The Last Certitude (of Denial)

To an old friend of my lost youth

(written about 1985)

A cheap pleasure it seems now,

Our old teenage repudiation

Of certitude, before we both

Became by many permutations

The very neck-tied arbiters

We doubted and still doubt—

Cheap because it claimed its own

Certitude, the last certitude

Of denial, as if the undoubt

We denied grew real in its denial

Like Johnson’s stone, kicked, extant,

Before we fell into the void

Of selves, collective and alone.

Then we knew what hypocrisy was. 

     To any sufficiently inquisitive person, there comes an age of realization that everything we "know" consists of (1) spotty constructions from sense data, (2) customary behavior of others, (3) and information from parents, teachers, and other authorities who pass it on more-or-less unquestioned as ideology or common belief. Much of this is necessary for survival--or, at least, prosperity--in the contexts into which youth find themselves summarily dumped, the still-somewhat-alien world of an arbitrarily given place and time. But practically nothing we have been told (we realize with a sinking feeling) is really known to be absolutely true. 

It is a glass floor over a teeming chasm of the unknowable, and we gradually come to understand that many of our teachers and authorities were aware of this chasm, the fragility of this floor, but somehow carried on. And so we carry on. Pay no attention to the bottomless pit at your feet.

     I can't speak for all teachers. Maybe some continue to see their lore as absolute, as divine truth. I see this as a cowardly lie. The one thing I'm sure of is that I'm sure of nothing. This is the kicked stone with which Samuel Johnson refuted the questioning of reality, the "last certitude." My insistence on critical thinking and source-evaluation derives from this. All knowledge is subjective but not all subjective knowledge is equal. The great, if ultimately unreliable, constructions of knowledge enable life, are some more than others. As a teacher, I made a career of passing plausible ones on to the next generation, but without assured belief. I have dared to speak as an authority while knowing I was not one.

     I became one of the "neck-tied arbiters" in the poem. Setting aside the analogy with a hangman's noose, the necktie was a sign of authority when I was growing up. Bertrand Russell said, "Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so" ("In Praise of Idleness," 1932). A dangling necktie, which would be dirtied by manual labor and snag in a machine, signified a man who gave orders. Even a tie clip or bowtie consequently tended to be déclassé. I wrote "man." Before I was thirty, nearly all pastors, priests, politicians, professors, lawyers, and judges were neck-tied men. The tie was an outward and visible sign of Lacan's privileged signifier hidden in their pants. Before Barbara Walters in 1974, even news readers were male. A woman's voice lacked authority.

     This sexism--obvious to us today but invisible in the last mid-century--is an example of complex strata of belief that may be reified as ideology. It might be just or unjust, useful or useless, constructive or destructive, but never true nor false. Customs such as driving on the right side of the road and having clear rules (even if arbitrary) for the ownership of property are essential to a smoothly functioning society. Until an ideological system crashes and a paradigm shift occurs, it is useful for everyone to know the system and for most to support it. 

This sort of naturalized ideology--by definition neither true nor false, merely functional--continues to operate in the background after we understand its subjectivity and is of no great concern to any but social activists, reformers who select a slice of arbitrariness to challenge. I say a slice because it is difficult to become aware of very many of our arbitrary assumptions (something called "consciousness raising") and impossible to resist more than a few.

     It particularly disturbed me, as I've said in earlier posts, to realize the subjectivity of that least true-false of ideologies, religion. "On Christ the solid rock I stand," goes the old hymn. "All other ground is sinking sand." But what if Christ, like the venerable cities of Venice and Amsterdam, is found to be sinking? Or, at least, subject to subsidence because based on custom and hearsay, on necktie authority and an anthology of dubious provenience? 

What hurt most was ripping away any guarantee of immortality from my precious ego, the doom of death. But this doom, according to Paul Tillich, gives meaning to life. One damned thing after another ad infinitum is nonsense. Tillich wrote of faith, “The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning" (The Courage to Be, 3rd ed, 2014, p. 163).