"Doubt and Skepticism"

 Friday’s disastrous meeting in the White House is a reminder of how doubt and skepticism can help us observers, and our political leaders. Certainly, there was enough blame for each of the three participants – President Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Vice President J.D. Vance – to take a share. Besides watching a re-run of the events on YouTube, I read twenty interpretations of the afternoon’s events, from all perspectives. Yet, I am still unsure how best to allocate blame. It is common knowledge that Mr. Trump is thin-skinned and likes to be praised. Mr. Zelensky is stubborn and theatrical – look at how he dresses. Mr. Vance is smart but immature, at least in matters of diplomacy.

 

All three made mistakes in that Oval Office meeting, but especially, in my opinion, Mr. Vance. He should have kept quiet. In debate or argument, Mr. Trump, right or wrong, does not need defending. He often digs himself into a hole, but just as often extracts himself. Mr. Zelensky would have been better served to have kept quiet, not argue with Mr. Vance, and let the offered deal play out. Mr. Trump, as everyone knows, shoots from the hip, but he is also quick to walk back what he has said. I feel confident he knows that Putin is a dictator and that Zelensky is not. Was he wrong to imply otherwise? Of course. But did Mr. Zelensky believe he could win over Mr. Trump by publicly disagreeing with him and his Vice President? It would seem so. Contrast Mr. Zelensky’s behavior with that of Emanuel Macron and Keir Starmer when they met with Mr. Trump.

 

Nevertheless, there is doubt in my mind as to who bears most responsibility.

 

I hope you find this essay of interest.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Doubt and Skepticism”
March 3, 2025

 

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect

confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”

                                                                                                                                Robert Hughes (1938-2012)

                                                                                                                                Australian author & art critic

                                                                                                                                “Modernism’s Patriarch”

                                                                                                                                Time Magazine, June 10, 1996

 

“Our doubts are traitors and cause us to miss

the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.” 

                                                                                                                                Lucio speaking to Isabella

                                                                                                                                Measure for Measure, 1604

                                                                                                                                William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

 

As the two epigraphs infer, doubt is personal. In her Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, the American poet wrote “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” On the other hand, in The Selected Letters of Tennessee Wiliams, the playwright is quoted: “I don’t believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work…”

 

………………………………………………………….

 

Doubt, including self-doubt, and skepticism are not synonymous but are related. Doubt can be defined as uncertainty regarding one’s abilities (as Lucio infers). It also serves as questioning one’s judgement (as Robert Hughes suggests). It is intuitive, reflecting a lack of knowledge, as Thomas wanted proof of Jesus’ resurrection. On the other hand, a skeptic is one with an open mind who questions the truth of something stated or alleged, or at least who defers judgement until more facts are available.

 

This is not to argue that belief in one’s self is uncommon. When a youth, I was not skeptical about much and had few self-doubts. Many of us were raised on the American folktale, The Little Engine that Could. Theodore Roosevelt, allegedly, expressed a similar sentiment: “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” All good advice, so long as it does not morph into cockiness, arrogance, or conceit. As I grew older, I read and thought more, I became more skeptical. I recall, when a teenager, the president of a brokerage firm who told me that the longer he worked in the business the less he felt he knew about finance.

 

Self-doubt is often a positive. Fyodor Dostoevsky struggled with doubt. In an 1855 letter to his friend Natalya Fonvizina, he wrote: “…the mind which does not labor will wither.”[1]Recently, I had a conversation with an old school friend, now living in Denver, and told him of my struggle with this essay. He reminded me of “Pascal’s Wager”[2] – that even if one cannot definitively prove the existence of God, it is better to believe in Him, as the potential benefits outweigh the risks of being wrong. Believe you can do it, he said.

 

But it is for our political environment I am most concerned, where skepticism has been overwhelmed by a tidal wave of hubris. In a 1901 letter to the Swiss professor of Greek and history Jost Winteler, the 22-year-old Albert Einstein wrote: “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” In our hyper politically-polarized world, neither doubt nor skepticism is widely extant. Instead there is an attitude of “either you’re with me or you’re against me.” This fractionalization has set brother against brother and friend against friend. Conservative students are hesitant about speaking out. In schools and universities, speech that is deemed “harmful” is disallowed. The dogmatism of progressives on the left and ardent Trump supporters on the right are notably void of skepticism.

