I was talking with a colleague who’d come to the US for training, about the Malaysian passenger plane over the Ukraine. Nothing seemed more obvious to me than the deliberate downing of a civilian airplane causing nearly three hundred innocent deaths is far beneath any standard of human behavior. I was particularly incensed as I had just read accounts of the perpetrators guarding the bloated corpses, and the New York Times had published profiles of some of the victims.  I raised my eyebrows, as he shrugged it all off saying, given how the American press is controlled, you really don’t know what to believe, harking back to the Twin Towers held in many person’s minds to be an American conspiracy.  Most illuminating. I changed the subject to something medical. But later he mentioned Polio. Almost manically I proposed, we are close to eradicating this scourge of young children for good around the entire world as had been done with smallpox. Bill Gates and all that, and American ingenuity. Some 60 years ago, Salk and Sabin, had ended the fear of that terrible neurological disease. Well, he said, not in his country, and maybe no time soon. Eradication of this horseman of the apocalypse is to me one of our proudest accomplishments which I liken a beacon of light. I would think so, particularly discussing this with a medical colleague. Not necessarily. Depends on whom you talk to.

Having just finished reading, My Promised Land by Ari Shavit, I had very much the same reaction as talking with my friend. Shavit casts doubt of innumerable proud accomplishments. The book has far less facts than personal emotions. Shavit is so ambiguous in his own feelings, he pushed me right into a position radically opposed to his own. It goes to show, you can be so ambiguous in your own beliefs, you end up proving the opponent’s points.

I am as attracted to people who see things in a different way as the next guy. But there is a long history of people casting doubt and bending the truth. People think they can change the past by lying about history and changing the historical record. If you have not read enough or weren’t there then how does anyone know what happened?  And certain bad people will use that ignorance to their advantage.  I have heard it said pretty often, especially from the Left, that every ethnic group has its own valid narrative of events. I can understand looking at things from different perspectives. The slavers, the colonialists on one side, may have a different emphasis than the colonized or the slaves on the other.  Native Americans see things differently than did Andrew Jackson. But there are also the facts and no one has the right to change them to make their own points or to lie about. It is easy to recall the long history of vicious lies as by Goebbels and Stalin. Personal narratives are not created equal. One’s narrative even if fictional should be true.

Things are only slightly better in the hard sciences than for history or sociology.  Everyone’s aware of the debate over climate change. Much has been written about computer models that incorporate convenient pre-suppositions of persons of a particular political persuasion.

Many have noticed listening to political arguments from the right and left, that the two sides argue past each other, mainly for the reason that they harbor fundamentally different styles of thought. It seems to me a Liberal is who he is, believes what he believes, out of just not being sure. The liberal mind, almost by definition, is more ambiguous in his beliefs. His views are less exclusive and he will entertain almost any idea, without casting it out. That is not a bad way to look at the world. On the surface of it, the liberal is less pig-headed, and thinks like a younger person in that no point of view is automatically rejected. Generally liberals are either non-believers, or at least less dogmatic about their particular religion if they even believe in a religion at all. They enjoy being exposed to new ideas and feel that change is the purpose of the political process. Hence views that are outlandish to the conservative are if not admitted out of hand, are subject to further evaluation. By liberal here I am talking about a person whose mind is a sort of big tent. Many on the Left of the political spectrum are not liberals in this sense as often they will not accept even the speech of others of a particular persuasion that they don’t agree with. The best example of the distinction between liberalism and leftism is in graduation exercises at a lot of college campuses where myriad speakers are heckled or rejected out of hand.

