Perils of certainty

One of the families I grew up with had a younger daughter who was somewhat troubled. She was the youngest and the family had started having troubles by the time the child was about 7 years old, which is shortly after I met them. The girl was really awkward and annoying in sort of a spoiled seeming way. She seemed oblivious to just about anything going on around her and she would do these really bizarre things or throw fits and scream like she was possessed. I hated being around her and I (along with almost everyone else who knew the family) blamed the mother, who seemed to baby her and not set any limits. Recently I spoke with the aunt of this child. The aunt said that the now 20-something-year-old girl is an engineer and is your basic Asperger's type, which to me explained a lot of what I considered unacceptably obtuse and annoying affectations when I was younger. The aunt opined that the child's mother turned out to be wiser than we all knew -- that the mother understood the child was exceptional, which is what prompted the hands-off parenting style. The theory sounded right to me and it was a relatively small thing, but in that moment I experienced a distinct paradigm shift, not just about this family but about parenting and how well we think we understand people and the world around us, compared to how little we actually know. It made me think of this NY Times op ed, "The Dangers of Certainty" (worth reading in its entirety). The article discusses the author's experience of watching The Ascent of Man as a child, and one episode in particular:

For most of the series, Dr. Bronowski’s account of human development was a relentlessly optimistic one. Then, in the 11th episode, called “Knowledge or Certainty,” the mood changed to something more somber. Let me try and recount what has stuck in my memory for all these years.

He began the show with the words, “One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an actual picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the 20th century has been to show that such an aim is unattainable.” For Dr. Bronowski, there was no absolute knowledge and anyone who claims it — whether a scientist, a politician or a religious believer — opens the door to tragedy. All scientific information is imperfect and we have to treat it with humility. Such, for him, was the human condition.
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There is no God’s eye view, Dr. Bronowski insisted, and the people who claim that there is and that they possess it are not just wrong, they are morally pernicious. Errors are inextricably bound up with pursuit of human knowledge, which requires not just mathematical calculation but insight, interpretation and a personal act of judgment for which we are responsible. 
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Dr. Bronowski insisted that [physic's] principle of uncertainty was a misnomer, because it gives the impression that in science (and outside of it) we are always uncertain. But this is wrong. Knowledge is precise, but that precision is confined within a certain toleration of uncertainty . . . no physical events can ultimately be described with absolute certainty or with “zero tolerance,” as it were. The more we know, the less certain we are.

In the everyday world, we do not just accept a lack of ultimate exactitude with a melancholic shrug, but we constantly employ such inexactitude in our relations with other people. Our relations with others also require a principle of tolerance. We encounter other people across a gray area of negotiation and approximation. Such is the business of listening and the back and forth of conversation and social interaction.

For Dr. Bronowski, the moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty. All knowledge, all information that passes between human beings, can be exchanged only within what we might call “a play of tolerance,” whether in science, literature, politics or religion. As he eloquently put it, “Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”

The relationship between humans and nature and humans and other humans can take place only within a certain play of tolerance. Insisting on certainty, by contrast, leads ineluctably to arrogance and dogma based on ignorance.

At this point, in the final minutes of the show, the scene suddenly shifts to Auschwitz, where many members of Bronowski’s family were murdered. Then this happened. Please stay with it. This short video from the show lasts only four minutes or so.

 


It is, I am sure you agree, an extraordinary and moving moment. Bronowski dips his hand into the muddy water of a pond which contained the remains of his family members and the members of countless other families. All victims of the same hatred: the hatred of the other human being. 
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When we think we have certainty, when we aspire to the knowledge of the gods, then Auschwitz can happen and can repeat itself. Arguably, it has repeated itself in the genocidal certainties of past decades. . . . We always have to acknowledge that we might be mistaken. When we forget that, then we forget ourselves and the worst can happen.