THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF DOUBT
The seventh book of Plato’s Republic begins with the Parable of the
Cave. To show “how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened” the
philosopher draws a picture of human beings living in an underground
den, all of them from childhood chained with their backs to the light
so that all they can see is moving shadows cast upon the opposite
wall. This world of shadows is the system of popular beliefs. To
these people “the truth would be literally nothing but the shadow of
images.” Plato tells us to imagine what would happen if the prisoners
were released and disabused of their error. If any one of them is
suddenly compelled to turn and face the light, the glare blinds him
and he suffers a sharp pain. If he is reluctantly dragged up into
the outside world of sunlight he is at first dazzled. After he is
accustomed to the new vision, all reality will appear different. He
will see the difference between shadow and substance. He will know that
popular belief is error. If now he should return, what a difference
there would be between his new wisdom and that which in the den passed
for wisdom! “And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among
themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows,
and to remark which of them went before and which followed after,
and which were together, and who were therefore best able to draw
conclusions as to the future, do you think he would care for such
honors and glories?--And if there were a contest and he had to compete
in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of
the den and while his eyes were yet weak,” we are told that he would
fumble and be ridiculous, and men would say, “Up he went and down he
came without his eyes,” and they would pass a law that no one should
even think of ascending any more or try to release another and lead him
up.
I will not discuss the metaphysical implications of this parable about
which there is dispute. Plato says we shall not misapprehend him if
we interpret this upward journey as education. Whoever would face the
light must turn his back on the crowd and its shadows. He must climb
into another world of values. The educated man thinks differently. His
beliefs are different from those of the herd. He is being set free from
its delusions, even from what it holds to be important. This is not
because he wishes to be aloof or superior, but because he is gaining a
different conception of what believing itself is. He has a new approach
to things in general, new habits of judging. He is beginning to form
his own judgments, and to judge is to weigh, to consider, to question,
to seek evidence, to doubt.
Common men cherish their naïve faiths and ask no questions. They
imagine that education is simply greater information of the same sort
which they also possess in some measure, and that it is the part of
wisdom to establish the reality of their shadows. They resent a wisdom
which is different from their own and unsettles belief. He who acquires
information without the will to doubt is a common man and his kind
understand him. Hence men tend to display their information and conceal
their education. However much a man may know, so long as he does not
become _re-oriented_, the crowd does not suspect him, but admires
his learning. He is like a former Mayor of New York in his high hat
at the head of the Policeman’s Parade. The multitude used to stand
with their mouths open gazing at him. Each in imagination saw in the
exalted figure himself risen to a place of honor and success. So it
is with the “brainy man.” The “lightening calculator” or the man who
can recite from memory the population statistics of the cities of the
United States is a museum wonder. But when it was announced in a New
York theater that only twelve men could understand Einstein’s theory of
relativity, I am told that the crowd hissed.
Information is a kind of skill. Everyone can possess this skill to the
extent he chooses, and people do not resent an exhibition of unusual
skill of such a nature. In America most men and boys have some measure
of skill at the game of baseball, so this game is the popular national
form of sport. The skillful professional ball-player is simply one of
the common boyhood ideals realized. He differs from the spectators of
the game in degree, but not in kind. He plays the same game they all
played, and is the same sort of person they all were as boys--only more
so. So with most kinds of information, the amount one may acquire makes
only a quantitative difference, not a difference in kind. But as a man
becomes educated he discovers that he is playing a new game; he is
becoming a different kind of person, with different likes and dislikes,
different interests, different ideals and faiths, and such beliefs as
he has he holds differently.
What the multitude most fears in education is the danger that the
crowd faith will be lost in the process. This fear is often justified.