 

At the risk of widening even further the gulf between conservatives and progressives, I place most (but not all) of the blame on progressives. Certainly, there are some on the right who don MAGA hats, pump fists in the air and, incoherently, raise their voices for Mr. Trump. However, most on the left do not just disagree with Donald Trump, they hate him, and they let hatred drive their responses; reason falls victim to emotion. In part, their aversion to Mr. Trump lies in his muddled syntax. Like Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter, Mr. Trump speaks in unintelligible riddles. Whether he is negotiating a deal, reflecting whomever he most recently spoke to, or speaking from ignorance, I don’t pretend to know. But I suspect he is neither as stupid nor as uncompassionate as he sometimes sounds. His opponents would be wise to let skepticism replace their instinct for immediate condemnation. 

 

We witness this arrogant audacity from media disciples of both parties, especially on televised cable evening news programs, podcasts and video-sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and Twitch. Social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) make it easier for viewers to limit their news to only that with which they agree. Do Rachel Maddow or Jesse Waters ever have moments of doubt, of questioning their loudly proclaimed ideologies? 

 

There are, of course, situations when conviction should be paramount – love for family, belief in freedom, and faith in God. “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think,” said Christopher Robin to Pooh. But generally, skepticism is healthy and doubt drives creativity.

 

True conservatives tend to be skeptics. In 1967, the prescient Daniel Patrick Moynihan was invited to speak to the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa: “Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.” Conservatives are concerned of the power that accrues to political leaders and for the tendency of the state to expand inexorably. This concern is not only because of the difficulty of paying for ever more programs, but because such growth threatens individualism, the bed-rock of conservative thought. Doubt and skepticism are generally associated with reflection, not spontaneity.

 

“Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind” are words attributed to educator John Dewey. Like chastity, as the philosopher George Santayana is alleged to have once said, it [skepticism] should not be relinquished too readily. Truth (the holy grail of the skeptic) is illusive, perhaps never to be discovered; it is the search that is important.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

---

---

[1] As quoted by Gary Saul Morson, professor of Slavic languages at Northwestern University, in the February 28 issue of The Wall Street Journal.

[2] Blaise Pascal, 17^th Century French philosopher.

"Life is Short but Eternity is Forever"

 “Know Thyself” is a maxim inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. They are also words found in Lamentations from the Old Testament. 

 

The quest for self-knowledge is a journey requiring honesty and is key to understanding our purpose in the world. Many of my personal essays, like this one, are short trips along that path of self-discovery. I have found that it is not the destination – which is always elusive – that is the goal, but the journey. 

 

Thank you for allowing me to share them with you.

 

Sydney

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Life is Short but Eternity is Forever”[1]

January 20, 2024

 

“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the 

profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive

forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute

true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”

                                                                                                              Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

                                                                                                             “The World as I See It,” An Essay by Einstein

                                                                                                              1931

 

At a recent family dinner, the discussion turned to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its ramifications. A grandson remarked that AI machines have limits. For example, they have been unable to create a living organism, except possibly Xenobots, supposedly self-replicating living robots. Scientists can modify genes to make wheat more durable and blueberries bluer. They can clone sheep and women can freeze eggs. But man reproduces through copulation, a biological function common to most animal species.

 

Life, as we know, is short. In the two thousand years since Jesus’ birth (a small fraction of the time that Homo sapiens have roamed the earth), six thousand generations of people have been born and died. Now, as I age, I think of mysteries of life, for instance that causality requires a first cause – from whence came the first spark of life? Evolution is understandable, how species evolve over millions of years, how they are still evolving, and even why, looking back from a perspective of a million years or more (assuming the planet and our galaxy survive), what we now know as man may seem like an early, primitive creation.

