Knowledge, Certainty, and the Principle of Tolerance

I used to have a penpal with whom I argued about many things. One of them was the Holocaust. He was not a Holocaust denier; he merely maintained that the whole thing was grossly exaggerated. Probably, he wrote (and I could detect no self-awareness of insanity, nor discern the slightest hint of irony), no more than half the number of deaths reported had actually occurred. The rest were Zionist propaganda or assumption. He was certain of this, sure of his facts. I wrote back, admitting that I couldn't quite decide at first whether his claim was more laughable than it was horrible, as if the organized mass extermination of three million men, women, and children, meticulously planned and methodically performed, down to the careful compilation and filing of the data by the executioners' clerks and secretaries, would be only half as monstrous as the murder of six million, as the arithmetical logic, with its impeccable numerical precision, would seem to dictate. I concluded in my letter that, as I didn't wish to go mad contemplating this sort of precision, I had decided, in a fit of self-preservation, that his argument was more laughable than horrible and would not debate the matter further. Our correspondence ceased soon after.

He was (and for all I know still is) absolutely certain he was right, that is, that his figures were correct. He was undeniably of a careful, scientific frame of mind. He knew far more about particle physics than I, and, he said (and I had no cause to disbelieve him), done some research into the Holocaust, and therefore had knowledge of what he was talking about. Whereas I, who had not carried out any documentary research into the question, was in no position to argue against his assertion, based as it was on hard facts.

Did he have a valid point? He most certainly did.

I'm a great respecter of any kind of research, scientific, historical, or literary, though locked as I am in deepest Somerset in the blighted heaths of darkest England, I do not engage in original research very much. Most of what I think I have gathered from reading, but I've only rarely gone to the source material, the initial wellspring and fountainhead, the original article. To those who regularly glance over my essays this may come as not quite the stunning shock I would prefer it to be. But there you are. Here I stand. God knows I could do a great deal more.

The question is this: Do we research the written record to gain knowledge, or to cement conviction? Do we accept continued murky doubt, or only the bright flame of certainty? For we shall never gain certainty in science through doing documentary research, even into original source materials, except the trivial sort, that Professor X did (or didn't) really profess Proposition Y in the form in which it has come down to us. Scientific research may yield us evidence that can be immensely useful in a limited, temporary way, but it will never be conclusive, never final enough to prove beyond doubt that a vital truth is this and not that, only what Professor X thought was the truth at the time, or, more likely (if Professor X was a good scientist), where a portion of what could be true might, possibly, be inclined to lead. For a real scientist, the acquisition of knowledge is an endlessly ongoing thing that often erases its previous state or amends it, sometimes beyond recognition.

For those interested in certainty, on the other hand, science and scientific research is not the way. Of course, there is bogus science and bogus research and these will lead us to certainty, in whichever direction we have already decided to go. Certainty leads to the end of thinking. It is also abundantly clear that, while nonsense can be promulgated in a few seconds or paragraphs, accurate and detailed information and explanation of the facts takes much longer. That's why fanatics and charlatans do so much better than rational people during television debates. But when sufficient time and space are allowed to the expounder of reason, then elements of truth (always partial, always provisional) may emerge.

Near the end of his wonderful book and television series, The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski has a section entitled "Knowledge and Certainty." In it he draws a careful distinction between the two while discussing Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty, which Bronowski prefers to call the "Principle of Tolerance." That is, a form of reasoning that allows a degree of latitude, a margin of error, to creep in, a lack of absolute conviction that one has succeeded in locating and now possesses all the facts, which, in Bronowski's words, is the principle of monstrous certainty. Part of this section of the book and television program is set in Auschwitz, where some of his relations (and if we stop to think about it, some of your relations and some of mine and some of every human being's relations) were gassed to death and their bodies burned, about four million all told, Bronowski states. In both the television version and the book he is shown squatting down in a small, murky pool in a field just outside the barbed w ire perimeter, dipping his hand into the dark, muddy, marshy water, and pulling out a tuft of weeds and saying, "We have to touch people." This happens a second or two after he tells us that the ashes of the burned corpses were flushed out of the camp's crematorium and into this field, forming this little pond amid the grass.