Doubt

In his movie "Doubt," writer/director John Patrick Shanley explored the effects of certainty on the lives of priests and nuns in a Boston Catholic school. The last line of the film, spoken in agony by Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius Beauvier, is "I have doubt." As a nun with absolute certainty -- about her faith, about Father Flynn's behavior with a student, about her certainty -- she suddenly falls to pieces when she steps back and looks at all the facts before her.

In today's Los Angeles Times, Gregory Rodriguez highlights a new book by two sociologists about doubt as an effective weapon against fundamentalism of any kind. Money quote:

The most important core certainty, and one found in most belief systems, is "do unto others ..." -- the Golden Rule. It leaves enough wiggle room for your beliefs, my beliefs and their beliefs to coexist. And what makes it all work is the same thing that burdened us all to begin with: doubt. Berger and Zijderveld believe that doubt can serve as a type of psychic cushion between all our different certainties.

This article has made me take a step back and re-examine what I had believed was my high level of tolerance for other belief systems. I believe that there are spaces in my tolerance for certainty to step in: certainty that I am right and others are wrong. Still, I also believe that I have enough doubt about my own beliefs, about politics or religion or the economy, that keep me open to new ideas. This blog was itself a product of doubt and uncertainty, as I spent a lot of time reading bloggers of different ideologies and hearing some level of truth in all of them. I think that's why I get so riled by the Malkins and Hewitts and other hard-core wing-nuts on the right: because in some ways they make sense to me while they are using language that pushes my buttons. God, I hate that!