 

But what did create that first form of life? We think of infinity, but it is beyond comprehension. If the universe is finite, what lies behind it? What does eternity really mean? Was the world as we know it, the creation of some power far greater than anything we can imagine? Or is any of this worth worrying about? Should we turn the page of the book we are reading, switch channels, or view another posting on Instagram? 

 

I am not a student of religion. In fact, we rarely go to church. When our children were young we did take them regularly to St. Barnabas in Greenwich where I served on the vestry and they attended Sunday school and became acolytes. When in boarding school, I was required to read the Bible. But I retained little, with my then non-retentive speed-reading skills. Nevertheless, I have found that I am thinking more about such questions. And I keep a copy of the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer within easy reach. In the same book mentioned in the footnote, Tyrrell wrote of reading the 17^th Century French philosopher Blaise Pascal and his wager: If one lives by God’s rules as laid out in the Bible, and believes in God’s existence, God will be satisfied. If God does not exist, one has lost nothing, while living with love and compassion. 

 

Accepting Pascal’s wager appears sensible. And with Einstein admission that there are limits to human knowledge, God’s existence seems a reasonable possibility. I’m getting there.

"One Damn Thing After Another," William P. Barr - A Review

                                                                  Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“One Damn Thing After Another,” William P. Barr

May 7, 2022

 

“Getting him to accept good advice was like wrestling

an alligator. Whatever you did, it was never enough – 

his attitude was ‘What have you done for me lately?’”

                                                                                                                          One Damn Thing After Another, 2022

                                                                                                                           On dealing with President Trump

                                                                                                                           William P. Barr (1950-)

 

The French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal once wrote: “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” That quote came to mind while reading Mr. Barr’s memoirs. It’s not because Mr. Barr bores the reader with long sentences and wordy paragraphs. His writing is straight forward, and his life has been fascinating, having served twice as Attorney General for two quite different Presidents, George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump. But one has the sense the book was rushed.

 

The book is 565 pages, with 400 of those pages devoted to the Trump years. Mr. Barr’s personal story is compelling. A Columbia graduate, he received his law degree from George Washington University in 1977, after taking night classes. Fourteen years later, at age 41, he was confirmed as President Bush’s Attorney General in. Nevertheless, I found the book somewhat light on who and what molded him as a young man; though he does tell us his paternal grandparents were Ashkenazi Jews from Ukraine and that he learned to play the bagpipes in his youth. He devotes most of his time to the two years he was Mr. Trump’s Attorney General, including the ups and downs of his relationship with the President, where I found his reflections dispassionate and truthful, as he praises and condemns Mr. Trump with equal measure.

 

Mr. Barr is a keen observer of the political scene and a conservative in the classic sense. He praises religion for its benign influence in our lives, but he also speaks to the importance of separation of church and state: “It is not the role of government to shape man in its own image. The government has the far more modest purpose of preserving the proper balance of personal freedom and order necessary for a healthy civil society to develop and individual humans to flourish.” In another chapter on tech companies and monopolies, he writes with relevance to today: “What the tech companies control, however, is the marketplace of ideas. They are privatizing the village green – the place where people receive and disseminate information…”

 

He concludes his story by writing of his vision for America:  a “nation founded on ideals…and establishing a distinct ‘People’ in a ‘Union’ with a government, borders and foundational law.” “We need leaders,” he adds, “not only capable of fighting and ‘punching,’ but also persuading and attracting – leaders who can frame, and advocate for, an uplifting vision of what it means to share in American citizenship.”

 

Like most memoirs, this is self-promotional. He tells his side of the story before more critical biographers emerge. That, however, is a caveat with which I can live. But I think his chapters on Russiagate, urban violence, borders, tech companies, religion and capital punishment would have been better presented in a separate book of essays, for their content is invaluable for anyone interested in the major issues of the last two years of the Trump Presidency. And I believe a shorter book, concentrating on his formative years and culminating with his interactions with Mr. Trump, would reach a broader audience who would benefit from his fair and balanced perspective of our controversial 45^th President.