Certainty as the great enemy of tolerance, part 1 of 2

Are we sure about that?

As the days post-election turn into weeks and months, there is much that is emerging that is alarming for health. There is also much that is speculative, with little clarity about the real implications of particular proposed actions by the new, emerging, federal administration. Trying to heed my own words, I am refraining from over-investing in comment or dispositive certainty about any of this, aiming to keep an open mind, and to think carefully about how I can be most effective, towards hope. If anyone is interested in comment on the more acute contemporary swirl, I offer thoughts on LinkedIN, and a brief note to our internal Boston University School of Public Health community is here.

With that said, and relevantly, I wanted to move on to a topic that has been much on my mind: certainty. 

Two weeks ago, amidst the post-election clamor, I enjoyed taking some time out to watch Conclave, a somewhat pulpy new movie based on the Robert Harris novel. The movie dramatizes the secretive election of a new pope by cardinals sequestered in the Sistine Chapel.  There is a memorable moment in the film when Cardinal Lawrence, played by a very troubled-looking Ralph Fiennes, says “Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance,” lines taken almost verbatim from the source novel.

This got me thinking. I have written previously about the idea of false certitude in science, and the role it has played in reducing trust in science in this post-COVID moment in particular. But here I do not want to talk about the certainty of scientists, but rather about the certainty of our belief in the ideas that we propose. I suggest that the very certainty of these ideas should be of interest to us in and of itself, but, in addition, it is the very expression of ideas with certainty, particularly when these ideas are wrong, that is the “deadly enemy of tolerance.”  I will in this essay talk about the certainty of our ideas, and next week discuss why such certainty harms tolerance and unity.

It feels like some deliberation about the certainty of our ideas is particularly appropriate in a post-election moment. The national discussion is currently characterized by a somewhat ritualistic triumphalism on the winning side and blame searching on the losing side. These attitudes each reflect a level of certainty on the part of those holding them—for one side, certainty that the coming years will be mostly good, for the other that they will be mostly bad. These feelings are informed by a broad sense that one’s favored candidate’s policies were right and that the opponent’s policies were wrong. We can hold these certainties with some nuance, of course, thinking perhaps not all of our candidate’s ideas are right and accepting there may be some good sense behind the other candidate’s ideas. But, by and large, an election season is a time of competing certainties, a zero-sum version of our politics which it is easy for us to view as something akin to good versus evil.     

So perhaps it is important to remember for a minute that in the matter of certainty that turns out to be very wrong, neither red nor blue nor center have much purchase to claim a spotless record. There are many examples of ideas felt strongly, expressed with certainty, that turned out to be wrong throughout the political/ideas spectrum. Let me offer three such examples.

I start with ideas that emerge from what is generally considered the left, grounding this in the progressive movement of a hundred years or so ago. The animating idea behind progressivism has long been that the world can be made better, that inequities in wellbeing are a result of conditions which can be improved through policy, technology, and the mobilization of social movements. This idea is what gave birth to a range of movements which have improved our world, including the push to design better cities by, for example, broadening the availability of parks for recreation for families with children, which paved the way for the enormous transformation that Robert Moses brought about in New York City, as documented in The Power Broker.

The rise of the Progressive Era was responsible for a large number of enormously important social transformations, including improvement in working conditions after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. This was all done with reformist zeal and clarity of thought about the rightness of these causes. Yet this zeal, this faith in the “perfectibility” of human beings, could also lead to some dark places, notably in the embrace by some in the progressive movement of eugenics. This embrace came about as another way, seemingly, to improve society, through science and rationality, and was prominent enough to attract adherents like W. E. B. Du Bois, Theodore Roosevelt, and Margaret Sanger and to lead to forced sterilization laws being adopted in 31 states.

Of course, we recognize eugenics today for what it is—abhorrent, an abrogation of fundamental human autonomy and respect for all individuals. But a whole largely well-intentioned movement was firmly boosting eugenics for decades, convinced of the rightness of the cause. This certainty is captured in the following statement from Theodore Roosevelt, which is typical of the sentiments among some progressives of the time: “Some day we will realize that the prime duty the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type [sic].”

Let us now move to the right side of the political spectrum, and to ideas embraced by perhaps the quintessential icon of right-wing ideas of the past century—Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan’s political career began not in Washington DC but in Hollywood as president of the Screen Actors Guild. It was from this position that Reagan testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee as a “friendly witness” in that committee’s hunt for communists that were supposedly infiltrating the US government. The work of the committee was famously supported by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose anti-communist crusade was motivated by the certainty that widespread communist influence was subverting America from within. While there were indeed spies for the Soviet Union within the US, McCarthyism contributed little to the work of finding them. Instead, McCarthyism upended lives and destroyed careers through the public vilification of those who were supposedly communists. Today, of course, McCarthyism is a cautionary tale of prosecutorial over-reach and abuse of power—and the certainty that can form the basis for such excesses. 

And finally, how about certainty at the center? I have been fairly explicit about my skepticism about extreme ideas on either side of the political spectrum, so perhaps, the reader might wonder if I think there is no false certitude in ideas that emerge from the center. While I would argue that, yes, when we approach ideas from the outer extreme edges, we are more likely to lean heavily into wrong-headed ideas, certainty at the center can also lead to challenges and missteps. There are times when the Overton window has shifted to a place where the centrist, politically moderate position is not a position which aligns with supporting human dignity and the natural rights of all. There was a time in America, for example, when the politically moderate position was to accept the presence of slavery in the south while merely opposing its spread into the western territories. There was a time when it was politically moderate to oppose US involvement in World War II, even as the Nazis invaded and occupied countries in Europe. In the present moment, we are arguably seeing on both the left and right a range of positions which could be said to be ideologically excessive, even as broad majorities regard them as middle-of-the-road—as simple common sense.

So, the fundamental point here is that movements of social thought lead, not infrequently throughout history, into intellectual cul-de-sacs that turn out to be dead wrong and repudiated by history. Even more, it is hard in retrospect to even understand what “they” were thinking. How could anyone think eugenics was a good idea? How could anyone be so shameless as to smear others with specious allegations that destroy their lives? How could moderation ever mean making peace with the existence of slavery at home or expansionist tyranny abroad?

This, in and of itself, should give us pause. Do we know which ideas we embrace today that will in the future be seen as misguided, harmful? Do we know which symbolic measures we embrace will be seen as performative at best, and obfuscating of complex issues at worst? We cannot know. So, we should indeed be careful about being overly certain, regardless of the providence of our ideas.

But there is another important half of this discussion—how is certainty the enemy of tolerance? I will engage with this question next week.