Will, quoting (and posting a photo of) a favorite piece of New Orleans graffiti. A perpetually interrogatory relationship with one’s conclusions can lead to the archetypal paralysis of Hamlet, but it is a crucial element of real humanism and the only possible defense against arrogance and intellectual atrophy.
The always-excellent Rabsteen added an amusing anecdote and, to complement a cited Karl Popper aphorism, this quote from Betrand Russell: “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” Immediately we see the tension between doubt and self-assurance, between the courage to question oneself and the courage to not.
Not long ago, Jeff Miller and I had an appropriately inconclusive discussion about the problem of certainty, of ideological passion: it drove the Inquisition and the abolitionists, the Nazis and the Founders, Lenin and Gandhi. Milan Kundera noted that the eternal precondition of tragedy is the “existence of ideals that are considered more valuable than human life,” but that is also one of the components of historical progress, individual transcendence, and heroism. For every erroneous conviction there may be one that advances us all. Certainty, then, cannot be the enemy; only error can. And, for the umpteenth time, “Error is the central feature of human existence.”
I’m fortunate to be wrong all the time, often in crucially important ways (as many here can attest). This idea is thus never far from my mind, although it scarcely saves me the frequent embarrassment. But it does remind me of my limitless fallibility, a lesson I cannot learn too often (apparently!).