Old beliefs will be lost and they should be. The fear appears in
consciousness as solicitude for the spiritual welfare of the person
being educated. It is really anxiety over the menace of education to
herd living and thinking. It is the function of education to lure the
individual out of the pack and give him opportunity to know his own
mind, a thing he can never do so long as he runs and barks and bites
along with all the rest. To return to Plato’s figure, every person who
climbs out of the cave not only loses his own faith in the reality of
shadows but weakens the faith of those who remain behind. Cave men
make strenuous efforts to resist education. Their common practice is
to maintain their own systems of pseudo education in which no one is
permitted to turn his eyes away from the wall.
Again, education has been likened to leaven. When it is honest it is
very much like yeast. Before the culture is introduced the solution
of ideas is in equilibrium. The mind has simply accepted what was
poured into it by parents, teachers, priests, and politicians. In the
solution there is reflected a compact, “still,” neatly ordered little
system of knowledge. “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.”
Duty is clear, all is conventionally arranged, truth is eternal and
logic can prove it. Human rights are decreed by the founders of the
republic. The course of destiny is disclosed to reason and faith and
the promise sealed in divine revelation. At this stage, most minds
are carefully sealed up or a prophylactic is stirred in, for if those
sugary solutions are exposed to a live spiritual culture they begin
to “work.” Then they are spoiled for certain purposes. With the
fermentation there is sometimes foam and gas; but a chemical change is
taking place, brewing a mind with a “kick” in it. It is interesting
that bread and wine and education are all made by a similar process;
hence an educational Volsteadism has often been enforced so that many
of the best minds have had to be “home brewed.”
Professor Dewey somewhere speaks of education as freeing the mind of
“bunk.” It is a large task. No one wholly succeeds. I never saw a
completely “debunked” individual. Strive as we may to eradicate it,
there is always in our thinking an amount of error, of wish-fancy
accepted as objective fact, of exaggeration, special pleading,
self-justification. Many of our beliefs are not founded in reason at
all, but are demanded by some unconscious and repressed impulse in
our nature. Men make a virtue of their faith when in fact they are
_victims_ of it; they can no more help believing certain things than a
neurotic can stop a compulsive habit.
It is said that it is easy to doubt and that to believe is an
accomplishment. It is not so. It is easier to believe than to doubt.
The things we must train ourselves to doubt are as a rule just
the things we wish to believe. It is children and savages and the
illiterate who have the most implicit faith. It is said that unbelief
is sin. This is not so; it is nobler to doubt than to believe, for to
doubt is often to take sides with fact against oneself. Nietzsche said
that this trait is characteristic of “higher men.” It was Huxley, as I
remember it, who considered that man could in nothing fall so low as
when he deliberately took refuge in the absurd. Even with a rationalist
like Huxley doubt is not merely a function of the intellect. Under
certain circumstances it is a moral necessity.
The pursuit of knowledge is not the same, however, as scrupulous
avoidance of error. He who strives to do his own thinking must accept
responsibility for himself. He must expect that he will make mistakes.
He may end in total failure. He must take his chances and be willing
to pay the cost of his adventure. I know professional scholars who
are so afraid they may write or say something which their colleagues
will show to be wrong that they never express an opinion of their own
or commit themselves to any downright statement. Such equivocation
and qualifying--playing safe--is not what I mean by doubt. I do not
mean merely that one should be always on guard against the possibility
of error, but that one should learn to hold all one’s beliefs with
a half-amused light-heartedness. Most minds are loaded down with
the seriousness of their convictions. Solemnity in the presence of
our eternal verities is awkwardness, and makes us always a little
ridiculous, giving us the appearance of one about to shake hands with
the President. Why not enjoy the humor of the situation? Our great
truths may all the while be “spoofing” us. It will do no harm to give
them a sly wink now and then.
Crowd men have no sense of humor. It is very difficult to educate
solemn and opinionated people. Like Omar, they always come out by that
same door wherein they went. I have known students to complete a course
of study having learned nothing, because of their disinclination to
consider any fact which might cause them to surrender some belief about
religion or economic theory with which they entered. Whoever leaves an
institution of learning with the same general outlook on life that he
had when he first came might better have employed his time otherwise.