The Conservative on the other hand has been through it all and is sure he knows what is true and right, either that or stereotypically he has been exposed only to a few ideas either from not being college educated or not listening in college.  In contrast to the liberal he will tend to be tied to his religious convictions as he is tied to his beliefs in general. Generally speaking, his beliefs determine what facts he takes in despite of validity of any facts.  In the conservative’s mind, change is not intrinsically good, quite the contrary, the emphasis and continuation of what is right and good, personal values and our proud history are what is important. The conservative will argue on the basis of our successes and what has been accepted in the past.  He is bound to be a strict constructivist, arguing that what is right was in the minds of our founding fathers and written in our constitution and codified in laws, that need to be respected, either that or to resort to unflinching religious principles.  Our immigration policy much in the news, to the conservative, needs to follow the law. Conservatives are incensed by persons who entered our country illegally and even if there are 12 million of them, if they have been here for a long time, they ought to be subject to the full effect of our system of laws. Our borders should be protected vigorously and there need be no exceptions to our laws even if broken in a former generation.

As I hear the arguments on left and right, and maybe get into some of these heated discussions myself, maybe I am not so skilled or persuasive, but I appreciate little change in position on either side. I pride myself in being able to be swayed by a good argument. I appreciate it when someone makes me look at something in a different light and changes my point of view.  Maybe I am just being kind to myself in saying that because to many, I am opinionated.

I very rarely have saw anybody’s opinions being swayed.  That may be because no one wants to admit that they have been wrong about anything in public. Hopefully they will mull over arguments later on. But the inability to sway opinion may be due to a fundamentally different style of thought on each side so that in the end, no one’s arguments can change anything. Conservatives have the style of thought that is certainty, Liberals may be cocky and sure of themselves but in their heart of hearts, their points of view are ambiguous. The conflict then is between ambiguity v. certainty.

Certainty can lead to precipitous action, ambiguity to inaction. Both are dangerous. We have a brewing crisis in our foreign policy now. To his credit our president wants to avoid war. But he has given the message to our adversaries, that America will not resort to violence under any circumstances, and this has emboldened them. As I write this our fiercest adversary the head of which he took out, is making significant advances in no fewer than 6 separate countries. These fellows also have adversaries who are enemies of our own country and all of them are trying to suck America into the maelstrom, so I fully understand the reluctance to act.  This has led us into a situation in which as David Brooks of the NYT describes it, “The wolves are all advancing.”  Failure to convince brutal adversaries that we mean what we say, that we are strong and unwavering, leads inevitably to further aggression and in the end will fail to prevent violent conflict. Wolves wait for waffling and weakness.

Yesterday I saw Return of the Planet of the Apes, a thinly veiled allegory about these very fields of conflict. The theme is fools rush in where wise men fear to tread. But the nail-biting, neurotic wise men in the end fail to prevent war and the funny thing is trepidation actually leads to war, not that a movie, particularly this movie, is a repository of good judgement, but things don’t work out for the trepid and the good guys seem to lose out. So a film that seems to be arguing for pacifism, actually makes a good argument for the wise application of force.  To be fair to our president, he has been stymied at every turn, unable to act, because so many are against him on principle so that it seems to matter very little what he does.

If we live in the age of anxiety, the nail-biting emanates out of a profound ambiguity which segregates with the profound anxiety of our time. One of the most interesting principles derived from studying the brain is how systems result from competing influences, a sort of Hegelian system of contrary binary pulls and pushes.  Certainty on one side and ambiguity on the other are two of the influences in our frontal lobe judgement facility. Confronted by any non-trivial problem we have the choice of acting precipitously or foregoing action. Stocks are going down and look to go lower. Do we hold and do nothing or sell before they sink to the bottom or buy?  How do you act in situations where you cannot know the outcome or do you act at all? Hiding from a predator do you break and run and take your chances or stay and hope he doesn’t find you?  Any false move is certain to lead to death so you have the conflict of inaction v. precipitous action. Precipitous action may save your life but it is difficult to act in situation of high stakes ambiguity which means you are left biting your nails.  Being sure, makes you more likely to act. Debating may truly be a matter talking to competing cerebral influences colored by high emotion. Persons of a different stripe have a style of thought and action that is somewhere along various spectra such as that of ambiguity and certainty.