Caleb Anderson: Humility and the tyranny of certainty

Sometimes I wonder if the biggest problems we face in the West today are our lack of genuine humility, and our preoccupation with the pursuit of certainty (in the form of absolute conviction).

Is it possible that we have forgotten what humility is, and how elusive, and unwarranted, certainty can be (or necessarily is)?

I recently had the privilege of watching the graduation ceremony for a family member. This event was well organized, those attending were made to feel welcome, students were appropriately honoured, and cultural diversions here and there were largely respectful.

Faculty seemed genuinely to care about their students, and about the difference they hoped they might make in the world if they believed sufficiently in themselves, and were confident of their calling.

The vice chancellor's commencing speech was excellent, but something he said stuck in my head. Toward the end of his speech his final advice to graduates was to take what they had learnt and change the world, or something to that effect.

I could not help but wonder if something along the lines of the following might have been more useful to these students ... you have learnt important things, but your learning journey is just beginning ... appreciate what you know, but anticipate always that there is much that you do not know ... be forever a humble learner ... be open to different ways of looking at things, in fact seek them ... question respectfully ... learn from those who have gone before you, as you have much more to learn from them (collectively) than they have from you.

It seems to me that we have too many people today who are certain, unwavering, who are taught in school, or university, or home, that things are less complex than they are, that what has gone before is almost always bad, or even contaminated beyond redemption, that truth began with their generation, or the one just before, that they, and their ideas, are the future, that absolute truth is just a grasp away, that to question, and challenge, no matter how, or when, is virtue, and that to be challenged presuppositionally is nothing less than an affront to identity.

Many academic psycholoigists and philosophers see certainty as a relative term more grounded in feeling than in concrete reality.

Questioning, wondering, aspiring, and imagining, are worth the effort only when these are grounded in something wider, deeper and more profoundly weathered than ourselves. Ideas gestate in time and space, and not in a moment in time. They are shaped as a potter shapes clay, or a sculptor shapes a piece of rock. Who is to say that Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Blake, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Esinstein, or even the Apostle Paul, are less worthy of our attention than the great thinkers of our time ... and none of these stand in total isolation from, or in true opposition to, each other ... each was shaping, and being shaped, by a knowledge system much bigger than the sum of its parts.

In psychology there is a concept known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. This asserts that the more you know, the more you know you do not know, and the less you know the more you think you know.

AI defines it as follows ...

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with low ability in a specific area overestimate their competence, while experts often underestimate theirs, because the skills needed to be good at something are often the same skills needed to recognize expertise

It seems to me that the price the Western elites have paid (are paying) for the pursuit of certainty, in the absence of complexity (a left brain preoccupation), combined with the outright commodification of knowledge, is a world devoid of common sense. A world blind to the patterns of the past, deaf to the wisdom of forebears, susceptible to agenda, and dishonest and deceitful in argument.

In the betrayal of our unique foundational legacy, we are shaping a new dark age, an age not of reason but of confusion, not of integration, and interrogation of ideas, but of the denigration, and disintegration of ideas ... and of truth itself.

If certainty is built on the negation of complexity, when truth can be conjured up in a moment, when thousands of years of reason and reflection can be cast to the wind, we are building on sand.

Certainty is an honourable pursuit, but not when it is unbounded, when it is in negation of complexity, when it is ripped from context, when its underlying presuppositions are self-evidently flawed, when it is driven by personal (or collective) agenda, or when it is predominantly political in nature.

When this happens we have given the keys to our favourite car to our least responsible teenager.

And the antidote to all of this, the guardrail to reason, the key to fruitful enquiry and collective endeavour ... you guessed it ... Humility!!

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.