Only certainty is in knowledge that nothing can be certain

The year 2008 is one of promise, not to mention better sleep, as we wake from an eight-year nightmare.

My New Year’s wish all around is for less certainty, more ambiguity, and a thorough re-examination of what we believe and why, in the hopes of restoring some modicum of actual justice in our dealings both at home and abroad.

Here’s a little incident that occurred when I was 6 years old: I was getting dressed for school and couldn’t find my favorite T-shirt. The bus was coming, and I was running around like my hair was on fire.

So my brother and granddad engaged in the search, too, until one of them noticed that I was already wearing the shirt.

None of us saw what was right in front of our eyes. Why not?

Certainty. My certainty, which convinced the others.

I was dead sure, and also dead wrong. I was only 6, of course, but it just reminds me that it can be dangerous to be too certain. What we know, or think we know, can do a ton of harm, and just because we’re sure doesn’t mean that we’re right.

What I know implies, by the very word “I,” a limited point of view – i.e., one that is inherently partial, and therefore at least partially ignorant.

That ignorance basically takes two forms: cluelessness of both the unknown and the known. All that of which I am unaware that I am unaware of, and also that of which I think, or know, that I know.

We rectify ignorance of the unknown, in part, through curiosity. There is obviously much that we cannot know, due to limitations of our intellect and senses, but insofar as our abilities allow us to know something, the gravest threat to further knowledge is certainty.

Curiosity opens doors. Certainty closes them.

Certainty limits my ability to understand the limitations of my knowledge. When I am certain that I fully know something, I am revealing a profound ignorance of the universe of greater possibility.

We best express possibility within a world of knowledge that we view as incomplete and provisional. One that I understand is not understood (in both senses).

An understood universe – one rendered static by one’s beliefs – is dead, holding only various types of certainties.

Possibility exists in a universe of constant motion, flux and change, an interweaving realm of parts that are wholes, and wholes that are parts, understood only in relational terms.

An easy way to understand the illusion of our apparent solidity as individuals is to realize how impermanent we are.

We – our “selves” – are completely permeable, in continual breath with the universe.

The skin I’m contained in today is brand new, completely different from the one that I was wearing a mere 35 days ago. “I” change 98 percent of my atoms in each and every year that I live, both as a part (a collection of ever-changing atoms) and a whole (an indivisible self).

Computer scientist Steve Grand asks us to remember a childhood experience and ponder how we can recall it when “not a single atom that was in your body today was there when that event took place. …

“Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made.”

And he sees certainty as the enemy of insight, reminding us that when people question their basic assumptions, they “find out that quite fundamental things they’d always taken completely for granted aren’t actually true. The snag with this is the implicit paradox, of course: If your assumptions are unquestioned, how do you know what they are?

“I think this is where it helps to see the world with childlike eyes – all innocence and ignorance. Experts are the last people to question the foundation stones of their towering edifice of acquired knowledge, for fear the whole thing will topple.”

To paraphrase the philosopher John Rawls, laws should be written such that you should be unaware, while writing the law, of whether you are at the top, or the bottom (his “veil of ignorance”).

This, of course, protects the rights of both the haves and the have-nots and also reminds us that justice is not possible if it’s for “just us.”

There is a deep sense of fairness in this concept of law, and a complete lack of certainty.