who has seen the limits of too much certainty may be able to fight against it without reservation in part because they take it for granted. They have a hard time conceiving what it would be like to be truly skeptical and rebellious, so it’s easy enough for them to argue a bit of skepticism when they assume that’s the bedrock, default position that people will default to and that it just needs a little softening. If you’re coming from a point in history where a given position has become corrupt and ossified and over-structured, it’s easy to be in favor of liberalization.
But if you’re coming from anarchy and wilderness, you will likely see the value of some structure. Whether your myth is a return to the wilderness or the establishment of civilization depends very much on your personal tastes and context. And what is needed does, in fact, vary. The problem is when people get stuck on one and can’t see the value of the other, or the very similar dangers of both.
I perfectly see the irony in arguing against skepticism and doubt and the systematizers, when I’m one of the most naturally skeptical people I know and loathe the limits and controls of the systematizers. But in fact, my resistance comes from a very long and deep personal journey into the limitations and pathologies of my own natural tendencies. People like my wife or mother-in-law, who are both very orderly, can toy with disorder and skepticism and use it as a defense against the pressure of the structure and the social influence of others (which they feel far, far more than I do). They can do this because their own hearts are safe in the bosom of assuming orderliness as a natural default position, one that needs tempering with a little wilderness.
I happen to have a much clearer idea of just how dangerous someone like me actually is. Because I don’t take their values or position for granted. To me it is a position, not a default, and one I don’t feel obligated to support or agree with, unless I can be properly convinced that it’s correct on its own merits. I don’t take for granted that their stable, civilized positions have any necessary value or valid claims, unless they can be proved to my satisfaction. And I can see the appeal in flaunting and violating them just for the hell of it.
And because I know how many people there are like me, and how few are like my wife and mother-in-law, I see a greater danger in their adjusted positions than they do (which were developed in reaction to themselves). Maybe they’re not a danger for them, but objectively, if they were handed off and applied to others of a different temperament, a more usual one. Well then.
Descartes embraced a very intense skepticism as part of his philosophy. But deep down he was a man of great faith. He assumed that his skepticism was safe because he believed that his faith was assured and would be proved and ligitimized by the questioning process. He believed he could give up his faith because he would build back to it.
Which was all well and good and rather courageously faithful, in a way. But his students that came after him kept the skepticism and dropped the faith. In different hands, his tools for exploring his faith became tools for deconstructing, removing, and deligitimizing it. What was meant to be a capstone of belief became a cornerstone of doubt. Yeah, yeah, they said, all that stuff about the limits of human understanding and the subjectivity of belief is great. But not as a curative for intellectual hubris. As a foundation for intellectual skepticism and subjectivism. The medicine became the meal. The antidote for authoritarianism became anarchism.
Well, “He didn’t mean it that way,” is the usual response given. Which is often the retort of those who have watched their own politics or ideological wagons get seriously out of control. “We didn’t mean it like that.” And usually there is some truth to this. There were unacknowledged premises and assumptions and prejudices and conditions, against which the position and technique was being applied, that were deeply central to the beliefs and assumptions of the person making the argument. There was an untold second half of the story, an unheard other side of the argument that was being responded to.
And unfortunately most people fail to imagine the possibility of someone who hears your arguments and believes them but doesn’t share your same assumptions and prejudices and conditions. People don’t realize that the balanced element of their position isn’t actually contained in their position, but rather in the tension it holds with another assumed position. And that this is what most people are doing most of the time.
Very few ideologies shoot right down the middle of two fully articulated positions whose assets and faults, virtues and dangers are fully appreciated. Very few people can even identify, much less imagine themselves out of, their own most easy and natural assumptions. And it’s very hard for people to see how their own ideas could be wrong or go wrong.
That’s partly because they are correct that the positions they have taken do represent a kind of balance or curative. But they fail to realize that they contain assumed counterfactuals against which they are balancing, and that their balance or curative would cease to be such the moment that assumed counterfactual was removed. So the problem is that they’re right. They are in the proper position, applying appropriate leverage. But they’re wrong, or at least dangerous, so long as they don’t realize that their position, and their ability to maintain that position, is dependent on the existence of an assumed counterweight. And if they actually succeeded with their arguments, truly succeeded, so those became the default, their weight would quickly pull the next person down into a new kind of extremity on the other side of the issue (into anarchy instead of tyranny, for example).
