Doubt without Doubt

With In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions without Becoming a Fanatic, Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld confront the warring but ultimately conspiratorial twin fanaticisms of cynical postmodern relativism and religious fundamentalism. These twins have become something of a contemporary Yin and Yang, comprising all, or at least almost all of the available social space. Relativism and fundamentalism are so entwined that Berger and Zijterveld go so far as to assert that they:

“are two sides of the same coin. Both are profoundly modern phenomena, and both are reactions to the relativizing dynamic of modernity. The relativist embraces the dynamic; the fundamentalist rejects it. But the two have much more in common than either one would have with a genuine traditionalist. Their commonalities explain why we said… that in every fundamentalist there’s a relativist waiting to be liberated, and in every relativist there’s a fundamentalist waiting to be reborn.”

Berger and Zijderveld have more in common with the fundamentalists than the relativists, if only by virtue of the fact that they reject, rather than embrace, both sides of the coin. Their rejection of relativism and fundamentalism relates to the quantity of doubt in play on either side of the coin: “If the danger of relativism is an excess of doubt, the danger of fundamentalism is a deficit of doubt.” Too much doubt, i.e. relativism, “leads to both individual and collective paralysis,” while not enough leads to “fundamentalism, religious or secular, (which) is always an enemy of freedom.” If you’ve been having the feeling that nothing at all seems to be getting done (exhibit 1, the US Congress), even as the foundations of our free society are slowly chipping away, welcome to relativism vs. fundamentalism (or, shall we say, relativism cum fundamentalism).

Berger and Zijderveld propose their solution in the guise of Goldilocks: relativism’s doubt is too much, fundamentalism’s doubt is too little, but somewhere in the “middle ground” is an amount of doubt that is just right. In fact, in a bit of a semantic sleight of hand, Berger and Zijderveld leave off referring to the quantity of doubt, and begin to identify doubt as a place between relativism and fundamentalism:

“The middle ground of all of this is doubt- a basic uncertainty that isn’t prepared to let itself be crushed by belief or unbelief, knowledge or ignorance. Precisely because it occupies this middle ground, genuine doubt can never end up in the many ‘-isms’ that people have invented and propagated. Doubt can’t be relativistic , since relativism, like all ‘-isms,’ stifle doubt.”

But it remains unclear how a plenitude of doubt is any less “genuine” than doubt in moderation. A glutton is precisely someone who eats too much. Just so, a relativist whose doubt goes a bridge too far is in trouble precisely because of the quantity, not the quality, of their doubt.

Ironically, it is differentiating between the quality and the quantity of doubt that just may deliver a cure for the symbiotic growth of relativism and fundamentalism. Berger and Zijderveld’s solution, for all of us to live on the side of the coin in the “middle ground” of moderate doubt, is troubling because of how easy (and tempting) it will be for us to fall off that narrow band back to either side of the toxic coin. On page 108 Berger and Zijderveld note that “doubt is the hallmark of the agnostic,” seemingly having forgotten that on page 6, in a riposte to the notion of advancing global secularism, they note “an enormous explosion of passionate religious movements” and declare that “it cannot be plausibly maintained that modernity necessarily leads to a decline of religion.” Last I checked, agnosticism was the opposite of passionate religious engagement. So we have a globe full of folk looking for passionate religious experiences who are somehow expected to be mollified by the middle ground of agnostic doubt. This sounds like the perfect recipe for more relativism and fundamentalism.

