Honesty, wisdom and insight say we have to live with uncertainty

By David McElroy · October 29, 2012

When I was much younger and even more foolish than I am today, I had trouble saying three simple words: “I don’t know.” Instead, I had a view about everything. And I was right about everything, of course. I was certain of it.

As the years have gone by, I find that I’m certain of fewer and fewer things. I find that there are a few root-level “first things” that I’m sure of, but there aren’t many things outside of those few principles that I can say I know with certainty.

The list of things I proclaim as “truth” shrinks all the time. I have more questions and fewer answers, partly because I’ve seen myself be wrong so many times and partly because I see that the world is far more complex than I realized even a few years ago.

So the idea of asserting so many opinions as absolute fact seems strange to me now. It feels jarring. I wonder if the certainty I expressed about so many things when I was younger was as annoying to others then as it is to me when I see it in others today.

I find that both science and Christian faith offer insights and truths to me about certain things, but scientists go wrong when they go beyond what they reasonably know to assert things they don’t know — and Christians go wrong when they claim certainty about things where Jesus and scripture are silent.

Why do people assert things as fact when they’re not in the position to know those things? I think it’s because they’re afraid of uncertainty. They don’t mean to “fill in the blanks” when they don’t know things, but they do, because they’re terrified of not knowing. Christian singer Pat Terry addressed this tendency in a song called “Nothing I Say.” He wrote:

I believe there’s more to life than certainty
There’s insecurity and things we don’t admit to
And I am not afraid of all this frailty
Cause it’s what’s keeping me
In search of something more

Still, people try to be certain. What’s even worse is that they feel the need to maintain the position they’ve taken, even after it’s clear that they were wrong. People say they want to remain consistent with what they’ve said before. They’re afraid of being accused of being wishy-washy. And they’re afraid that people won’t understand if they change their minds and reject what they had embraced before.

Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed this issue is a widely misunderstood passage of his essay on “Self-Reliance”:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Emerson isn’t saying that you should randomly change your mind for no reason. He’s not saying it’s a good thing to intentionally be inconsistent. What he’s saying is quite simple. He’s saying to live with your understanding of truth (and state your understanding of truth) every day, even if it’s different from what your understanding was yesterday. Don’t be afraid of speaking what you honestly understand the truth to be. And if you decide tomorrow that you were wrong, don’t be afraid to change your mind and say so.

Will people misunderstand you if you do that? Will they claim you’re inconsistent? Yes on both counts. But, as Emerson points out, pretty much everybody who’s ever brought truth to human beings has been misunderstood, so you’re in good company if people misunderstand you.

In some ways, I miss the certainty that I felt when I was younger. I miss the feeling that I had everything figured out. But I’ve had to change a number of things I’ve believed along the way. I’ve changed positions on intellectual matters and political matters and theological matters. I’ve had to completely reinterpret some things at times about my own history and psychology. I’ve had to do it enough that I know now that I’m wrong about some of what I believe today. I just don’t know which parts I’m wrong about. I only know that I’m ready to change them when I discover where I’m wrong.

In his early 20th century play, “The Admirable Crichton,” J.M. Barrie wrote, “I’m not young enough to know everything.” It was just a joke in a play, but there’s a lot of truth there. I once knew everything. I’m now just aware of how easy it is to be wrong about almost everything.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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