THE VALUE OF DOUBT
EPISODE 028: THE VALUE OF DOUBT
Doubt gets a bad rap but it has long been doubt and the willingness to live with uncertainty that has led to innovation and creativity. What would happen in our creative lives if we were more willing to look more carefully at our doubts and set aside the things we’re so sure of? Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
True believers, and by that I mean people who never wrestle with doubt, they scare me. I’ve met my share of them in my time, but more hauntingly, I’ve been one. I’m pleased to say I’ve grown out of it, but there was a time in my life when what I knew about myself and the world around me was held with much less doubt than it is now. At the time I prided myself on my conviction, but mostly I was just closed-minded and arrogant. I knew what I knew and I knew it with a degree of certainty that I don’t think we ever have access to as human beings. The world was very black and white for me and not only did I believe the world was held together by absolute truth, I was unwavering in my belief that I knew that truth absolutely. My years in theology school as a young adult only helped the cement dry on those beliefs, and by the time I left they were unshakable and dogmatically inflexible and if you knew me back then and didn’t like me very much, I get it. I’m not sure, looking back, I like that guy either. But he was young and while he probably wouldn’t have much empathy for the man he eventually became, I look back at that young man and all I can think is, "buckle up, kid. You’ve got a hell of a ride ahead.”
I’m David duChemin, and this is episode 28 of A Beautiful Anarchy, The Value of Doubt. Let’s talk about it.
Life has a way, if we’re listening, of revealing the holes in the ideas and beliefs we hold too tightly. During the years in which I made a living with a comedy magic act I spent long days studying sleight of hand and illusion and the only reason any of those wonderful magic tricks worked at all was because my audience believed certain things with such conviction that when those convictions were challenged they would rather believe it was a miracle than believe that they hadn’t seen what they were so sure they were seeing. We can be so sure of our assumptions that we become blind to reality. But the problem with assumptions is that we don’t see them as such. We believe them to be fact, but not even consciously. Not some tenet of faith that we intentionally adopt, but something silent and unseen, something we don’t even know we think or believe.
Why I’m talking about this at all is because creative thinking in any discipline, whether it’s artistic or not, is about possibility and it frowns darkly on those that believe hard and will not gladly go digging for their assumptions, and underlying beliefs, to bring them into the light and see if they still ring true. I don’t mean religious belief here, I mean anything we believe about ourselves. Or about the work we are doing. About what is possible and what is not. About what we can do, should do, or might do. I’m talking about every assumption about how we believe our work must be done, and why. There is a tremendous value in humility and doubt in the creative life.
It’s easy to be convinced. It’s easy to rest on things you think you know, learned for good a long time ago. But things change. We discover new things all the time. We once believed with all the certainty of dogma that the sun revolved around the earth. That the earth was flat. Or that babies couldn’t feel pain. In the early 1920s we believed radium was good for us. If it could cure cancer it must be able to cure everything, right? It was put in tonics, hair cream, toothpaste, and even candy. Until it started killing people, at which point it was doubt about the safety of radium that led us in the saner direction of, you know, not eating it. Doubt has long been the doorway through which we’ve walked to innovation and progress. Doubt that the old ways are the best ways, that old assumptions and knowledge are the only ways. Doubt leads to questioning and questioning leads to new ideas and directions.
The problem with doubt is that it really is only a doorway through which we too often peer without walking all the way through to see where it leads. We doubt we can do something, so we don’t. We doubt someone’s being honest with us, so we disbelieve. We doubt that we’re loved, so we act as though we aren’t. Doubt used well is not just a lack of belief, but a trigger to exploration. It’s a tool and like all tools it can be used well, and it can be used destructively. Or not at all. Doubt can be used to keep us from our best work, to push us deeper into exploring that work. If our assumptions are what keep us from seeing new directions and possibilities, it is a healthy, active doubt of those assumptions that will help us through our myopathy, to see beyond what we might be wrong about.
I think the reason we back down from the possibilities that doubt presents us with–the possibility to see things in new ways, to gain new knowledge or ideas, and to try new things–is because not knowing is hard. We’ve never done well with not knowing. All of the stories of demi-gods and fairies and demons that we’ve told ourselves for thousands of years were an attempt to put something meaningful into the empty spaces about which we had no knowledge. It’s easier for us to tell ourselves stories than to simply say, I don’t know. Especially with things we just can’t know. It’s hard to be the one that stands up and says, "Hang on, that doesn’t seem right, are we sure about this?” The results of having and giving voice to those kinds of doubts have long been closer to ex-communication, public scorn, and burnings at the stake, than they have been to quick changes of heart and mind. We are so, so slow to change our minds. Not just because our pride gets in the way but because doubting is messy. While we doubt we stew in cognitive dissonance, with competing ideas bouncing around, and what we’re left with is mystery.
