By Jonah Goldberg
Townhall.com
December 28, 2006
Have you heard the news? Belief is bad.
Pick up an eggheady book review, an essay in Time magazine or listen to a thumb-suck session on National Public Radio for very long and you'll soon hear someone explain that real conviction--dogmatism!--is dangerous.
Andrew Sullivan, in his new book "The Conservative Soul," declares a jihad on certainty, by which he means the certainty of fundamentalist "Christianists"--the allusion to Islamists is deliberate. The New Republic's Jonathan Chait proclaims that liberalism is the anti-dogmatic ideology. Sam Harris, a leading proselytizer for atheism, has declared a one-man crusade on religious certainty. Intellectual historian J.P. Diggins writes in the latest issue of the American Interest that there's a war afoot for "the soul of the American Republic" between the forces of skepticism and infallibility. And so on.
Much of this stems from the popularity of Bush hatred these days. President Bush's alleged "messianic certainty"--to use Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) words--is dangerous and evil in the eyes of supposedly meek and nuanced liberals.
Longtime New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis captured the thought nicely a few years ago when he said that a primary lesson of his entire career was that "certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft."
Whenever I hear people say such things, I like to ask them, "Are you sure about that?" When they say yes, which they always do, I follow up by asking, "No, no: Are you really, really certain that certainty is bad?" At some point even the irony-deficient get the joke.
But they still don't understand that the joke is on them. Virtually every hero in human history has been driven by certainty, by the courage of their convictions. Sir Thomas More and Socrates chose certain death, pun intended, over uncertain life. Martin Luther King Jr.--to pick liberalism's most iconic hero--was hardly plagued with doubt about the rightness of his cause. A Rosa Parks charged with today's reigning moral imperative not to be too sure of herself might not have sat at the front of the bus. An FDR certain that certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity might have declined to declare total war on Nazism for fear of becoming as bad as his enemy.
The fact is that unless you know where you stand, it's unlikely you'll have the courage to understand where someone else is coming from.
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