He is not a student; he is a church-member.
A well-known reformer says in his autobiography that his education,
to the present time, has been a long process of “un-learning.” The
progressive disillusionment began in college when he was forced to
abandon the religious dogmas of his childhood. It continued through a
series of hard experiences and misdirected efforts to improve the world
from each of which he reaped a harvest of doubt, leaving behind the
exposure of one economic or sociological fallacy after another, until
in the end he had left only his faith in Woodrow Wilson and in the
proletariat. Then he lost Wilson.
Perhaps one who still has the proletariat is not utterly disillusioned.
If the education continues that too may go the way of earlier beliefs.
It is one thing to despair of a society only one section of which can
stand the test of our idealism. It is quite another matter if one is
led to re-examine one’s idealism. It is this latter kind of doubt which
has the greater importance. The significant thing is not the particular
belief which a man gives up or retains but the manner in which he
believes what he does believe. Change the latter and you change a basic
habit pattern; you change the man.
Not all scepticism has educational value. There is a kind of doubting
which is merely the negative response of the unteachable, the
suspiciousness of the wilfully ignorant, the refusal of the incurious
to examine disturbing and challenging evidence. There are, as an
eighteenth century philosopher said, minds that are moulded to the form
of one idea. Many people, after they have accepted one idea, tame it
and keep it as a sort of watchdog to frighten all other ideas away.
This refusal to be convinced may appear to be scepticism; it is only
stubbornness. The late Mr. Bryan and his followers were very sceptical
of evolution. But this hostile attitude is very different from the
scepticism of those scientists who hold that the theory is a mere
working hypothesis which is yet to be confirmed. The scepticism of
ignorance is motivated by the desire to save an old faith. Savages have
been known to exhibit this incredulity toward certain aspects of our
more advanced knowledge. If you were to tell the natives of Borneo that
there is no dragon in the sky which eats up the moon during an eclipse,
that there are no spirits and no magic, I imagine they would laugh in
your face and think you a fool. Many a discovery and invention has been
greeted by a grinning and incredulous public even in civilized society.
The scepticism which has value is that which leads one on to further
study and investigation. And it is characterized by intellectual
modesty.
Philosophic doubt is not the pitiable condition of the soul that timid
spirits imagine. It is not pessimism or cynicism, but a healthy and
cheerful habit. It gives peace of mind. Men who stop pretending can
sleep o’ nights. There is a certain scepticism which is in no sense the
spirit that denies. It is a frank recognition of things as they come.
It is almost a test of a man’s honesty, among those who have stopped
to think about the nature and limitations of our knowledge. Certainly
cultivated people do not exhibit the same degree of cock-sureness
as do the ignorant. People think the old saying about “doubting the
intelligence that doubts” is funny. Popular audiences will always
laugh at it. But why not? It is a platitude that the more a man learns
the more he realizes how little he knows. Existence is filled with
inscrutable mystery. To none of the profound questions that we ask of
it is there any final answer. We must be satisfied ultimately with
surmise, with symbol and poetic fancy. Speculations about the soul,
God, the ultimate nature of reality and the course of destiny, and as
to whether existence has any meaning or purpose beyond our own, or
whether our life itself is worthwhile--all these speculations and many
others of similar nature lead to no conclusions in fact, and we return
always to the point from which we started. The very terms in which we
put such questions are often meaningless when closely examined by the
intellect, and the answer to them is determined by our own moods.
There is a general belief that science can answer the riddle. But
science is only one possible view of things, the one best adapted to
the needs of creatures like ourselves. It cannot deal with questions
of value. It can tell us how things operate, their relative mass and
positions in space and time, but it cannot tell us what they are in
themselves, nor why they exist nor anything about their goodness
or beauty. The more exact scientific knowledge becomes, the more
closely it approaches mathematics. Pure mathematics deals only with
abstractions and logical relations and can dismiss the whole world of
objects. Science presupposes the data of experience and the validity
of its own logical principles. It substitutes its mechanized order of
things for things as we experience them.
