If religious and political leaders want us to trust their judgment, they need to admit their uncertainties
There is a wincing little scene right at the end of John Patrick Shanley's 2008 film, Doubt. The film is set in a Catholic church in the Bronx in 1964, and the action focuses on the suspicions aroused in the steely mind of the principal of the parish school, Sister Aloysius, about the conduct of the liberal-minded parish priest, Father Flynn. Sister Aloysius bullies Father Flynn into resigning, but in the final scene she confesses to another sister that she lied in order to get rid of him. Then, her steely facade disintegrating, Sister Aloysius bursts into tears as she speaks the last words in the film: "I have doubts … I have such doubts."
We are not told what it is she doubts, but we conclude that behind her severe and implacable front there lies a mind riven with uncertainty about the truth of the very beliefs she has given her life to. This is a well-understood phenomenon and it is one few of us have not experienced. We understand how often the proclamation of excessive loyalty is a cloak to hide unbearable doubt, even from ourselves. Doubt can be unbearable. It is one of our most painful experiences; but when we attend to what is happening and try to understand it, it can be the prelude to liberation and a kind of rueful peace of mind.
Standing at the altar, doubting whether you can keep the promises you are about to make to the person standing beside you, can be a summons to accept the tremendousness of the commitment you are about to engage in, or it can be a signal to you to do the honest thing and get out of there right away.
If doubt about earthly commitments is hard enough to deal with honestly, doubt about heavenly ones is even more difficult. We can test the scope and significance of an earthly doubt, but how are we to test the scope of a heavenly one, a supernatural one?
It is this intractability that lends a note of desperation to religious debate and leads to the development of conflicted personalities like Sister Aloysius. It is why religious leaders in their public pronouncements on complex issues are often tempted to take their rhetoric too far. We heard it from Lord Carey recently, when he claimed to see in the genial secularity of contemporary Britain the prelude to full-blown religious persecution. And at the weekend we heard it again from Cardinal O'Brien in his latest fulmination against allowing same-sex couples to marry.
It is striking that when these otherwise kindly and even-tempered men clap on their mitres to address the nation, they lose not only their sense of humour, but all sense of proportion. This is one reason why many decent-minded people are turned off religion in our society, being so blinded by its exaggerated prejudices that they fail to recognise its many virtues.
But the same thing is increasingly true of our attitudes to politics and politicians. It is not, I think, that we have suddenly discovered that our politicians are as venal and compromised as the rest of us. One of the virtues of our democratic system is that we are frequently reminded of that fact. No, it is not the moral fallibility of politicians that troubles us; it is their claim to political infallibility that depresses us.
We agree with TS Eliot that "there is nothing quite conclusive in the art of temporal government", and we fully understand why that should be so. Politics, after all, is the attempt to find the best way of ordering the unruly wills and affections of disordered humanity, and that is never going to be easy. We know that politics is more an art than a science, so we understand that uncertainty and doubt are intrinsic to its very nature.
It is obvious to us now that economics is as cloudy and inexact a subject as parapsychology, which is why we are depressed when we see our politicians hammering out their rival economic certainties on the airwaves without any sense of the absurdities of the exercise. It is not that we want them to be endlessly swithering over what to do, but we do expect them to have the kind of experimental modesty that will acknowledge when something is not working and try something else. Sadly, like bishops, politicians are never allowed to air their doubts in public.
Living with uncertainty does not mean that we have to live hesitant and uncommitted lives, either religiously or politically. It does mean that we will live with a certain lightness of being and bring a modest provisionality to our judgments – especially when we remember how many things we have been wrong about in the past.
Artists seem to understand this better than either theologians or politicians. In a letter to his brothers George and Tom, the poet John Keats probably said it best. It should be read daily in their prayers by archbishops and cabinet ministers: "Negative capability: that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Amen.
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