Three Cheers For Nervous Hand-Wringing

By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, July 1, 2007; B04

Here's who we need in Washington: Socrates. The Greek fella. We need him not because of what he knew, but because of what he knew he didn't know, which was pretty much everything. He was one of the all-time great doubters. Listen to Loyal Rue, a professor of science and religion at Luther College, describe him:

"He would say things like, 'How do you know that? What's the evidence for that? What do you really mean when you say that? Here's the implication of that claim. Here's the danger you get into if you try to generalize that claim and apply it to everyone.' "

Give Doubt a Chance: This could be a rallying cry for our troubled times.

Doubt has been all but outlawed in contemporary Washington. Doubt is viewed as weakness. You are expected to hold onto your beliefs even in a hurricane of contradictory data. Believing in something that's not true is considered a sign of character.

The president sets the tone: He told Bob Woodward that he relies on "gut instinct" and said, "I'm not a textbook player. I'm a gut player." Blogger Glenn Greenwald's new book, "A Tragic Legacy," opens with something Bush told journalists last September: "I've never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions." The smart bet: He'll become more convinced yet. He's not the type to slap his forehead and say, " What a bonehead I am!"

Then there's Dick Cheney, a one-man branch of government who, we can safely estimate, second-guesses himself as often as he re-roofs his house.

The certainty-mongering of the Bush administration has created an opening for political opponents. Al Gore's latest book criticizes Bush for his "seeming immunity to doubt." He has found a market for books with "Truth" and "Reason" in the title. Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile, declares that Democrats are an "evidence-based" party. Of course, Gore and Clinton radiate a fair amount of certainty themselves. Politics isn't for equivocators. At the elite level, there's pressure to prove oneself the surest and smartest person in the room. Think of former House speaker Newt Gingrich: In your mind, you see him emitting certainties with the air of a man who is delighted (but not surprised) to be right once again.

And now even the doubters have become overly certain. Look at all the atheism books on the bestseller lists. In "God Is Not Great," Christopher Hitchens writes, "The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species." But it's hard to think of a public intellectual more certain of himself than Hitch. (Carl Sagan was certainly no believer, but he once told me, "An atheist has to know a lot more than I know.")

But in an age of warring certainties, of dogmas gone ballistic, uncertainty is viewed as the shaky prelude to going wobbly. Confidence is what citizens look for in their leaders and, increasingly, in their pundits. The pros know that John Wayne never said, "On the other hand . . . " It's dangerous to change or modify a position. The worst thing you can say about a politician today is that "he was for it before he was against it."

Washington is full of alpha males (some of them female) who would no sooner express doubt than join a knitting circle. Their mantra is "Failure is not an option." But perhaps we might suggest (meekly) that sometimes failure needs to be an option -- which is to say, you ought to have a Plan B in case your initial indubitable judgment turns out wrong.

We need to rehabilitate doubt and uncertainty and recognize them as tools for cutting through mushy notions and wishful thinking. We need to stop elevating decisiveness over intelligence in the list of political virtues. We need leaders who think more like scientists, who know that knowledge is provisional, that today's orthodoxy might be invalidated tomorrow. We need to learn how to think again.

Jerome Kagan, professor emeritus of psychology at Harvard, says we've valued ultra-confident leaders since time immemorial. "The public is uncertain," he notes, "and they look to their leaders for certainty, for confidence. De Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt: In times of crisis, you want a person who appears to you to know exactly what he is doing. That's not recent or American. That's human."

But we should probably doubt our own talent for discerning competence from a distance. Princeton psychology professor Alexander Todorov has shown that we will reach a decision on whether someone looks competent in just one-tenth of a second. In another study co-authored by Todorov, test subjects looked at photographs of senatorial candidates. (If the subjects recognized any of the candidates, they were bumped from the study.) They had one second to reach a conclusion about which candidate was more competent. For the 2004 senatorial races, this snap judgment correctly predicted the outcomes of 69 percent of the races.

So sometimes we pick a guy because, at first glance, we like the cut of his jib. (Even when we're not exactly sure what a jib is.)

All of us -- citizens and senators and shopkeepers and scholars -- need to review the principles of "critical thinking." In 1990, psychologists Carole Wade and Carol Tavris listed eight elements of critical thinking:

1. Ask questions; be willing to wonder.

2. Define your problem correctly.

3. Examine the evidence.

4. Analyze assumptions and biases.

5. Avoid emotional reasoning.

6. Don't oversimplify.

7. Consider other interpretations.

8. Tolerate uncertainty.

This would get you instantly fired from many jobs in Washington. Asking questions is a time-waster in a culture that demands instant answers. Defining your problem correctly, examining evidence and contemplating biases can be extremely inconvenient. The media marketplace favors absolutism and hysteria.

But doubt, when properly managed, pays rewards. It gives you more information. It helps you create coalitions, which is necessary in a society designed to be coalition-based. And doubt prepares you for those inevitable moments when what you hoped was true turns out to be false.

Have there ever been leaders who were comfortable with uncertainty and doubt? George Washington, who was always the first to cite his lack of qualifications for a job (Continental Army commander, president), said in his farewell address that he did the best he could with a "very fallible judgment." No one today would dare say such a thing.

Other leaders also come to mind, some more politically talented than others: Dwight D. Eisenhower, who before D-Day wrote a statement taking the blame for the invasion's failure; Bob Dole, always more of a pragmatist than an ideologue; and Bill Clinton, who could talk through eight sides of every issue, often until his listeners passed out from information overload.

But these are particularly polarized times, and we're in a war (or three), and no one has much patience for a lot of maybe-this, maybe-that stuff. If you want to become president, you probably should act as though you've never had a doubt in your life. Rudy Giuliani said the other day, "You face bullies and tyrants and terrorists with strength, not weakness." And strength means you don't sit around requesting more data.

This was driven home in the first Democratic debate, when Barack Obama was asked what kind of military action he'd take if the United States were attacked again by terrorists. His answer was criticized as weak. He began by saying he'd check on the emergency response to the attack itself. Then:

"The second thing is to make sure that we've got good intelligence, (a) to find out that we don't have other threats and attacks potentially out there, and (b) to find out: Do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network? But what we can't do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast."

Way too deliberative. Correct answer: I'd start killing lots of bad guys. (Better yet: Make pocketa-pocketa sound effects while pantomiming the machine-gunning of the enemy.)

Professor Rue reports that in Renaissance England, political jesters were allowed to poke fun at the alleged wisdom of the king, injecting a little doubt into the royal court. (Think Leno and Letterman and Stewart, live from the Oval Office.) In the medieval church, a devil's advocate would participate in the debate over whether a certain person deserved sainthood. And in ancient Rome, the victorious general returning from battle would have a slave trotting by his side -- a reminder, Rue says, that the general was a mere mortal.

"Doubt motivates inquiry, but it is also a source of humility," Rue says.

So as a nation will we rehabilitate doubt? Will we suddenly pivot toward greater tolerance of uncertainty?

I doubt it.

achenbachj@washpost.com

Joel Achenbach is a staff writer for The Washington Post and blogs at washingtonpost.com/achenblog.