One of the curious things about the universe is that the more you investigate things, the more confused you get about how things really work. If you wanted to be flippant and aphoristic about it, you might say things like: "The more you learn, the less you know."
But that's not really a "true" statement (the reasons for the quotation marks around the word "true" will become apparent shortly, Padawan). Because the more you learn, the more information you gather, the more "facts" you collect. The problem, if we are to call it that, is that the more of these facts you absorb, the more aware you are of the slippery and mutable nature of what we consider knowledge. Maybe the only real thing we can know is that we don't know anything at all for certain; that when you get right down to it we all have to consider the possibility of our own madness, that the self we have invested so much in is an illusion.
Some philosophers think that; they might suggest that "the self" is an insupportable superstition, some convenient marriage of chemistry and philosophy. There are lots of rabbit holes we might go down here, we could make a digressions into the bio-psychology of psychic unity--the idea that all people, regardless of cultural or genetic differences, have in common the same basic cognitive make-up--or the philosophy of continuity, but for the purposes of a column printed in a general interest newspaper all we probably have to understand is that there are serious and smart people out there who stand ready to question the very idea of "the self."
And this isn't some New Age modern-day phenomenon either. Scottish philosopher David Hume, who died in 1776, pushed John Locke-style empiricism, which held that all knowledge is derived from the evidence provided by the senses, to the logical (if not immediately graspable) extreme. Hume was an advocate of Skepticism, which in philosophy is the position that true knowledge is unobtainable and that the real world, if it exists at all and is not just my personal and particular fever dream, is essentially unknowable.
Hume believed--to the extent that he could actually believe anything--that the only statements people could make about the world were those that privileged humans experience because, uh, our senses were limited in the data they could provide. He only believed in "sensible things"--in what he could taste, touch, hear and see. (Hume thought that this "sense-data" colliding with the brain was what caused people to develop the illusion of "self.")
Hume also cautioned against human reason overreaching, which is why I think it's inaccurate to call him an atheist, though that's what many of his contemporary enemies did and what a lot of people who don't agree with his ideas say about him today. But if you could ask Hume if there was such a thing as God, he would probably tell you (in an impenetrable accent) something along the lines of: "I don't know and neither do you."
Which is something that I notice smart people say a lot, probably because it's one of the very few things they believe to be true. (I think Gene Lyons said it in one of his columns last week, which is probably why I'm writing about Hume now. So blame him if I'm making your head sore.)
But I know I'm not scoring any points with a lot of my putative readership by pointing out that a dead Scot thought faith a nonsensical proposition (for further reading, see Bertrand Russell's 1947 brief essay "Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic? A Plea For Tolerance In The Face Of New Dogmas") for the simple reason that most of us (including yours truly, whose personal philosophy skews more to Cartesianism than Empiricism) find our lives enriched and sustained by faith-based beliefs.
We all believe in things. Or at least most of us do. And while I'm not prepared to present a unified theory on the correlation between faith (in something, not necessarily a higher power) and an individual's well-being, I am willing to say that I think belief is generally better than nihilism. Even if all it does is lubricate human tensions.
While it's probably true that nobody really knows anything, that idea isn't particularly useful to those of us who (for whatever reason) want to carry on and profit in the world. For us, it's kind of important that we agree on "facts," that we are able to discern between what's accurate and what's not.
What's really interesting to observe (and these days I'm pretty much in permanent observing mode, I'm fascinated by what we've managed to do to ourselves) is how we've twisted ourselves into what, were we to observe them in others, we would immediately identify as untenable and hypocritical positions.
And I do not know if our president-elect has read deeply in the works of French philosopher Jacques Derrida or not, but he seems to share the Deconstructionist's attitudes about the ultimate meaninglessness of words. Trump (and his surrogates) are surprised that anyone took the candidate's words seriously during the campaign because they were after all just words. And the words one says during a campaign are all about winning, not about what happens afterward.
OK, fair enough I guess. One of the things a lot of Trump's supporters say they like about their guy is his refusal to adhere to any sort of political orthodoxy. What they say they like about him--and what might be promising about about him--is his pragmatism. I don't expect him to do away with what we now call Obamacare, I just expect it to be given a different name.
I don't expect him to build an actual physical wall--one that could have supplied David Hume (if he ever existed) with sense-data--but maybe he'll construct a metaphorical one. (I hope not by making America an undesirable location for those yearning for freedom.) I don't think he'll lock anyone up; I don't think the courts will let him.
At this point, I'd say I'm more interested than alarmed, because I don't know what good being alarmed will do.
I don't know anything at all. And neither do you.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 12/20/2016