Tolerance of Ambiguity

Since when is (misplaced!) certainty a moral or intellectual virtue? Election rhetoric, especially from the right, seems to assume that people are simpletons in search of absolutist, black and white understanding of complex realities -- with us or against us -- white hat cowboys versus the axis of evil. I hope the little-boy ideologues (at both ends of the political spectrum) are wrong but at the same time wonder whether twenty-plus years of their anti-education, pro-indoctrination agenda has succeeded in producing a populace comprised of a majority of moronic automatons incapable of (or at least unwilling to) tolerate any ambiguities in their own understanding -- amoral foot-soldiers finding certainty in so-called "revealed truth" and willing to (send others to) die to defend and extend ideological half-truths.

Recent villifications of billionaire-philanthropist George Soros are especially revealing. Consider his argument, derived from Karl Popper, that our current form of global capitalism poses the most immediate threat to an open society precisely because it rest on false certainty. According to Popper, all human understanding ultimately must rest on an uncertain foundation since knowledge is at best a body of thus-far-unrefuted conjectures. Even the most rigorous scientific enterprise does not, and indeed cannot, reveal any certain Truth. From the standpoint of human cognition, all honest understanding must be regarded as provisional and thus must remain subject to modification of rejection in the light of new evidence.

As Emerson put it in Self-Reliance:
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.

So, there you have it George -- consistency is no virtue especially when one is so consistently and demonstrably wrong. And John, celebrate and and embrace your reasoned inconsistency rather than pathetically denying it and you might even merit my respect and get my vote. /dps