And because the sort of battles we fight and the sorts of things we take for granted are in large part due to our personality, it means we will keep leaninging into them, regardless of how the balance or conditions are shifting. Open people will keep pushing for liberalization even when it’s becoming a problem. Orderly people will keep trying to add structure, even when it’s becoming a problem. And people who have been burned by one or the other will likely keep fighting them, fighting the old enemy that hurt them, even after the battle has been won, and will keep pressing the assault until they drive the enemy out of territory we actually need them to occupy and manage.
We are very bad at knowing when to stop fighting, even when to stop winning. Because we take either our own position for granted, or we take our enemy’s challenge to our position for granted. And people who fail to see the value and power in their opponent’s position will fail to preserve its balancing function when they overcome it, and so imbalance and overcome their own.
Some people fall back on skepticism and ignorance at this point, a kind of false humility that spares you the effort of engagement. You don’t know what you think you know, I don’t know what I think I know. If we would all just chill out and stop trying to push our beliefs on other people, we would all be better off. But that’s a fallacy. You don’t know that they shouldn’t push their beliefs even if you don’t like them, even if they get unbalanced or offensive. They might have good reasons. In fact the process of pushing and engaging and pushing back may be the very mechanism of enlightment, as well as the fountain of ignorance, extremism, and discomfort.
You can’t simply argue skepticism as a convenient assumption to dismiss the valid claims of someone else’s beliefs. You have to actually test and discuss them and work through them and figure out what can and cannot be supported, or what is most likely or best supported and reasonable, and test the practical outcomes if in real world practice, if at all possible. You have to take the perspectives of others seriously. You can just dismiss them and their inherent tensions and and conflicts as meaningless quibbles a priori.
If there is no basis for determining any of these things and everything we say comes down to subjective differences in perspectice and interpretation, then what are we talking about? What is the point of discussion except to assert our own prejudices and assumptions with no valid basis for arbitration or competition or testing?
Skepticism is a very convenient belief to cite to defang the arguments of others. As is provincial absolutism. Both are very good at shutting down discussion. Both are remarkably convenient, and both have a habit of catering to and preserving our personal tastes and desires from the discomforting incursions of others. And both are lazy and risk-averse and antithetical to the true nature of life and growth.
I’m perhaps a bit more sympathetic toward someone who believes something in spite of, or in full knowledge of, the less desirable consequences of those beliefs for themselves than I am toward someone who believes something that is terribly convenient for their own preferences. There’s a kind of courage and conviction to the first, even when it’s wrong, that you have to respect. There’s a consistency. There’s an acknowledgment that holding a real truth as your belief means it may demand something of you, something you may not want or like or prefer. It isn’t a thornless rose.
But beliefs that shift and adapt themselves to whatever it is comfortable and agreeable and easy and popular to believe are hard to separate as actual beliefs from accommodations to social or personal tastes and incentives. And such criticisms can easily be argued by either side of a dispute. However much one position may seem more or less noble or more or less indulgent and easy, these judgements are not very illuminating when used as a guide for objective truth or falsity.
People have such differing and contradictory desires and fears, even within their own minds. We all have our tangled reasons for doing and believeing what we do. The argument that people only believe things that are to their own advantage, and so therefore if they believe something that is to their disadvantage, then it must be true, is highly specious. For one, it ignores the actual complexity and bloody-mindedness of humans. We are rational. But we’re also profoundly irrational. And we aren’t simple, we aren’t just one thing. We contain many needs, desires, interests, and conflicts. A belief may be worth embracing despite being to some disadvantage if it advantages us in some other more significant way (for us). And because we don’t not know the inner details of other people’s lives and minds, and often hardly even know our own, it is often not clear at all what is really driving those deep judgements and motivations.
The degree to which I could say that I’m courageous, if the social consequences of taking a certain stance or action don’t really matter to me, is in doubt. You may not have located what I am afraid of and really care about and do see as significant. We’re all afraid of a hundred different kinds of things, and simply by instinct some more than others. The real question, which isn’t always easy to answer, is which should we be afraid of, in a given situation? Or, more positively, what should we desire and love? Because we have many desires, and many are in conflict with one another.
So it suffices to say that I’m skeptical of evaluating anyone’s beliefs purely on the basis of their apparent motivations or intentions. Even my own.
Making Nobody Happy 