We live in very strange times, as you may have noticed. Nobody knows who or what to trust, witness masks and gloves when you go to the store, or those who choose not to wear them (me!). Which “experts” should we trust? Politicians? A lot of people are fed up with their dictates. Media sources? No need to laugh. We’re seeing the profound implications of what happens to a society when trust breaks down, and it isn’t pretty. Civilization is fragile, and trust the glue that holds it together. Which brings us to the issue of certainty, how it’s related to trust, and how the expectation that absolute certainty is possible makes trust impossible. The problem is that if absolute certainty is possible, which is isn’t, then trust is unnecessary. To get the connection, we must understand something about epistemology, the study of knowledge, how we know things. You might wonder, what that six syllable word has to do with anything. Pretty much everything. To understand why will require a brief history lesson.
The idea that absolute certainty was even possible never occurred to anyone until the 17th century. Imagine that, thousands of years, and nobody thought such an idea worthy of consideration. Until a pious French philosopher named Rene Descartes (1596-1650), a name much commented upon at this humble little blog, decided it was absolutely (pun intended) necessary for attaining true knowledge. Briefly, Descartes was concerned about the growing skepticism of his age, and so determined he would find a way to absolute certainty, knowing without doubt. Ironically, he did that by first determining he would doubt everything he could doubt, and discovered that the only thing he couldn’t doubt was his own existence. Thus his famous phrase, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. I won’t get into the philosophical and theological problems with this, but his obsession for certainty became an obsession in the Enlightenment, and we are living with the ramifications to this crazy day.
The fundamental problem should be obvious to any sentient person: absolute certainty is impossible for finite creatures, thus trust is a requirement of existence. Since we can’t know everything, and are limited by our very natures as to what we can know, we must act with limited knowledge. And we can only act with any confidence if we trust sources for the knowledge we can’t access directly. Think about our daily lives, and you’ll realize that almost everything we do, maybe 95% or more, requires trust! We are accepting by faith an authority about which we cannot know anything directly. This requirement is glaringly obvious in light of this so called pandemic.
Most people don’t give a second thought to any of this, but it’s baked into the cake of the secular assumptions bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment. It’s especially apparent when you study the intellectual and sociological history of the West. The idea of rationalism, that we could figure everything out by mere reason alone, became the dominant assumption of cultural elites. The parallel growth of scientific knowledge was the perfect compliment to rationalism, and partly a result of it, but it lead to a growing hubris that man could find answers and solutions to every single problem or issue, including maybe one day the most unpleasant problem of all, death. Like I said, hubris.
This historical intellectual stew and its negative implications are being played out before us in real time. One side of the political and cultural spectrum believes we should be ruled by a managerial elite consisting of “experts” and academics who know better and ought never to be questioned (doctors who question shall be silenced!). The assumption of certainty is built into everything they say or do, and we are warned that we better trust them or else! Average Americans (and in countries the world over because the entire world is now “modern”) who have been educated in the same set of assumptions accept the dictates of “experts” without question because “experts” must know with absolute certainty. Or they wouldn’t be experts! Fortunately there is another side to the political and cultural spectrum, people who in some way know absolute certainty is impossible, that trust is necessary, and risk part of life. It is the only way back to civilization as we once knew it only a few short months ago.
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