Seeing Both Sides Can Make You Cross Eyed

Doubt has become the goal of knowing. Certainty is dismissed as both unattainable and undesirable. A recent Facebook picture of Bertrand Russell contains the quotation, "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

I have long seen this among the high school students I teach, and they are learning the lesson of doubt quite well. We teach it to them under the guise of critical thinking, which is, of course, a good skill. It becomes deleterious to thought, however, when it becomes an end per se, which it must be in a world that says truth does not exist except as a relativistic, amorphous fantasy.

This post is not another lament about children educated in the uncertain seas of truthless relativism. It is about the damage done to teachers in such a system. It is about me.

Not long ago I was leading the small group of fifth grade boys at our church. Our son is part of the group, and the lesson involved giving the boys a series of cartoons in which the characters encountered different challenges to living as a Christian. Their job was to write the words in the dialogues bubbles of what the Christian could say in each situation. I was proud of the boys for coming up with reasonable, faithful responses. They knew what to say and were confident of their answers. What nearly brought me to tears in front of them was that I did not have their certainty. I knew the right answers, just as they did, but I could see too well the opposing side, could sense the complex and tortured discussion that would ensue in the adult world over the issues in the cartoons.

To be sure, mature thought is complex, and there is a difference between the simplistic understanding of a child and the adult perspective that properly considers multiple aspects of an issue. Yet I realized in that moment just how eroded is my ability to discuss truth in the public venue of the classroom. I am constrained to push away whatever I know to be true in an effort to foster within developing minds the questioning faculty that exists for no purpose beyond itself. I have lived and breathed this toxic air of relativism for so long that, despite my deep convictions, I find myself crippled with regard to teaching or expressing those convictions. I am the academic equivalent of the miner suffering from black lung disease.

Ei mihi! Domine, miserere mei!