Human reasoning is partial in all its processes. We think successfully
about things when we ignore all the aspects or qualities of them except
those which are relevant to the purpose at hand. The H₂O-ness of water
is no more the ultimate nature of water than is its wetness, or its
thirst quenching quality. That it is H₂O is only one of the things that
may be said about water. Now if we add together bits of one-sided and
partial scientific knowledge, we do not thereby gain a sum total which
is the equivalent of reality as a whole. We have a useful instrument
for dealing with our environment, because in thought we have greatly
simplified it by ignoring in each instance all that is irrelevant. But
what we now have is a universe of discourse, a human construction which
is what it is because we are always more interested in some aspects of
things than in others.
All our ideas are views--they have been likened to snapshots. The
world of which we are part is in flux. It comes to us as process,
and our intellect does not grasp the movement any more than we can
restore the movement of a man running by adding together a series of
photographs. The movement always takes place between the pictures.
Intellect is an instrument, not a mirror. Our world is not reducible
to a form of thought, and when men speak of truth, reality, cause,
substance, they are really only saying what they mean by certain words.
The world, as James said, has its meanings for us because we are
interested spectators, and so far as we can see none of these meanings
are final. Whitehead and others have shown that some of the basic
concepts of physical science which have held sway since the seventeenth
century are now subject to revision. Santayana says that knowledge
is faith--animal faith. It would be strange if it were otherwise, if
hairy little creatures such we are, whose ancestors lived in trees and
made queer guttural noises, should so organize human discourse as to
be able to say the last word about reality as a whole. It is well that
we should marvel at our achievements of knowledge, for they are man’s
noblest work; but let us remember that human reason, itself a phase and
part of the process of nature, can only view the whole process from
its own partial standpoint, and that is enough unless we aspire to
infallibility.
Man is a disputatious animal who loves to speak like Sir Oracle.
Uneducated people, ashamed of their ignorance, commit themselves
hastily and cling to their commitments, for to change one’s mind is an
admission that one was mistaken. We wish to be vindicated as having
all along been in the right. Hence it is more natural to contend for
a principle than to test a hypothesis. The ego becomes identified
with certain convictions. We feel ourselves personally injured if our
convictions are subjected to criticism. We are not ordinarily grateful
to the person who points out our errors and sets us right. But if our
education is to proceed, we must get over our delusion of infallibility.
This fiction of infallibility is very common, and those who have not
learned to doubt this fiction, who are sure that they have the truth
and are on the side of the right are as a rule the more ignorant
and provincial elements of the population. It is no accident that
Fundamentalism, prohibition, and other forms of moral regulation exist
in inverse ratio to urbanity and have their strongholds in rural
communities. People to whom it never occurs to ask how they know so
clearly they are right when better informed people have doubts on the
subject, are the ones who naturally strive to coerce their neighbors.
To many minds there are no social or moral problems. The answer is
always known by the crusader. It is very simple. To him there can be
no two opinions. The standards which prevail in his own parish, the
self-expression of his own type, are the will of God. Principles of
right and wrong are known immediately without reflection or regard
to the situations where they are to be applied; they are revealed to
conscience. “Right is right and wrong is wrong everywhere and forever
the same!”
Men who hold such a view learn little from experience, and this is why
crowds never change their minds. They have first to be disintegrated
and a new crowd formed about new standards, because each crowd
represents its will as a divine command, a matter of eternal principle.
