A man arrives at work one day and instead of walking through the main entrance, he goes around back. As another person enters through the back door, the man rushes to catch it before it can close and lock. Once inside, his coworker says to him, “The boss wants to see you.” Without looking up, the man mutters a barely audible, “Yeah, I want to see him too.” In the locker room, he sets down his gym bag—a bag far too large for just clothing—and pulls out a pistol and a handgun. He conceals both under his coat. Then, he goes to look for his boss.
Based on what you know so far, context would assist you if you had to predict what this man would do next. But, as Gavin de Becker points out in The Gift of Fear, (a super fun and engaging read, by the way!) just one small piece of information changes the context of this story: the man is a police officer. Your prediction would likely be different if he was a postal worker.
The greatest enemy of perception—and therefore, accurate predictions—he says, is judgment.
And it’s so easy to judge what we think we know. But a theme that keeps coming up in my reading is that we don’t know much of, well, anything.
What if we were more honest with ourselves and others about what we don’t know? If wisdom begins in humility, then it’s more than okay that we don’t know. In fact, it’s the best place to start…
Compassionate Assumption
People can frustrate us. And sometimes when they do, we make harmful judgments about them (the worst of those judgments being that they did something to us). My daughter is purposely trying to make my life miserable. The guy who cut me off is a jerk. My spouse is incapable of understanding why I’m upset. But what if, as Ryan Holiday said in last week’s Daily Stoic email, we fought to defend their side instead of attack it? What if, instead of working to produce evidence against someone, we worked to produce evidence for them? We could follow Seneca’s advice and play the role of public defender, and “plead the case of the absent defendant despite our own interests.” Maybe my daughter is acting out as a way of asking for help. Maybe that guy is having a bad day. Maybe I’m not communicating with enough love toward my spouse. Because we don’t ever really know what someone is going through, do we? Even the people closest to us struggle with things we’ll never know about, let alone comprehend. In any case, we can default to compassionate assumption. If nothing else, it will make us calmer and happier.
What If Five Senses Aren’t Enough?
The sixteenth-century writer and philosopher Montaigne was famous for his skepticism of knowledge. He worked for the court of inquiry and, when a civil case was too complex for a quick verdict by the judge, was tasked with summarizing the evidence for both sides, without passing judgment. Dubbed the king of uncertainty, he knew all evidence was error-prone, and therefore so were decisions based on it. Judges and lawyers were fallible too, and to be doubted. Even the laws themselves were to be questioned because they were made by humans. Perhaps it was this court work that made him skeptical of things, himself included. He vigorously investigated the nuanced, opposing impulses of his soul, but he never took himself too seriously. (He would laugh at his own contradictions and silliness.) Much of his writings end with phrases such as “though I don’t know,” which, Sarah Bakewell writes in How To Live, is pure Montaigne. Basically, he believed that all knowledge should be doubted because it resides in human beings. “We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses,” he said, “but perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or ten senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence.”
Doubt As a Case For Faith
The philosopher Descartes said, “Everything I perceive clearly and distinctly cannot fail to be true.” But, as Montaigne would have pointed out, we can’t possibly know whether we are capable of seeing things clearly, let alone be sure that we do. I think about this a lot when it comes to religious faith. In David Brook’s wonderful book The Second Mountain, he points out that even the most religious people have regular doubts about their faith. Mother Theresa did. Brooks says he still does. But, he argues, faith is strengthened, not destroyed, by doubts. Montaigne likely would have agreed, as Sarah Bakewell writes that he “denied that humans could attain knowledge of religious truths except through faith. Montaigne may not have felt a great desire for faith, but he did feel a strong aversion to all human pretension—and the result was the same.”
Books Read This Month
I read The Road to Character by David Brooks and it was amazing. He tells the stories of people like Dorothy Day, George C. Marshall, A. Phillip Randolph, and Augustine, and the ongoing inner battles they fought to live a life of meaning and purpose. Reading their stories helped me to better understand what it means to live life to its fullest. I can’t recommend this book enough. I read and enjoyed Admiral James Stavridis’s To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision. He combines his 30-plus years of experience in the US Navy with 9 crucial moments in the Navy’s history, to help answer this question: How do great decision-makers make their decisions? And because it’s a collection of 9 different stories, the pages flew by. I also read a hidden gem I found in a used bookstore: an old copy of Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, which I loved so much that I bought and read Fahrenheit 451 which was so good that I added it to my list of favorite books. (I’m sad to say it was my first reading of Fahrenheit; I was book-averse when it was assigned in high school.) I was surprised that it touched on so many of my favorite themes: slowing down, being still, dancing in the rain and taking walks and being present and doing things for no reason other than to do them. Just a great book. Finally, I read The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and oh my gosh, I had so much fun reading it; I wrote exclamation marks on nearly every other page. It’s a book about what we don’t know and how we handle what we don’t know. And I found a lot of cool ideas to potentially use in my own writing.