That, to me, might be the most beautiful aspect of doubt, or the ability to live with it and engage it: the mystery. Where there is no doubt, where there is only certainty, there can be no mystery. Without mystery there is no awe. The presence of mystery makes us pay closer attention, to look deeper and longer. It’s the flip side of assumption, which isn’t so much lazy thinking as it is thinking that’s settled into a coma. Without mystery, there is no fascination. Without mystery and doubt there is no trigger for the question, “What if?” and it is that question that has long fired the imaginations of creative thinkers and pushed us to look for answers and in so-doing to find cures for diseases and invent astonishing things and to make and write and perform the best of what we’ve created. Without “What if?” and “I wonder why?” we’d all still be sitting around a campfire afraid of the dark and the sound of thunder.
Doubt equips us to deal with life because if you’re wide awake it won’t be long before you run up against things that don’t fit into your worldview. There is so much more out there that we don’t know about than what we do. We don’t even know ourselves that well. That’s why I’d tell my younger self to buckle up and hang on. Because navigating reality when we’re so damn sure of who we are and how we’ll react to things and how others will treat us and what circumstances will throw our way, and doing so without your seatbelt on, is bound to have its share of collisions. When you believe or know something with 100% certainty and you are then confronted with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary you can either let doubt do its job, and open yourself to mystery, or you can fight it. Those that fight it turn away from the chance to learn something new about themselves or the world that surrounds them.
The 24 year old me didn’t see life coming the way it did. We never do. He was headstrong and cocksure, closed off to the idea that life and all its mysteries could be anything but what he imagined. That was exactly half a lifetime ago for me now at the edge of 50. I’ve now seen the world from some very dark corners as a humanitarian photographer. I’ve been divorced, twice now, when I swore I never would and judged those harshly who had. I’ve gone bankrupt. I’ve had more missteps than I ever believed myself capable of. I’m now very sure that my way is not the only way, that my perspective is not the only one. I’ve become very comfortable with doubt. Life has softened me, particularly in the areas where I once believed so hard. Doubt has led to possibility: the chance to wonder, to see mystery instead of certainty, to ask "what if?” and go looking for a response to that infinite question.
Perhaps ironically, then, I have never felt more confident. Not the confidence of conviction I once felt, though I’m sure some of that residue remains, but the confidence that it’s all leading somewhere. Confidence not that I won’t screw up but that I will bounce back. Confidence that there’s much I don’t know and the process of discovering those things is better than the certainty they do or don’t exist. Confidence that the things I make are necessary, if only to me, and that none of them will last that long but that’s OK. I’m confident that I’m getting a little closer to wisdom. That I’m becoming a more graceful presence in this world and that my thinking is becoming more gentle, and more accommodating of others. And I’m confident that my doubts are a more faithful teacher than the certainty to which I once clung so tightly. But they will only be so, if I let them raise questions for me that I’m willing to explore.
I don’t know what your doubts are. I’m guessing many of them need a little more exploring, because they’re based on assumptions and ideas that just aren’t true anymore. That art teacher who told you to give up because you “just weren’t creative.” It’s time to start doubting her. The parent that told you you had to have a real job, something more conventional, to be happy or successful–it’s time to start doubting that voice. The kids in school, the unhealthy relationships, that one counsellor at summer camp or the professor you had in college…isn’t it amazing how the doubts first planted by those voices have become certainties that we’ve never questioned, or assumptions we’ve never stopped to unravel enough to see for the bullshit they are? It could be they were right. It could be that you’re exactly the person those voices tell you you are. That you’re not good enough, not talented enough. It could be that you’re the only one who isn’t held back by by a little too much certainty, and who couldn’t be a little happier, a little more awake to wonder and mystery and the power of asking “what if?” a question that can only be asked when we don’t already know the answer. It could be you’re the only one that wouldn’t think more creatively if you saw more possibilities in what you don’t know than in what you do.
It could be. But I doubt it.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0