To learn anything from experience it is necessary to take into account
the results of our behavior. But when you do a thing merely because
it is demanded by a universal principle which must be vindicated at
all costs, or because it is a divine command to be carried out with
unquestioning obedience, you need not consider the results. Hence you
cannot be shown that you were mistaken. In this sense men’s gods and
their _a priori_ ideas have the function of preserving their fiction
of infallibility. There always appears what Professor Overstreet calls
the proclamation of “the One Right Way.” Differences of opinion are
held to be not mere differences of point of view, but the difference
between Right and Wrong, Good and Evil. Those who think differently
are the wicked, the ungodly, the _enemy_. They must be convinced by
being vanquished, silenced. Every knee must bow and every tongue
confess. There is no longer a meeting of minds in the search for
truth. The triumph of the Right is in the belief of the average man a
knockout. There must be no compromise; any attitude other than intense
partisanship is disloyalty. One in a discussion must line up for or
against a proposition, take sides, have a ready answer for anything
that the other side says, and be sure that nothing will cause one to
modify one’s views. Is any one ever convinced by public debate? Or does
one emerge from a church quarrel, a political campaign, a session of
the legislature, a convention of a trade union with a broader outlook
or better understanding?
The egotism of the ignorant keeps them in ignorance. There is an
amusing notion that the masses are kept in ignorance by clever
conspirators against freedom and progress. The average man’s reasoning
consists chiefly of the repetition of cant phrases in support of
preconceived ideas. He wishes to hear only what he can applaud, and he
applauds what saves his face and puts his enemies to shame. Theological
disputation has always been carried on in this spirit, and so have most
popular discussions of morals, politics and economic problems.
Professor Overstreet says that this “One Right Way” attitude is
essentially adolescent. This does not mean that it is essentially
youthful. Adolescence is the period when there is normally an
exaggerated emotional interest in the ego. A delayed adolescent type
of mentality is common. Psychologists speak of it as narcissism,--a
fixation of interest upon the idea of self. Among psychopathic
individuals and also among crowds this _narcissism_ is very dominant
and leads to exaggerated notions of self-importance and to other fixed
ideas. Inability to entertain any doubt of self becomes inability to
question any idea which one would like to believe true. Hence the
delusion of infallibility. I think that vast numbers of otherwise
normal people are made susceptible to crowd thinking because they
simply do not know that there are ways of life and thought different
from their own which good people may and do honestly hold. Crowd
appeal at once entrenches prejudice and flatters the ego, compensating
it perhaps for any half-conscious feeling of inferiority it may have
because for instance a man over-rates school education and “did not get
it.”
It is interesting to note how this delusion of infallibility may often
lead men to believe and assert the most incredible fabrications. I
quote from a recent New York newspaper an exaggerated example which
will illustrate what I mean.
“The League of Nations has been asked to do a lot of strange things
by people all over the world, but it remained for a New York business
man to request action on the most unusual topic of all. Announcement
is made by the league secretariat that it has received a letter
from the New Yorker declaring his opinion that ‘brain enslavement,’
otherwise known as spirit writing or receiving messages from the
dead, is the cause of many evils. He said he wanted the league to
stop this system all over the world, making the specific charge that
the American courts of ‘so-called justice’ are controlled by the
spirit movement.”
Note the last sentence; the “specific charge” is very typical. There is
not the least notion that so sweeping an indictment should be supported
by evidence. It _must be_ so, for how can the alleged tolerant attitude
of the courts be explained otherwise? An explanatory idea is asserted
as an established fact. Here we have a mind incapable of entertaining
doubt. As usual in unhealthy reasoning, the thinking in this case is
a syllogism. Spiritualism is a form of brain enslavement which is the
cause of wide-spread evil. All who do not sufficiently oppose it are
controlled by it. The courts do not sufficiently resist it. Therefore
the courts are controlled by the spirit movement. If the premises are
true the conclusion of course follows logically. The trouble with
diseased thinking is not its logic, but its inability to examine
its premises in the light of fact. A healthy mind would doubt these
premises before reaching such a ridiculous conclusion. Doubt makes for
sanity.
