Challenging the Myth of Certainty

Before launching into what I know can be a hard-edged area - religion and certainty and the bloody history of their  interactions - I want to make clear that I will tread very lightly.  Only a crazy man would tread on someone's long- claimed and well-fenced religious turf. So my views here are only editorials and editorials about language at that. None of this creates much competition for the sports pages. So what I have here are just some ideas from the mid-week op-ed page.  No one will fight over them.

Wandering around as much as I did early on, and never sure where the next trip would leave me - I always had the start well worked out - must have been based on some sense that somehow I would be taken care of.  For anyone in this world now that crosses from naivete to something close to a disorder. A disorder if that were all that was there. But what was also at work was the sense that I had the right to have things work out. Writ otherwise, it becomes the combination of self-interest and savvy that was the mark of my world.

In another section I described my young man's wanderings including  the excitement of boarding the Queen Elizabeth and sailing for Cherbourg just a matter of months after my graduation from Yale.  On my arrival in Cherbourg I had to get down to the quai and locate the steamer trunk that held all my clothes.  There would be a man there, I would tell him where it was to go, and then I would take the train to Paris.  The trunk was there, the man was there, I told him what to do and when I arrived in St. Maximin in Provence two weeks or so later it was there waiting for me.  Four years earlier it had gone by Railway Express from home to New Haven.  Whatever was in that trunk that followed me to the start of a new life in Provence was minor compared to the personal history tied in with all the baggage that came along for the trip. And part of that was a life's worth of experiences telling me that the certainties that were both the bricks and mortar of my coping were very solid.  When the mobility in life takes place on stages all under the control of totally dependable if faceless stage crews you do not need to take much on faith. 

In looking back I am more interested in the trunk than what was in it.  But now I see the combo as an image for certainty.  In order to feel certain you have to be certain about something.  And in order to drag old baggage around with you, and drag it knowing it comes from the past, you have to have it in a labelled sack.  Unsacked baggage and empty baggage sacks have no reality.   Somehow it seems that you have to tie the two together in order to say that this is me, this is mine.  Certainty like baggage needs its contexts.  

 Woven trough some recent writings on language, actually as a starting point in them, is my belief that language is no force of nature.  It is a human creation.  In my college days I came across the work of Erich Auerbach who studied the different ways of representing reality in Western literature. It was published under the title Mimesis - which Auerbach always pronounced in a German accent I could never match, something like meMAYzis. He insisted on the need to understand events in history as they would have been understood in their own time and within the language systems of the time.  And he draws on the idea of Giambattista Vico who wrote that we can understand history because "men made that." It was a temporal creation with all the characteristics of the language design and functioning of that time. He insisted that we look at past things as they would have been seen at their time by their makers.  That human creativity extends equally to the language systems themselves. Transfer that view into a my own memories and it requires that I make the effort to recapture the ways - the images, emotions, the efforts to anchor myself  into these new places - that carry the realities of who I was at that time.  That is essential here because I carried those reactions deeply within me when I chose to enter into the Dominicans in California a few years later.  And those reactions came from within me untutored by others because there were no others there interested in or able to take me in hand.  And in a world of self-anointed life guides what a liberation that was. 

I mention this at the start because I find myself extending this view - "men made that" -  to the sciences and religious views that claim, in effect, that men did not make that - they did not make the truths or beliefs or starting points of whatever kind.  That Linnaeus, for example, did not make up his ideas on genus and species.  In effect he merely uncovered them where they lay, like a linguistic bone hunter.  And then he put into words the natural distinctions and order that had existed in them ab initio.  His work was seen not as something he made but a reality he uncovered. And the uncovering was mostly a matter of looking.  Beauty might be in the eye of the beholder but scientific truth is in the visual truth the scientist uncovers by smart looking. I admit that my point here is much influenced by my own sense that smart looking reached its high point in the Western World when the Portuguese looked at the dark Africans along the coast they were exploring and realized, both smartly and scientifically, that they could be rounded up and put to work for the Portuguese.  The more they rounded up and shipped off to work in Brazil, the smarter their sciences became.  They  put into  their own words perhaps what had long existed but had lain little noticed and less understood. It was just waiting for the linguists to smarten up and figure out how to say it.

Saying it in Latin obviously helped.  Just as it helped the Sibels and Nobels and Adolfs  and Gustafs to become Sibelius and Nobelius and Gustavus Adolphus.  It made it to the point that challenging the new wisdom rendered you amonb the unwise.  That too helped along the progress of scientific wisdom since separating us and our understanding of specific differences among human-seeming creature human from those who did not perceive those differences gave us the standing to do sometnbing about it.  Which we did.  For all over the world, they were then discovering, were people-like creatures but who on careful looking really were different - which means different from us.  Different and darker skin colors, different languages which no one every heard before, just different.  Darwin on his boa ride south came across a canoe of people - so unkempt, so dirty, and so definitively un-English that he doubted their human nature.  Since different from us meant lesser than us you could and probably should put them to work for us fr everyone's benefit.  We could have the freedom to spend more time in the mind-developing pleasures of observing natural differences between us and our workers and they, most certainly as John Calhoun and others put forth so well, they would benefit from having their lesser lives channeled into the better practices we could instill.  But however we view these systems of certainty I begin my own look at them using Vico's summary - men made that.   And they made it in time and in place for purposes that benefited them in their own contexts.   

Because I am interested in contexts as starting points I want to describe how at the start of my professional life I was lucky enough to have worked, in quick order, in two fields which claimed in effect to have a solid grasp on human actions and motivations.  Interestingly each of them dismissed  the claims of the other.

David O'Rourke and Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus in the garden outside the Presidentura