This week’s thesis is simply, “We don’t have a clue.”
Perhaps my choice of topics, however vague, has something to do with the start of the final exam season. Or perhaps it is rooted in my contempt for the meteorologists who have repeatedly promised me some respectable Wisconsin winter weather but have failed to deliver on even the tiniest snowflake.
Or maybe it is inspired by post-birthday and pre-New Year’s anxiety: The world is changing, I’m getting older, heck, I just discovered that I’m in a different generation than my younger brother.
Yet I don’t want to convey a tone of despair, just one of humility. And this is the real reason for my thesis: We really don’t have a clue, and perhaps once in a while we ought acknowledge this.
My primary motivation for this column is, well, the opinion page on which you’re reading it. The opinion page spectator sport is most thrilling when the juxtaposition of views is at its most extreme and irreconcilable. We all get to watch from the sidelines as supporters and opponents of abortion rights, the war in Afghanistan and Ashcroftism lob volleys at each other without any real hope or desire of convincing the other side.
Each side is supremely confident. Each side knows the other doesn’t have a clue.
Soccer could be way cooler than football. Or the rest of the world could be tragically ignorant of the Big Mac of sports.
Madison could be an island of sanity in an otherwise hopelessly conservative nation. Or a hopeless island of liberalism in an otherwise sane nation.
Race could be nothing more than skin color ? or it could encompass experiences and qualities that we neither understand nor appreciate.
Those individuals who express reservations about the government’s increasing powers could in fact “scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,” “aid terrorists” and “erode our national unity and diminish our resolve,” to quote the attorney general. Or they could be dead right in their warnings about a new era of Big Brother Bush.
Ashcroft would tell me that my cautious position on our government’s increasing powers is unacceptable, erroneous, and harmful to our national unity. That Ashcroft disagrees with me does not trouble me; that he disagrees with the legitimacy of my dissent downright scares me.
I am uncomfortable with people who claim a monopoly on the truth, whether that truth stems from ego, from science, or from an elderly bearded bachelor with a son. I am skeptical of those whose personal belief systems read like middle-school textbooks. In the real world, ambiguity is a lot more prevalent than certainty.
Absolutism can be a very powerful force and is one of my favorite topics of discussion. Yet even the absolutists aren’t absolutely absolute, for our perspectives and our reasoning are confined to a very narrow context and time.
In 100 years, people will likely be dumbstruck by the notion that many of our issues were even issues, that much of what we debated was even debatable. As I see it, there will be bafflement that homosexuals were treated differently under the law and amusement that race was a factor in much of anything. Our ethical and legal issues will likely be profoundly different, if we are even operating under the same ethical and legal systems.
On the lighter side, two anecdotes from Jim Feldman’s absolutely fabulous book “The Buildings of the University of Wisconsin” show us just how much changes in less than half a century.
When the Southeast dormitories were being planned, two illustrious regents derided the project. The noted Regent Rennebohm thought that the proposed dorms were far too nice, while Regent Jensen, to quote from Feldman’s book, said, “It seemed to him that the dorm would be more of a ‘club’ than a dormitory for a serious purpose, he was outraged by the presence of parking spaces, provision for television, and suggested eliminating elevators from the first four floors to encourage student exercise.”
Taking a stroll from Club Witte to the Humanities Building, one reads how Vice President Robert Clodius dedicated the monstrosity to “beauty, harmony, and grace.”
Just as the Humanities stands as something of the ultimate oxymoron, argumentation frequently yields the contradictory and the hypocritical, and this is condemned far too often. One of the most overused instruments of debate is charging one’s opponent with hypocrisy.
Conservatives extol the value of life while condoning the murder of convicts. Liberals press for the abolishment of the death penalty while pushing for greater access to reproductive choice. Each side is often willing to point out the apparent hypocrisy on the other side.
I see no contradictions. We all have values and systems of reasoning that we must apply to a widely varied and constantly changing set of circumstances. In our complex world, we do the best with the tools we have, and this often results in beliefs and decisions that, when viewed with the advantage of separation or with an eye toward rhetorical advantage, may not be perfectly congruent.
Reasoning is not absolute; we are not computers and we never will be. We must navigate our ambiguous world with optimistic humility.
At least that’s what I think.
But I really don’t have a clue.
Bryant Walker Smith ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in civil and environmental engineering.