I do not wish the force of this example to be lost. Most people will
see it so long as we are talking about spirits, for there is much
wholesome doubt about the doings of spirits. But let us substitute for
spirits something else concerning which surmise commonly passes as
established fact, and we have something very familiar. “The American
courts are controlled by Wall Street,” or by the Catholic Church, or
by British propagandists, or the attempt is being made by labor unions
or by Communists. So it is with popular thinking on most subjects.
Acquaintance with facts does not seem to be necessary for the formation
of opinion. I can easily assert alleged facts on my own authority;
it hurts my pride when I am asked for evidence. I once heard a
fundamentalist preacher say that everyone who doubted the infallibility
of the Bible merely sought an excuse for living a life of sin. Such
statements must be true; they are so logical, moreover they justify a
man in his fixed beliefs and put doubters always in the wrong. Many
people even in their reading do little more than seek confirmation
for notions founded on such thinking. The censorship of books is
hardly necessary to keep people’s minds in the beaten path. Many
people cannot read a book with which they do not agree. We disguise
our infallibility under the infallibility of our favorite author. He
becomes an authority. We read our own meanings into his text when
necessary. We pick out the passages which support us and quote them on
all occasions. For instance, a mind saturated with the teachings of
Karl Marx will take in nothing else and will view every other author
from the standpoint of his agreement with Marx. It is always so with
the sectarian mind, whether in religion or in politics.
The sort of logic which we have just been considering leads men to
assume extreme positions of all sorts. Opinionated and undisciplined
minds always tend to carry an idea to extremes, to jump to a
conclusion, to let enthusiasm carry belief beyond the limits of good
judgment. This all or none attitude is supposed to be zeal in the
service of principle. It is merely intemperance. Education strives for
the virtue of temperance, and temperance--which among the uneducated
becomes merely abstinence from the use of alcoholic beverages--is the
avoidance of rash assertion, and of ill-considered and hasty inference.
The temperate man stops to think. Careful thought seldom leads one
wild. An educated mind is not so likely to “go off half-cocked.” It
has fewer enthusiasms and so accumulates a reserve; a sense of the
ridiculous helps it keep its balance.
Most men feel uncomfortable when they must hold their minds open
and judgment in abeyance. Judgment suspended gives a feeling of
unstable equilibrium, of tension; it is irksome like resistance to
temptation. In addition to this discomfort in being unsettled, there
is a disturbing feeling of insecurity in the thought that we live in
a world in which certitude is rare and difficult. In many situations
it is necessary to act before all the evidence is at hand. We must act
on faith and take our chances. All men cherish their faiths, but few
have the courage to act on faith. We naturally wish to feel ourselves
more secure than we really are in a world where much is left to chance.
A formula generally believed gives such a delusion of security. The
greater the number of those who believe, the more convinced is the
average man of the truth of the formula and the more safe he feels.
I think this wish to feel at home in the universe has inspired much of
religion. It is also one of the reasons why, as older religions wane,
each man must have his “cause,” his social gospel, his movement. These
things afford a sense of comradeship in which there is safety. They
give one “something to tie to,” something enduring to believe in. And
as each cause or movement claims the future and looks forward to sure
vindication and triumph, the future becomes predictable and congenial.
This search for an ideal security has had its influence on philosophy.
Many philosophers, from the time of the ancient Greeks till now,
have sought to construct systems of ideas, verbal forms in which in
contemplation they could find refuge from the universal change in
which all things come and pass away. Inasmuch as it is possible to
think of an object or class and to mean the same even when the objects
themselves are no longer present, a system of abstract and unusual
universal ideas is set up and thought of as existing in itself, outside
the process of time and change. The system of thought so conceived
is held to be more enduring than the world of changing objects. The
ideal world is then the real world. In it alone is knowledge of the
Truth which abides forever. Such systems appear to me to be elaborate
attempts to sustain a fictitious security by taking refuge from reality
in a logical arrangement of man’s own empty forms of thought. From the
point of view of education it should be said that such philosophies
require much learning before one can understand them, but they tend to
dogmatism and the closed mind.
