The Virtue of Doubt

One of Joni Mitchell’s better known numbers, “Help Me,” came up on the shuffle the other morning, and I reflected, as I often do with her, on the price that some artists pay for an early and astonishing success. Orson Welles once said,

I painted and they said, ‘Nobody’s ever seen such painting!’ I played and nobody’s ever played like that. And there seemed to be no limit to what I could do. I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child because everybody told me from the moment I was able to hear that I was absolutely marvelous. I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn’t know what was ahead of me.

The danger in being told how marvelous one is in that, eventually, one might start to believe it. It develops into a kind of certainty and a faith in one’s brilliance, and that concoction is a deadly brew. In Welles’s case, he invoked the ire of the system that should have sustained him, and he spent the balance of his career, after Citizen Kane, having pictures taken away from him to be recut and running around the world begging for financing from Philistines. As he also said later in that same interview, that’s no way to lead a life.

In the case of Ms. Mitchell, her work became mired, after the great success of Court and Spark, in the swamp of her own pretentiousness. Having been told repeatedly that she was a genius, she came to believe it. Believing it, she developed faith in her genius. Having faith in it, she became certain of its existence. Paul McCartney has been similarly infected.

Belief, faith, and certainty. These three go hand-in-hand. One reinforces the other, which would be fine if they weren’t all based in the ephemeral. We believe when we cannot know. We have faith in order to justify our belief. And to protect the fragile eggs of faith and belief, we build a wall of certainty, denying reason, denying questioning, denying examination. And denying doubt.

The wonder and glory of faith is, of course, the great American cliche, and almost every politician finds it convenient to trot his out for inspection from time-to-time. Even rarer than the atheist in a foxhole is the atheist on the stump, and there is no greater indictment of the value of faith than that every politician sees fit to display his like it’s encased in amber.

This is not to say that faith and belief are without value. Not all is known, and I suspect that not all can be known. It is when faith and belief are mixed with certainty that the greatest sorrow flows. The potion of faith and belief, spiced with certainty, is the basis of every conspiracy theory and crackpot religion, and has formed the basis for great social evils such as South African Apartheid and the demi-slavery of the Jim Crow South. The racist, the terrorist, the killer cloaked in the lineaments of religion are all true believers.

The cure, therefore, is doubt. Not a great deal of doubt, just a pinch. Doubt is the dot of Chinese mustard in an intellectual pool of duck sauce. It cuts through the cloying sweetness of faith and belief and make their flavors more complex and subtle and rich. Doubt makes opposing ideas seem possible and possibly legitimate. It opens the ears and relaxes the mind. It invites conversation and discussion and seeks relief not in thesis or antithesis, but in synthesis.

For one of the great problems in our public life today is the inability of opposing groups and individuals to compare ideas, rationally, and to come up with better ideas out of the comparison. Instead, our public life is awash in grandstanding and posturing, and the conversation that is necessary to the functioning of a healthy democracy is controlled, mostly, by shills and toadies. It is a sad thing, this current American conversation, a set of speeches made to a wall by a wall.

But it needn’t be that way. All we need is for more people to learn the virtue of doubt.