Have you heard the news? Belief is bad.
Pick up an eggheady book review, an essay in Time magazine or listen to a
thumb-suck session on National Public Radio for very long and you'll soon
hear someone explain that real conviction - dogmatism! - is dangerous.
Andrew Sullivan, in his new book "The Conservative Soul," declares a jihad
on certainty, by which he means the certainty of fundamentalist
"Christianists" - the allusion to Islamists is deliberate. The New
Republic's Jonathan Chait proclaims that liberalism is the anti-dogmatic
ideology. Sam Harris, a leading proselytizer for atheism, has declared a
one-man crusade on religious certainty. Intellectual historian J.P. Diggins
writes in the latest issue of The American Interest that there's a war afoot
for "the soul of the American Republic" between the forces of skepticism and
infallibility. And so on.
Much of this stems from the popularity of Bush hatred these days. Bush's
alleged "messianic certainty" - to use Sen. Barack Obama's words - is
dangerous and evil in the eyes of supposedly meek and nuanced liberals.
The rot, not surprisingly, has reached Hollywood. For example, in "Star
Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith," George Lucas caved to the
fashionable anti-absolutism that comes with Bush hatred by having a young
Obi-Wan Kenobi proclaim, "Only a Sith lord deals in absolutes!" Translation:
Only evil people see the world as black-and-white. This signaled that
Lucas's descent into hackery was complete, since it was Lucas himself who
originally explained that the entire universe is divided into light and dark
sides.
Longtime New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis captured the thought nicely
a few years ago when he said that a primary lesson of his entire career was
that "certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure
they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft."
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.