A modern method of supporting the fiction of security--less austere and
sophisticated than some of those of official philosophy--prevails among
those who speak the language of science. It is known as mechanism.
As scientific _method_, mechanism is indispensable. It is found by
exact measurement and careful scrutiny that given two identical
material situations, the same result will follow. There is a certain
orderliness about the processes of nature, which if we ignore all else
but the movement and masses and temporal and spatial relationships of
particles of matter, lends itself to statement in mathematical terms.
In this manner events are predictable with great accuracy. And now
because it becomes possible for human reason to interpret facts of
nature when they are thought of only with respect to mass, movement,
position, it is held that nature itself is really nothing but mass,
motion, position, etc. The laws and methods of interpretation are
thought to constitute the nature of that which is interpreted. A method
deliberately adopted in order to give a mathematically rational account
of certain selected aspects of nature is now taken for a correct
picture of ultimate reality. The reason which measures masses and
distances believes it has discovered itself as the true nature of the
thing measured. The universe is held to be at once like a machine, and
at the same time essentially rational. Security is again grounded in
forms of thought.
It is said that all futures are predictable by the new logic of science
if we only knew enough about complex phenomena to be able to strip them
down to that which can be expressed in mathematical terms. Of course
no one professes to be able to calculate the curve of the whole, or to
have worked out a quantitative statement of many of the phenomena of
life. But it is a scientific faith that it might conceivably be done.
This seems to me to be merely saying that we could reduce the universe
to reason if we only could do it, which is tautology. I am not sure
that a universe so reduced would be anything more than a bare system of
thought about only one aspect of the universe. But scepticism here is
as distasteful to many scientists as the scientists’ own scepticism is
distasteful to theologians.
I am not asserting dogmatically that we cannot know truth or the
nature of reality. I am not suggesting that we cannot be educated
without ending in universal scepticism or agnostic negation. It seems
to me that we have, or can have, such knowledge as will make our
intellects fairly adequate instruments in the performance of their
proper functions. But I do not see what such functioning has to do
with ascribing finality to our beliefs or trying to legislate for
all possible worlds. I am not suggesting an attitude of despair in
the pursuit of truth, but am trying to state the very reason for any
learning at all, for what is the use of it if we know it all before we
start?
Education may not end in doubt, but it ends when a man stops doubting.
But why speak of the end of a process that should continue through
life? As I see it, the process is more often discontinued at the point
of some fictitious certainty than in any moment of doubt. Doubt, the
willingness to admit that conjecture is subject to revision, is a spur
to learning. The recognition that our truths are not copies of eternal
realities but are human creations designed to meet human needs, puts
one in a teachable frame of mind. And the discovery that thinking
may be creative makes intellectual activity interesting. Much has
been written by indoctrinators about the wretchedness of the dogmatic
sceptic. I wonder how these writers, themselves so innocent of doubt,
know so much about him. I have never found such a man. I do not believe
he ever existed. There are writers who question things that most men
do not even know exist, compared with whom professional “freethinkers”
are often naïve. But such writers are often gentle and cheerful spirits
whose minds are not at all paralyzed by doubt, but are active, subtle,
stimulating.
Humanity during the course of civilization has fixed certain habits,
made certain discoveries, constructed certain systems of ordered
knowledge by emphasizing the relevant and significant. There is little
likelihood that the whole structure will come tumbling about our
heads because somebody examines into its nature. In fact the highest
achievement of civilization would appear to be a mind capable of
understanding our human ways of thinking for what they are. But if
our learning should cause us to abandon all our consoling beliefs and
ideals and pet theories; if it should reveal human folly in our every
great cause, and futility in our every scheme of social reconstruction,
even then we cannot for such reasons shirk the task of educating
ourselves. There would remain for each of us the ideal of what an
educated mind might become; no knowledge could take from us the ideals
of courage, of preserving our integrity, of standing undaunted before
the challenge to our spirit.
