THE ONLY CERTAINTY

THE CERTAINTY OF DOUBT

I recall as a teenager being a little envious of those of my peers who were churchgoers and who believed beyond all doubt. They seemed fixed and certain and on such certainties was built their whole lives and their own complete happiness (it seemed complete to me). My life is built on ‘less stable’ foundations. I could not believe then, riddled as I was with doubt; I still can’t – and now I wonder at the whole idea of certainty in anything.

Someone tells me something is wrong and I wonder by whose decree it is wrong and wonder then at the whole notion of right and wrong and think of determinism in its strict philosophical sense and in the impossibility of escaping it. How can anything be wrong in an absolute sense if determinism is right?

Then a scientist tells me that plagiarism is wrong, and the certainty of her belief is, I think, something unscientific! She says it is morally wrong and in every way wrong. She does not enter into debate on the subject but pronounces from on high, the high of the moral highground. And I am surprised at a scientist’s unwillingness to remain open… open to the possibility of something wrong in her own thinking.

Neuroscience is something new, a study that is in its infancy with many ‘charlatan’ minds professing to have discovered some wonder in the working of the brain, and with some genuinely clever souls discovering the same or a little different but discovering nevertheless. The truth is, (and there’s a sort of certainty in that perhaps) that we do not yet fully understand how the brain works, how consciousness works, how thinking works and how imagining works. We are only just beginning on that journey of discovery. But already there is enough for us to understand that the certainties we hold may not be so certain as we once thought.

There was a time when the educated people believed the world to be flat. Their conviction was unshakeable. It took journeys of discovery to prove otherwise and a whole revolution in thinking. And what have we learned from this? Some of us laugh at the idea that anyone could ever have believed the world flat; some of us don’t laugh. But, at the risk of repeating myself, what is there here to learn? To doubt; to keep an open mind; to always question; to always be trying to understand; to never be so certain that you throw stones based on that certainty. Isn’t that part of what we think of as the scientific mind, a willingness to remain open to all possibilities?

There are many raised voices that cry out that plagiarism is wrong. Some educated voices; some not so educated. The cry out even in the face of evidence that it is a natural part of art, the imitative element in creativity, the process by which many of our revered writers, painters and thinkers have grown. I am not saying with any certainty that plagiarism is right; but I am at least questioning what it is and why it is that it has been so much a natural part of the cultural development of our species. Who is there who never knew a book and wanted to write? If there is sense in not having, each one of us, to reinvent the wheel, then where is the sense in condemning the borrowing of creative ideas in art? I only ask the questions, from a habit of doubting and a stubborn desire for certainty.