Power of Doubt
Compare the hardboiled, dogmatic, polarizing label sometimes applied to the self-identified sceptic of today – climate sceptic, vaccine sceptic, evolution sceptic, election sceptic – to the philosophical model created by Cicero some 2000 years ago.
Remove the toga, translate the latin, and we have a model of scepticism less pejorative than inspirational i.e. “The genuine sceptic is not the person who doubts everything, nor the person who demands proof before anything. It is the person who has learned to hold their best views with the right strength of grip: firmly enough to act on them, loosely enough to let go when the evidence turns.” Click: He Was probably Right.
That sounds like the provisional methodology of scientific inquiry in which hypotheses are iterated in response to new information or unexpected results. Now apply the same mindset to the political arena and doubt may be seen as less the enemy of conviction than a pause that prevents conviction from becoming a captive of rhetoric.
Cicero separated himself from the dogmatic certainty that characterized some other sceptics of his day when he distinguished such others who’d declared certain things are settled and fixed whereas he held many things to be probabilia, such that: follow easily; affirm rarely. Distinguish that resolve to follow that which is “worthy of approval” from that other great sceptical school of antiquity which counselled “suspension of judgment on most issues and otherwise acting according to how things appear to be while following local customs.”
Our discussion may take a dark turn as we apply this Ciceronian wisdom to revisit MM 4/27/20 Critical Thinking Re: 9/11 of some six years ago, a session that evoked such strong emotion that one participant had commented , “. . . 9/11 wounded us all so deeply that I cannot think of joining any further discussion of this topic.” Two others seemed to have dropped out of the discussion group as a result. At its heart was the simple question about the credibility of the official story.
What would Cicero have done? The circumstances he faced were every bit as dire as the modern-day scenario, e.g. his one-time friend Caesar was now a political opponent; his Republic was on its last legs; his decisions likely meant (and resulted in) his assassination. Fast forward to this conjecture: he would have regarded the official story as but a working hypothesis.
Oh, no, not this again. Cognitive dissonance may be real but is certainly not Ciceronian. He probably would have found this half-hour An Updated Hypothesis certainly worthy of his counsel: follow easily; affirm rarely. That’s the power of doubt.
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