But they still don't understand that the joke is on them. 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. A Rosa Parks charged with today's reigning moral imperative not to be
too sure of herself might not have sat at the front of the bus. An FDR
certain that certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity might have
declined to declare total war on Nazism for fear of becoming as bad as his
enemy.
The fact is that unless you know where you stand, it's unlikely you'll have
the courage to understand where someone else is coming from.
Obviously, there's more than a grain of truth to the view that
closed-mindedness is bad. Immunity to new facts and a smug confidence that
you couldn't possibly be wrong are serious character flaws and the source of
grave mistakes. Yes, of course, dogmatism can be very bad, if the dogma in
question is bad. But, as Chesterton teaches, a dogmatic conviction can also
be morally praiseworthy and socially valuable. If you doubt that, let us now
commence the war on the certainty that murder is wrong, that racism is bad
and that a parent's love should be unconditional.
This ultimately is my problem with the anti-certainty chorus; they aren't
offended by conviction per se, but by convictions they do not hold.
Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that "hell is other people." Well, for the
new "liberal" champions of skepticism and philosophical humility, hell is
the certainty of other people. "Closed-minded" has come to mean "people who
disagree with me." (This is a corollary to the popular tendency of defining
"diversity" as a bunch of people who look different but think alike). So,
for example, pro-lifers have an unshakable "dogmatic" and "faith-based"
certainty that abortion is wrong. But, we are told, pro-choicers are merely
open-minded and realists. People who are certain gay marriage is good are
"enlightened" people, while those whose convictions point elsewhere are
zealots.
In other words, certainty has become code among the intellectual priesthood
for people and ideas that can be dismissed out of hand. That's what is so
offensive about this fashionable nonsense: It breeds the very
closed-mindedness it pretends to fight.