I DON'T KNOW

           While explaining the absence of weapons of mass destruction, Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense said, “There are things you know, things you know that you don’t know, and things that you don’t know that you don’t know.” Long before Rumsfeld, Mark Twain said, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”  Lack of good information explains the not knowing what it is that you don’t know. Unconditional belief in what you want to believe is risky business. It can leave you in the lurch, between the rock and the hard place; that’s the “just ain’t so” that Twain spoke of. 

           I kept company with a gaggle of friends last night. We had been to a movie, then went to the home of one couple, sat around a big table with wine and pizza. The conversation began with the movie but turned in on itself. Politics turns humming birds into vultures. Ten progressive, open ended thinkers became as narrow and closed as the politics they were condemning. But we know from the psychology of small groups, when like minded people are isolated from other points of view, openness and divergent thinking go away, in a heartbeat. That’s not good for people who pride themselves on openness and divergent thinking. For over an hour we tried to frame new, different ways of rebuking the immorality of conservative logic and fantasizing on how we could do something about it. I kept asking them, “Who do you mean by We?” They were too busy with rhetoric to go there with me. 

           David Hume, an18th century Scottish philosopher who, at the time, was unchallenged and renowned for his progressive views. He championed science and process over tradition and belief but he couldn’t avoid the fundamental fact of human behavior; passion drives and knowledge follows. We do, all of us, respond to our feelings before we do to knowledge. What we feel is more compelling than what we know. At first I thought, ‘How can that be?’ I didn’t want to believe it. I want to believe that reason is more trustworthy than emotion; knowledge trumps feelings every time. In a National Forest you look around and you see trees; take a few steps in any direction and you notice that all the trees are planted in perfect, evenly spaced rows. That geometry went unnoticed until you aligned yourself with it. Logically, my psychological trees lined up when I realized that my passion for reason and logic was driven by the way I feel about knowledge, not by the knowledge itself. It is not a rational choice. Every rational decision is channeled by the way we feel about rational decisions. The same can be said about decisions based on Faith and tradition. The feeling validates the source. 

           That is one of those things I didn’t know, for a very long time, that I didn’t know. Not changing the subject but off on a little side bar; Cognitive Dissonance is a psychological phenomena associated with conflicted feelings. When your belief is strong and new, credible information casts doubt on that belief, you are pulled in two directions (stress). The dissonance part comes in when you disregard, dismiss any new knowledge regardless of how compelling it may be in favor of a comfortable conscience and the old, belief based paradigm. You hang onto the comfort of a shrinking comfort zone at the risk of being not only incorrect but terribly wrong as well. We all do it to some extent. We want to believe whatever it is that makes us feel good about the world and about ourselves. If you’re a diehard Cubs fan and cling to that hope, the aftermath isn’t going to break the bank. Yet, if we are so invested in what we know, that “just ain’t so”, that we turn a deaf ear to good science and proven process, it’s a deep hole we are digging. The pathology of that folly only results in harder to climb out of, deeper holes. It doesn’t matter which side you come down on; if you deny an obvious truth because it threatens a moral principle you hold dear, you look foolish and the only consolation is to surround yourself with others who glorify the foolish.

           Rumsfeld was right to some extent; there’s too much to know, too much to grasp the scope of our own ignorance. Twain was, still is the uncompromising filter we would strain our Truths through. The truth will always be tarnished with what we want to believe. I would change that if I could, just like my friends last night. We would all welcome the truth, unvarnished, but whether we could live with it is something else. Once upon a time I hated the President. He was a spoiled, rich guy who only thought about rewarding his rich cronies. I couldn’t give him any credit for anything that had merit. But I mellowed and realized he was doing exactly what I do; he did what made sense to him and he loves his country. My friends last night think the other guys are all self righteous bigots. Those self righteous bigots think we are all self righteous bigots in the other direction. 

          There are two kinds of wisdom; the kind that others pass on in books and traditions and the kind that precipitates out of your own experience. This bit belongs to me with maybe a little nudge from Buddha: Those ideas and actions that offend you are enough of an insult that you will always distrust and oppose them. The ideas and actions you believe in make you comfortable, and in that comfort they make you vulnerable. You should challenge and test your own beliefs more rigorously and more frequently than the ones you hate. If you really believe that diversity and openness to possibility are important, then you have to keep them under the microscope. After all, you want to be capable of change, and we should change when reason dictates. I must have a powerful passion for the critical process to keep choosing it over everything else. It’s purpose is not to prove anything, but to disprove everything. What can’t be disproved must have pretty good legs. I am more comfortable with my liberal friends than the other guys but some of their truth just ain’t so either and I don’t know anything at all.