Embracing Skepticism
What I read: Scepticism as a way of life by Nicholas Tampio. Published March 25, 2022.
We have all changed our minds many times. At least I hope that’s true. It’s certainly true for me. Anyone who doesn’t change their mind does not possess much curiosity. Learning new facts or perspectives should challenge us to alter our opinions and beliefs and update our knowledge base. That’s how it should work anyway.
Part of maturing is developing intellectual humility. You’ve been wrong before; you could be wrong now.
Of course, we live among people who refuse to change their minds about many things even when presented with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Take the Big Lie promulgated by the former President and his ardent followers. Despite all facts pointing to a fair election with the definitive outcome being the election of President Biden, some still cling to the baseless lie.
Climate change is another example. While scientific consensus has been trying for decades to rally the world to change its ways to avert worldwide disaster, many decided to shun the science and remain skeptical.
As Nicholas Tampio’s article highlights, maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism is a good thing. But at some point the preponderance of evidence for or against something mounts up to overwhelm a skeptical stance, at least in most cases. While a few still cling to their delusion, few people today deny outright that climate change is real or that humankind has escalated its ramifications considerably.
Coexistence with people with whom we disagree will always be our reality. We will never reach a point in human history where everyone will agree about everything. Indeed, living in a civilized society means that we must make compromises and tolerate people with whom we disagree. To live in an idealized mindset while avoiding pragmatic compromise is folly. It’s a surefire recipe for a forever polarized world and lifelong unhappiness.
Tampio offers us the writings from Sextus Empiricus, a physician who wrote in Greek and lived in the 2nd or 3rd century CE. Founded upon the tradition of the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who lived around the same time as Aristotle, Empiricus wrote a work titled Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Many consider that work a robust account of what is referred to as Pyrrhonian skepticism.
A healthy dose of skepticism is good. We shouldn’t take everything at face value. We should question the messages we take in from all sectors of society. We should verify facts to the best of our ability. However, taken to its extreme, skepticism can result in us throwing up our hands in defeat and never coming to any useful conclusion. Some dig into a constant skeptical mindset so they never have to take responsibility for their beliefs or actions. If enough people did that, social chaos would be the result.
The sceptical way of life, on Sextus’ presentation, follows a certain rhythm. You feel puzzlement about something. You search for knowledge about it. You arrive at two equally weighty considerations about what is happening. You let go trying to find an answer. And once you recognise that you might not find a solution, it brings some mental tranquility.
Were our society to embrace such extreme skepticism, we’d get nothing done. Politics would forever remain gridlocked. Businesses would never be able to plan ahead. Life’s decisions would always remain a quandary and we’d never decide to do anything useful or productive. Not good.
But, it’s also important to realize that at any moment a decision you’ve made, a fact you’ve decided is absolutely true, a political position you’ve remained steadfast in support of, could at any time be turned on its head and you’ll need to reconsider.
Tampio gives an example. If you lived before Sir Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein upended their areas of thought and study, you would likely have held views and embraced what you saw as facts that ran counter to Newton’s and Einstein’s conclusions.
We must acknowledge that despite us being entirely sure of what we know or believe at the present time, we could and should change our minds if presented with evidence or strong argument that changes the landscape from which we originally made conclusions. Apart from perhaps basic inalienable truths like the veneration for love and compassion (at least I consider them firmly established), we should open our minds to allow for the constant reconsidering of what we know and believe.
The balance between utilizing skepticism to investigate life and our dedication to our own set of information and belief system is admittedly a tricky one. There is a constant push and pull between the two. I wish I could say where the perfect balancing point resides, but I don’t know. Neither does anyone else. My own divining rod for that balanced place seems to wander about and rarely rests in one place for long. Like much of life, I live within the grey, the always slightly uncertain.
The trick for creating a well-reasoned life and a society that functions is to regularly tip that grey area into a position where the acknowledgment of facts and accompanying beliefs favors doing good for ourselves and for the greatest number of others. I know. That’s pretty vague. Welcome to life. Welcome to the quandary that is our day-today existence. I wish I could offer something more definitive, but I can’t.
This post doesn’t speak to the entirety of the article that inspired it. I leave that to your reading of it. It’s a nuanced and deep piece. I recommend you consider reading it once, setting it down, then reading it again. I think you’ll get more out of it that way.
Tampio ends his article with the following, a call to remain vigilant in the face of people who claim to speak the truth. While we might rightly trust certain people and institutions to speak the truth more often, even the best of such sources are sometimes wrong. We must accept that or we’ll never grow individually or collectively.
We cannot say that sceptics always favour democracy over other political regimes, yet scepticism has an egalitarian impulse insofar as it withholds from anybody the status of sage or philosopher-king. Democratic societies cultivate a healthy scepticism of political, scientific or cultural verities. Reading Sextus Empiricus today gives us argumentative strategies, and confidence, to resist anybody who claims to speak on behalf of truth or reality.
I encourage you to be skeptical. Be rigorous in your thinking and the actions that emanate from that thinking. Be curious. Be open. Do not jump to conclusions, But at some point you must decide on what you know and believe. I just hope you do so without jumping to conclusions or accepting the truth as certain simply because it comes from a source that confirms your already entrenched bias.
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