Jonah and Certainty

Here’s a handy blog take-down of a column by Jonah Goldberg, in which the National Review writer defends absolutism and certainty against their multiplying critics. One of Jonah’s heroic dogmatists, it turns out, is … Socrates, which might have amused the man whose mode of discourse was a questioning and unending dialogue. And Jonah makes no distinctions about certainty with respect to different subjects. It is one thing to say that I am certain that my eyes are brown and another to say that I am certain that all non-Christians will burn in hell. We should surely make distinctions between what we can know and what we see through a glass darkly. But such nuances are to be dispensed with by many of today’s conservatives.

My main critique of certainty in "The Conservative Soul" is with respect to the divine. Since God is definitionally beyond human understanding, certainty about God’s will on specific matters is something to be treated with appropriate skepticism and humility. That especially applies to politics, as the apolitical message of Jesus and Paul insists. Moreover, Anglo-American conservatism, from Burke onward, has always emphasized the uncertainty of unexpected consequences, the need for empirical reasoning, and the indispensability of practical wisdom – all enemies of unyielding dogma and abstract ideology. But dogma and ideology are what now pass for Republican wisdom. So Jonah does his duty.