How Certain Are You?

The forces of ant-religious bigotry have been developing a nice little meme lately about certainty. They have been telling all their freinds that they stand nobly for skepticism against the rigid certainties of religious fundamentalism and superstition.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg has a technique for dealing with these professional skeptics.

Whenever I hear people say such things, I like to ask them, "Are you sure about that?" When they say yes, which they always do, I follow up by asking, "No, no: Are you really, really certain that certainty is bad?" At some point even the irony-deficient get the joke.

That’s the point. There seem to be a lot of people in the United States right now that have pretty rigid opinions about the rigidity of people whose ideas they don’t like.

Of course, back in the Nineties conservatives made a pretty good book complaining about the slipperiness of Slick Willie.

But which is it? How certain do you get to be without being dogmatically rigid? And how flexible can you be without being a wet noodle?

The answer is: It depends.

Virtually every hero in human history has been driven by certainty, by the courage of their convictions. Sir Thomas More and Socrates chose certain death, pun intended, over uncertain life. Martin Luther King Jr. -- to pick liberalism's most iconic hero -- was hardly plagued with doubt about the rightness of his cause.

And the villains of the world, when they weren’t outrageously shifty, were monstrously certain. Think H-word, Stalin, Mao, Torquemada, Genghis Khan.

In our current American culture, of course, the rage against certainty is really nothing more than the Pharisaic disdain of the creative classes for the rule-following traditional classes.

Of course, we all feel disdain for the fools that surround us. If only we weren’t so sure.