Being right and liberal thought and liberal values

I was having a very humbling reflection, today. It was about being right. And how invested we all get in being it.

I was listening to a really interesting story on NPR about global warming, today. I agreed with the general premise of the show's producers: that the important debate about global warming is probably not whether it is happening or whether it is serious, but what we can and should do about it.

Now, I don't know that is true, obviously, in the same way that a climatologist might know or think it is true or not true. And I know enough about polemics in scholarly debates and discussions and about how self-righteous a bunch of academics who have a scholarly consensus can be, as if a lot of scientists believing something - say, like, a flat earth or a geocentric universe or longitude best deduced by astronomy or a physical world of Newtonian exactitude or the wisdom of eugenics in Nazi Germany - makes it true. Empirical reality makes things true. Scientists and scholars are forever just making their most educated judgments about what that empirical reality constitutes.

George Will is one of the most reknowned conservative thinkers in America for good reason. He's one of the smartest. And his principled classical liberal commitments are a large part about what I find most trustworthy about his thinking and his writing. George is a global warming skeptic, a position I respect him for because it is not an easy position to maintain, these days, when being skeptical about anything that is not part of the dominant, more forced consensus is looked upon as undermining the progress that every consensus is sure that it is bringing to the world.

I think, in all likelihood, that the climatologists and scientists who study global warming probably have a consensus for good reason. I don't know that to be true. And one could argue for a consensus for the use of pressure and force among political scientists, today, that could arguably be true and that I would still think was wrong until the arguments were made for me that would make clear why I was wrong. So I could very well be wrong to trust the claims of scientific consensus on this question. It could very well turn out to be yet one more political attempt to shortcircuit a legitimate scientific question and debate in the name of yet one more self-righteous claim on final truth around an important question. That really is the problem with force. It so fucks up the conversation because noone knows whether its proponents have arrived at an honestly best assessment of facts or ideas or whether they have just bullied their way to shortcircuit that discussion and those judgments because they have grown impatient that people just do not see things the way they see them.

It's also very likely to George is wrong and that the global warming skepticism that I have entertained in my own life is wrong and that the scientific consensus will help us avoid the problems that global warming may threaten.

It's also possible that George and the global warming skeptics will turn out to be right and that a lot of people convinnced of global warming and its calamities are playing chicken little as a means of proving how right they were all along.

What I know, from that discussion, is that some really smart people are going to turn out to be wrong. And it is the last and most serious weakness of smart people that they do not like to be wrong, especially about important stuff.

And yet it is so. Regularly. And yet they and all of us are regularly convinced that we are right, so much so that we can and should force others to reckon with just how right we are. And, yet, no matter how right everyone is, which of course implies that many of us are wrong, all of us believe that we are right enough to know that we cannot possibly bring progress to the world unless it is forced to reckon with the blunt certainty of our imposed finality in judgment.

Karl Popper must wonder why he did scholarly work at all, some days.

What I know is that on this question and on so many questions, some of us, necessarily, are wrong. And around our most serious questions, we are all wrong, often enough that it should give us pause about imposing ourselves on one another all the time.

I eat organic, but I often wonder if its really all that much healthier. And the Economist has written some really great organic-skeptial articles that very much have me questioning whether organic is the best way to eat. I think it's probably a good idea, given our already strong propensity to be exposed to carcinogens and other unhealthy chemicals. I don't know if its worth all the money, and I won't pay $11.00 anymore for a bottle of organic laundry detergent.

But what I do know is that there is no way that I want this or a million other healthy or liberal or whatever values imposed on everyone else, and I certainly don't want to pretend that doing so would be "progressive" or "liberal" in the highest sense. Doing so clearly would not be either, since it would continue to erode the very few freedoms that liberal minded people are constantly rationed out by those who do not value it or the values that support it nearly enough.

That skepticism, that ability to question and doubt and challenge and to refuse to profess belief in anything just because someone or many someones pressure to make it so is the most fundamental freedom and most fundamental liberal value that a liberal society holds dear.

And it doesn't matter if you are right or if you are wrong. What matters is the freedom to question and doubt and challenge and to make up one's own mind.

Without that freedom, freedom of conscience is a joke.

And it is that tragic joke which is being played off as "progress" or as the direction for the future or as the strongest values that liberal democracy has to offer that is so dominant in contemporary America and the world, right now.

It is liberal democracies looking to the theocracies and autocracies and despots and totalitarians of the world and the cultures that support them and saying, "See. We can be tough too. We are moral too. We can impose with certainty too."

And on and on and on will be our sad, little, insecure liberal democratic culture until we can have the courage to just embrace the freedom that makes liberal countries and cultures and values and people and ideas so great.

The logic of our contemporary liberal democratic culture says, "We are always and always will be afraid that we are too liberal. We will never be confident in our values because we are afraid that they make us vulnerable to the charge that we are not nearly as good or moral or tough or smart as our illiberal and less liberal brethren."

The truth is that we are afraid.

And one of our biggest fears in a liberal democratic world is that we are wrong, for fear that it means that we are stupid or fallible in a way that will justify every ugly or meanspirited thing that people may have said about us.

And the on-going and perpetual irony, of course, is that history is an on-going reflection on how we were never liberal enough. Very rarely do we look back in history and think, "If only we had just been tougher on those dissenters, those debtors, those Natives, those slaves, those women, those African Americans, those immigrants. If only we had been tougher on all of those Americans, then the world would be whole." Almost never.

And yet liberal peoples are constantly saying to themselves, in the moment, "We are afraid that we are too liberal." Always. No matter how far we move forward in that regard. We are always afraid, "I think I or they or all of us are too liberal. Too decent. Too kind. Too nice. Too lenient. Too merciful. Too generous. Too loving. Too compassionate. Too forgiving. Too good."

When, really, what are, far more often and far too often, is too self-righteous, too mean, and too sure and full of hubris that we have finally figured out what will finally fix all of our problems.

The truth is that I will think that George Will was one of the finest thinkers of the 20th century and one of the finest conservative minds of the twentieth century whether he got this question or any other question right or wrong for all time or just for now. And I will think that scientists engaged in empirical inquiry and research and scholarly debate are, generally, some of the most trustworthy people that inhabit our culture and I will listen to what they say above all other folks in the culture, generally, because I think, generally, they are the most careful thinkers and most honest members of our society.

And the plain fact that is that any and all of these people can and often are still wrong. No matter how much we might like to believe otherwise. And, generally, they will each be the first to tell you that.

I don't want to live in a culture where being right is taken more seriously than the thinking and the skepticism and the debate and the discussion and the forever open-ended engagement of serious matters of conscience where everything is now and forever open to questioning, skepticism, doubt, challenge, debate, and discussion.

And I certainly don't want a world where politics is held aside as an area of life where engaging serious questions with that level of integrity is not ever taken seriously because too many people are perpetually convinced of their self-righteous notions of the world.

What this period has totally clarified for me is that this is the most important value that liberal values and cultures have to offer. This value we put on conscience, and thought, and questioning everything we encounter.

I'm sure my kids must look at me and say, "If you believe in that kind of skepticism and questioning, all the time, why are you constantly expecting that we do exactly as you say without questioning you all the time?"

And maybe they have a point.

I'll have to think about that.

Love,
Ben