If one was unsure whether fall or winter was the more beautiful season or whether Chopin or Mozart was the more masterful composer, the disagreement which would ensue would be purely academic. From it, no practical reverberation would echo. But if one was unsure of whether God existed, the debate would have very real consequences, as the matter at hand would not be music or aesthetics but the foundation on which the lives of billions rest. But in my own thoroughly secular civilization, it is the other way around; religious agnosticism is one of the last acceptable forms of agnosticism.
As the modern West becomes increasingly secular, orthodoxy and apostasy do not go away - they just become secular too. If one says that the Virgin Mary was just a Jewish girl who told a fib, no scandal follows, but if one was to say that Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant and a scoundrel, one would be cast into outer darkness.
“It’s the original martyrdom,” historian Harold Holtzer said of the Lincoln assassination; “It’s Lincoln dying for the nation’s sins.” The martyred Lincoln, according to Holzer, became a “secular saint.”
Seeing how reluctant most Americans are to condemn Lincoln makes me more willing to cut the English some slack when they are reluctant to condemn Henry VIII or when the Russians are reluctant to condemn Stalin.
Admitting ignorance, let alone doubt, ought to be one of the most honest actions of which humans are capable, but when one expresses doubts on matters with greater gravitas than composers or seasons, saying “I don’t know” can be greeted with not only contempt but outright disgust. It is not the ignorance of someone else that disgusts us but the possibility that we too could share in this ignorance. This possibility runs contrary to the instinct that, as Steven Pinker put it, “in any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.”
Rather than entertaining the possibility that we could be in the wrong, many will, often without even thinking about it, linguistically manipulate dissenting opinions into being logically impossible. English journalist and novelist George Orwell called it “Newspeak,” American economist Stuart Chase called it “blab,” but the term I most prefer was coined by British journalist Steven Poole: “unspeak.”
In Poole’s 2006 work by the same name, he defined unspeak as “an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak - in the sense of erasing, or silencing - any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one choice of looking at a problem.” Most of us would rather be confirmed in our beliefs rather than have them challenged, just as most of us would rather speak our mother language than speak something else.
And than there is one of the most insidious manifestations of unspeak –“unthink.” If unspeak is when one uses words to portray one's own position as the only possible position to hold, unthink is when one thinks their position as not a position at all. Declaring oneself not only “un-ideological” but “anti-ideological” is where unthink becomes either insidious, genius or both, because to paraphrase the ancient military theorist Sun Tzu, to win an argument without debate is the acme of skill.
Education, Mark Twain once said, is “the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.” Along the way, one needs to remember three simple rules: first, remember that you could be wrong; second, remember that others could be wrong; third, always be willing to listen to people who admit they could be wrong. “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority,” Twain said, “it is time to pause and reflect.”
