Erroll Morris has a fascinating 5-installment series in the New York Times this week on "anosognosia"--the lack of knowledge of one's disease or impairment.The condition was first recognized in cases of paralysis--specifically in cases of hemiplegia, paralysis of one side of the body. In some cases, it is as though the paralyzed side of the body does not exist. If asked the pick up a pencil with the paralyzed hand, the patient will simply do nothing, and act as if the request is directed to someone else.
Morris takes this further, toward more modern investigations into the inability to discern one's own incompetence, also known as the Dunning-Kreuger Effect: "our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence." Morris stretches the concept to where he really wants to go: to the heart of consciousness, or the possibility of really knowing anything. It is the sort of paradox Borges would have loved. How can we ever know what we don't know, when we don't know enough to even know what we don't know? He invokes Dick Cheney's "unkown unknowns," a concept that I once found the paragon of double-speak, and that I have come around to thinking is the most (perhaps unintentionally) humble thing he said while in office. Morris interviews a Stanford neuro-scientist, V.S. Ramachandran, who gives one of the best quotes in the piece: "What we call belief is not a monolithic thing; it has many layers." But we treat belief as though it is something refined and clear and of whole cloth. Maybe that is a defense mechanism in the face of paralyzing uncertainty. But doubt is our best defense against failing to address the world as it is, rather than as we would prefer it to be.
Which leads me to my point here. I distrust certainty. While I do admire some people I know who engage the world on fairly direct terms--what is right and what is wrong is generally quite clear and actionable to them--I find too often that we live in a culture that overvalues action based in a certainty ungrounded in sufficient awareness of detail and nuance.
I was recently in Oklahoma City and visited the Memorial there, at the site of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. I knew how the site designers had chosen to represent the dead with rows of brass chairs, smaller ones for the children. I thought the concept melodramatic. I prefer the restraint and elegance of monuments (give me an obelisk any day), or modern approaches like the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial. But in the presence of the chairs, they did give rise to an awareness of the humanity they represented.
Each chair was a life. Each life was a vast and complex entity. And all of them sacrificed to an idea, a crazy, stupid idea acted upon by a man who was evil, certain and evil. I suddenly had a new understanding of evil. That evil is simple. It requires only that you believe that you know something profound and ineluctably true. It may be only one thing, but that is all it takes.
Evil requires certainty, unwavering commitment over time to an idea that strips the world of its true essence--complexity, richness, unknowability. It is by doubt, not certainty, we will be saved.
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