Berger and Zijderveld’s misguided solution asks us to be neither relativists nor fundamentalists. I would suggest that understanding the difference between quantity and quality of doubt will empower us to be both. Where Berger and Zijderveld ask us to live on the side of the coin, I hope to demonstrate that we can live on both sides simultaneously. The demonstration begins by opening the dictionary. Merriam-Webster offers two definitions of the word doubt:

“1: to be uncertain about (something) : to believe that (something) may not be true or is unlikely
2: to have no confidence in (someone or something)” (emphasis added)

Berger and Zijderveld’s error is in restricting their understanding of doubt and its role in our belief systems to the first definition. For Berger and Zijderveld, relativism and fundamentalism are, respectively, the conditions of being either too uncertain or not uncertain enough about the beliefs in question. The solution, then, can only come with the correct formulation of certainty about. But everything I am going to ague can be boiled down to this: we must learn to be pure relativists about our beliefs, while simultaneously being strict fundamentalists re: confidence in our beliefs. In place of Berger and Zijderveld’s “doubt about doubt,” which is intended to save one from relativism, I proffer “doubt without doubt.” In doing so I would note that Jesus said “Oh ye of little faith,” not “Oh ye of the incorrect faith,” while also noting the research which demonstrates that it doesn’t matter what technique your therapist uses, only how confident she is in using that technique.

In essence, I am suggesting a return to Hegelian dialectics, in which the thesis of relativism has given rise to its antithesis in the form of fundamentalism, and that the only possible resolution of the tension between the two takes the form of synthesis. In recognition of the greatest failed dialectics of all time, Marx’s dialectical materialism, and in solidarity with dialectical materialism’s vision of a class free society, but also in recognition of the genesis of a (brutal) failure in a stubborn blindness to the immanence of an immaterial spirit, I would like to humbly make the grand gesture of naming this doubt without doubt. Ladies and gentleman, I give you dialectical (im)materialism, in which a never ending doubt about means that whatever you happen to believe about God is immaterial, and your unwavering belief in an absolute mystery is the only material with which you can ever work.

Perhaps counterintuitively, in this era when faith is conflated with fundamentalism, doubt about is inscribed in the world’s various wisdom traditions. Doubt about is so central to faith that it makes up the first four lines of the Tao Te Ching:

"The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things"

It is also etched into God’s self-proclaimed definition, “I am that I am,” which in Christian tradition is understood as “at once a name revealed and something like the refusal of a name, and hence it better expresses God as what he is- infinitely above everything that we can understand or say: he is the ‘hidden God’ , his name is ineffable, and he is the God who makes himself close to men.” (emphasis added) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am) It is only when we accept that our doubts about God should be “infinite” in scope that our belief in God (or the Sacred of one’s chosen tradition) escapes the orbit of relativism and fundamentalism. Thusly untethered, blind faith miraculously avoids all blind alleys, and the blind leading the blind means everyone feeling their way slowly forward in the dark together.

And none of this is an intellectual parlor game. Being human beings, we will still build institutions and craft rituals to buttress our belief in; the hope is that disarmed by doubt about we will refrain from killing on behalf of these institutions, but that our belief in will run so deep that we’d willingly die for it, again and again and again, as in this Lojong slogan: “Practice opening and letting go throughout your life so you will not panic as everything dissolves at death.”

Being a human being, I can’t resist having a go at constructing my own edifice in order to have something to doubt about. Because I am constantly doubting about but always struggling to believe in, my edifice is in perpetual flux but ever present. Sometimes it hovers over me like the giant UFOs suspended above the world’s cities in V, at other times it’s more like a sore throat. This week it is a word, teleology, which is my way of saying that this universe is going somewhere. Outlaw theologian John D. Caputo rightly points out in The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps that “life is not telic because life is cyclical and circles have no end, and it is not teleological because any possible causa finalis is finished off by a final terminal blow. Life is and can only be its own ‘because.’ Life is lived for itself not for an end.” To which I would reply with my own outlaw definition of teleology, taken straight from my Dad’s favorite Joe Ely lyrics: “The road goes on forever, and the party never ends.”

So my current belief about the universe is that it is going somewhere, and that it has extended us an invitation to a timeless party, which we will either accept or decline by virtue of our collective choices, i.e. we can contribute to where this is all headed if we so choose. But my current belief in the universe is that Ely’s lyrics are true, even if, to paraphrase the Grail Knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we choose… poorly. (i.e. There’s gonna be a party, with or without us.)