Two kinds of skepticism

Sometimes events happen in which my understanding of the relationship between people, events, or items take on a new significance for me.  I was a Quaker before I became Catholic.  George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, called these instances "openings."  I began having these openings as a 14 year old.   I am now 64.  For fifty years, at totally unexpected times, things converge in which I see a connection between them which I did not previously see.  It is instantaneous.  When I was a pastor, often these connections produced fruit in the form of a sermon.  I have described these openings as an experience where it is like a curtain is lifted and I see what lies behind it.  I had one of those openings today.

It began with a very brief Facebook exchange with my dear friend and theological colleague, Dr. Thomas Jay Oord.  Dr.  Oord is a well-known American theologian.  I am kind of an obscure, unknown  thinker but Tom has welcomed me as a friend and colleague.  He graciously endorsed my book Finding My Voice Through a Wilderness Journey.  Tom and another friend and colleague, Dr. Tripp Fuller, are working on a project on people who have had to deconstruct (and then hopefully reconstruct) their religious beliefs.  That number of people has included me.  (Not that I am mentioned in the book, I am just among the number of those who have needed to deconstruct.)

Tom mentioned in the Facebook post that part of deconstruction is doubt.  People are afraid to doubt the articles of Faith they have been taught, and yet it seems that this is an important part of the process of deconstruction and coming to a place where our faith is our own, rather than one which has been, if you will, dished up and served to us.

I shared with Tom one of the most important things my mentor, the Quaker philosopher D. Elton Trueblood taught me about philosophy.  Elton used to say, and I used to quote this in my very first lecture every time I taught Introduction to Philosophy, that one of the marks of good philosophy was what he called Beneficent Skepticism.  Trueblood said neither science nor philosophy could ever exist or advance without some element of doubt, and that doubt was really our friend because it prompted us toward what he called "a life of search."  The value of a question, he said, was not in the answer to the question, but in the follow-up questions it generated.

My friend Tom appreciated that concept.

Shortly after that comment, I was listening to a video with my wife, in which the TV commentator Rachel Maddow was commenting on some things going on in the news in 2023.  We are big fans of Rachel and watch her every Monday evening.   I consider her the most honest person in all of TV journalism.  One of the things she said she's observed is a number of commonalities in American conservatism today and the small pockets of Americans who were actually pro-Nazi in the run-up to World War II.  Rachel said one of these is a deliberate attempt to undermine the concept of truth, to make everyone skeptical of everything.  This is a technique cult leaders use.  I was in a cult for ten years and wrote a book about that experience.  That book can be found here.

It dawned on me that there are two distinct kinds of skepticism.  There is the beneficent skepticism of which Trueblood wrote, and the maleficent skepticism of those who use skepticism, not to advance the discovery of truth, but to impede it.  I think the single biggest danger the Donald Trump years has unleashed is this maleficent skepticism.  The use of skepticism to undermine all use of science or fact was evidenced in how the administration at the time handled the COVID pandemic and all the unnecessary loss which ensured.  The number of people who were anti-vaccine in this time period is but one example of the harm maleficent skepticism can unleash.

The very first week of the Trump administration, one of his aides used what I consider a contemptible phrase, alternative facts.  I remember thinking that these might be the most dangerous words in American history.  I wrote about that in 

2017 and posted that on my blog last month.  You can find that essay here.

I am well aware that complete certainty is a myth--and that is a good thing because complete certainty would be inimical to beneficent skepticism and no advances in science, medicine, philosophy, religion, or politics would ever happen.  But as Trueblood also said, while we do not have complete certainty, we do not have to be in complete doubt.  Doubt is good and necessary.  So is sugar.  But as in a  diet, where too much of a good thing can do great harm, so it is in the life of the mind.  Doubt is good, but too much doubt, or too little doubt, can do a lot of harm.