When in Doubt

Thanks to Bush, doubt is back in American politics. But which form of doubt is right for progressives Ã’ and good for America?

George W. Bush’s stubborn certitudes–about Iraq, about executive power, about the readiness of peoples everywhere to embrace democracy–have created a bull market for doubt, not least among conservatives. While there is still no shortage of assured conviction in American politics, it has become intellectually fashionable to place doubt at the heart of one’s political principles. Atlantic senior editor Andrew Sullivan has filled his blog–and his most recent book–with a call for a renewed place for doubt in conservative politics, drawing on everyone from Socrates to the twentieth-century British philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Likewise, many liberals, and in particular those hawks left soul-searching by their erstwhile support for the Iraq war, have turned to ancestral liberal doubters, most notably the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for intellectual succor.

This quest for alternatives to dogmatism has led in three directions. The first is toward common sense doubt–a renewed focus on the incompleteness and indeterminacy of data, and also on the vagaries of human judgment. The second is toward skeptical doubt–a comprehensive stance questioning the availability of any final and definitive truth. The third path leads to moral doubt–the suspicion, grounded in psychology or religion, that the actual motives of individuals and nations are never pure and that the announced motives are always in some measure self-serving. All three have their intellectual adherents; but it is moral doubt that is most needed to re-establish balance within our government and American authority and respect throughout the world.

Three Types of Doubt

We need not tarry long on the first kind of doubt. In the wake of gross errors of fact (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) and judgment (Iraq’s readiness for a democratic transition), the case for ensuring that all perspectives are given a fair opportunity to be heard in policy deliberations is compelling, indeed crashingly obvious. Every generation, it seems, must re-learn the dangers of “groupthink”: the temptation to fit facts to pre-established judgments and to marginalize unwelcome dissent. Common sense doubt is neither liberal nor conservative; it is an antidote to ideologically driven policymaking of every stripe.

Skeptical Doubt More noteworthy is the conservative reconsideration of skeptical doubt. In his recent book The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back, Sullivan deploys a philosophical tradition extending from Socrates through Montaigne to Oakeshott against the “politics of certitude,” which he describes as the infusion of the “fundamentalist mindset” into the contemporary Republican Party and the presidency of George W. Bush. Socrates questioned everything, demonstrating, in Sullivan’s words, “the fundamental incompatibility of certainty with humanity; of philosophy with politics; of ideas with practice.” Montaigne, likewise, observed the myriad ways in which arrogance and presumption warp human judgment and lead us to make claims about heaven and earth that we cannot justify. And Oakeshott was a critic of “rationalism” in human life; in both morals and politics, he taught, the heart of the matter is sound practice, not true doctrine, and sound practice is the sort of thing one learns not by reading, but by doing. The best political alternative to bad theory is not better theory, but rather no theory.

This is all very British–not surprising, given that Sullivan was born and raised in England. The question is whether it can work in America, or anywhere else, for that matter. Sullivan declares, sensibly enough, that the “need to conserve” is the “essence of any conservatism.” But he fails to draw the obvious inference, that conservatism will therefore be a local matter. And this is an important transnational point–because Great Britain and the United States have different national traditions, the substance of what British and American conservatives seek to conserve will differ accordingly. Because the idea of “inalienable rights,” which Sullivan spurns as pertaining to liberalism rather than conservatism, is woven into American tradition but not the British, it would be surprising if American conservatives did not rise to its defense, as many do.

This failure to understand the way creed and tradition interpenetrate American politics generates all manner of difficulties. For one, it leads Sullivan to mischaracterize Abraham Lincoln as pursuing, Oakeshott-like, the “intimations” of the Civil War as he acted to free the slaves, overlooking what Lincoln himself had said on the eve of that conflict: “All honor to Jefferson–to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract idea, applicable to all men and all times.” For another, it leads Sullivan to mischaracterize the U.S. Constitution as being about only means and procedures, overlooking the Preamble, which declares in no uncertain terms what the Constitution’s purposes are and what they are not (the blessings of liberty but not the promotion of virtue; the common defense and general welfare but not the inculcation of the One True Faith, and so forth).

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