Again a question arises similar to that we discussed at the close
of the chapter on propaganda. Does not education, then, cause doubt
and indifference so that the educated remain aloof and fail to take
their share of social responsibility or participate in the activities
of their times? Is it not the mass of “common people” therefore, and
not the scholars, which accomplishes the overthrow of tyrannies and
achieves progress? In a day when everybody is a professional or amateur
reformer and people are led to believe that they can make their lives
count only as they participate in some mass movement, it is natural
that this question should present itself as we consider what education
means.
History should aid us to an answer here. The author of “Our Times,”
Mark Sullivan, after giving an account of the partisan strife and
popular movements of the last quarter of the nineteenth century,
suggests that perhaps all this expenditure of energy and intensity
of enthusiasm was but part of the passing show and came to nothing,
while the so-called leaders who seemed to be creating history were but
the puppets of deeper and silent forces. He suggests that the enduring
changes are those of science and the arts. I believe we have here one
of the important lessons of history. Progress in civilization has been
the work almost wholly of scientists, philosophers, artists, engineers,
and unique individuals. The rest has been froth and foam, a struggle
to liberate mankind from the clutches of its most recent liberators,
crowd devouring crowd, mass movements marching to Utopia down blind
alleys. Unfortunately there is some truth in the statement that the
intelligence of the race has little influence upon mass movements.
This is not because scholarship is aloof, however, so much as because
the multitude in its enthusiasms does not heed the counsels of wisdom.
When I become a zealot for a movement I lose my critical faculties.
In exalting my cause I would persuade myself that my existence is of
more importance to the world than it really is. No one so devoted and
earnest could possibly be in the wrong, and in the righteousness of my
cause, I have infallibility. What need have I of the wisdom that comes
by taking thought when I have the truth by intuition and intensity of
feeling?
If it is true that men can only be made to act under the lash of blind
faith and enthusiasm, then the estate of man is a sorry one indeed.
For most of the things done will end in tragic failure. It is only the
conceit of ignorance to believe that the world can be straightened once
for all by people who do not know what they are doing. Moreover, to say
that ignorance is necessary to the accomplishment of good is to say,
that ignorance is desirable and better for man than knowledge. There
have been those who held such a view. Obscurantists always hold it. It
is the philosophy of pessimism, and it is interesting to note that it
is the believer and the devotee, the man of action and not the gentle
doubter who finally ends in pessimism.
For want of intelligence the devotees of causes have been the mischief
makers in all times. We cannot always know who does the most good
in the world, but the evil that men do lives after them and it is
sometimes possible to estimate the amount of harm done. Who has done
the most harm in human history, the sceptics or the believers, the
devotees of causes or the devotees of culture and urbanity? St. Bernard
with his crusade, or Abelard with his doubts? The men who conducted the
Inquisition, or the men who doubted the doctrine of the Trinity? Calvin
and the obscurantists on both sides of the Reformation, or Erasmus and
the Humanists? Cromwell and his Puritans or Voltaire and the Deists?
Robespierre or Goethe?
The devotees to causes have kept human life in turmoil. If the
immorality they would cure has slain its thousands, their “morality”
has slain its tens of thousands. In most cases the strife has been
useless and for causes that might have been won in other ways, really
won. The devotee of a cause requires little provocation to practice
persecution, and only the opportunity to play the tyrant.
Doubt not only has educational value: it preserves social sanity. I
would suggest as part of everyone’s education the reading of such
authors as Lucian, Epicurus, Abelard, Hobbes, Montaigne, Rabelais,
Erasmus, Lessing, Voltaire, Hume and Anatole France. There is no blood
on these men’s hands. They have quietly smiled in the face of bigotry
and superstition. In their words there is laughter and there is light.
Perhaps no one of them ever intended to be a liberator of mankind. They
merely thought and spoke as free spirits, and their very presence puts
sham and cant and unction and coercion and mistaken zeal to shame. They
have done more for freedom and truth than all the armies of crusading
devotees.