I Might Be Wrong

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

By Brooke Williams

The letters to the editor and comments in last week’s papers generated by the rally to protest Vice President Cheney were nearly as interesting as the events themselves. I’m continually amazed by the spectrum of opinion represented by the people of Jackson, and also by our ability and willingness to articulate it.

Let’s assume for my purposes that on the surface one’s opinion about the rally and the vice president are based on one’s feelings about the Iraq war, which, it can be argued, is about weapons, oil and terrorism. But beneath the surface our feelings may be based on belief — about being Muslim or Christian, about the Torah or the Bible, Mohammad or Jesus, God or Allah.

One of my heroes, the writer Wendell Berry, said that one failure of modern religion is its inability to allow faith and doubt to coexist. I interpret this to mean that by definition, belief and faith must include an element of uncertainty. If this were a mathematical equation, it might look like this:

Belief + Uncertainty = Reality

It makes sense to me that there is some force at work that has brought life on Earth to this point (Reality). We all do our best to understand that force in order to live our lives with some degree of meaning (Belief). If we’re being completely honest, we are not 100 percent sure (Uncertainty). We’d all like to believe that the Belief part of our equation is 99 percent and the Uncertainty is 1 percent. We all know people whose Belief seems to have absolutely no basis in Reality.

And it might be safe to say that throughout history, people have been killed because Uncertainty was missing from the equation. The Crusades, the Holocaust, the genocides in Native America, Rwanda and now the Sudan, and the bombings in Baghdad, might all be blamed on people for whom Belief has become Reality.

The great thing about living in a place surrounded by nature is that we’re constantly exposed to reality. Migration. Seasons. Predation. Natural selection. Life cycles. Daily, we can watch organisms engaged in one task: survival – the work of passing life onto the future. While we actually understand very little of it, it constantly enchants us. something spectacular is at work.

Last week at the Murie Center, I heard the season’s first elk bugling. I saw coyote pups and found a deer in the last stages of decomposition. I watched a dragonfly take bobbing mayflies out of the air, and a soaring formation of white pelicans. I love the security of knowing what I’m seeing and I understand that what I’m seeing is not random behavior but elements in a stable system.

The more I see, the more complex the natural world becomes and the less I know. For me Uncertainty becomes Possibility.

What if we were to apply this new formula to all of our issues? What if we acknowledged that, yes, I believe in (fill in the blank: Evolution, Creation, wolves and wilderness, Jesus or Buddha), but I might be wrong?

I might be wrong. Uncertainty. Possiblity.

Imagine how adding those words might change the debate: “I believe that wolves might decimate the cattle industry and are capable of killing children – but I might be wrong.” “I believe that wilderness is necessary for us to achieve our maximum potential … that the American way of life is the only way … that the (Catholic, Mormon, Episcopal, Presbyterian ) church is the only true church … but I might be wrong.”

At one time, some people believed that the world was flat. Others didn’t. Today we know it isn’t. The major questions fueling our debates currently have no universally acceptable answers. Could it be that the possibility of solving our most pressing issues might be increased if everyone explored and acknowledged their personal uncertainties?
I think so. But I might be wrong.

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I Might Be Wrong | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

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