Doubt.

Choice or doom? An action one takes or reaction one can’t avoid? Health or disease? Blessing or curse?

We are born without doubt. The actuality of our experience is absolute. Gradually we peer behind appearances to origins. Does the sun really rise? Or bodies after death? Did Santa bring me these presents? How did he get here – we don’t even have a chimney?

Some folks are paralyzed by doubt; others never encounter a second thought. When does confidence become overconfidence become folly? Puppy Henry is wary of the least novelty, sniffing every morsel I offer. Doesn’t he trust me by now, I huff! But he is right to doubt. Who will protect him if not himself?

A fat book I’ve just finished got me thinking about doubt. I won’t mention its title because it annoyed me: why advise you skip what you wouldn’t read anyway? It was about art and thought during the Cold War, a period which included my first quarter century. Most of the many names mentioned were familiar, some were acquaintances. I was too busy becoming human then to wonder what was going on.

I lived a long time immune to doubt. That’s because my dad never seemed to doubt anything. His pronouncements were oracular, dictatorial; he told, he never asked. Then he sickened before his time – of heart disease – and his whole edifice of certitude collapsed into bitter distrust. Why was he dying so young! Maybe there was no God! His loss of faith got me asking questions. If Dad’s way led to despair, which way was right?

Doubt corrodes confidence. “Doubt grows with knowledge,” said Goethe. The more you think, the more there is to think about. I barged into my career cocksure as my dad – he had been my model. Gradually the know-it-all came to know less and less. “Who concludes, excludes,” I aphorized. “Certainty is a redoubt from doubt.”

America’s loss of confidence during those years paralleled my own. My dad went to war against Hitler; I and my schoolmates went to war against America. Civil rights, women’s rights, Vietnam, Watergate, institutional malfeasance, wherever one sniffed America smelled bad. Distrust grew paranoid. The better we did, the worse we were. Trump is a natural outgrowth of that distrustful trend: America is a shithole – elect me God!

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition,” said Voltaire, “but certainty is absurd.” History oscillates between doubt and faith. Might we the people be growing sick of nihilism, famished for hope? “The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me,” complained Flaubert. “I doubt about everything, even my doubts.” We must relearn the trick of affirmation, before we trash all that’s good about our place and time.

The right amount of doubt is… the right amount of doubt. There is no prescription. “The fundamental cause of the trouble,” groaned philosopher Bertrand Russell a century ago, “is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” We must learn to doubt wisely – enough not to blunder, but not so much we drown in dismay.

Doubt is both choice and doom, action and reaction, health and disease, blessing and curse. Some strengthens, too much disables. We can manage our doubt – up to a point. We can turn our frown upside down – sometimes.

I choose to believe in the salvageability of America and mankind. The evidence notwithstanding, we are capable of good, dammit. “Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms,” wrote Khalil Gibran. In the present battle between love and doubt, I side with love – cautiously – accepting the proffered morsel but sniffing first.