Conviction

I have for a long time thought of conviction as an important precursor to action. On the other hand, doubt and the willingness to reexamine any conviction is also important. There is a fine line between conviction and rigid intractability.

The need to be aware of one’s own biases has received focus. After the popularization of Einstein’s work, a lot of emphasis was placed on the idea that truth cannot be proved. Karl Popper focused on ‘falsifiability’, rather than justification, as a safer route toward objectivity.

Deconstructionists demonstrated the implicit bias in language and syntax. Post modernists described contemporary life and virtuous living as a state of ambivalence.

I see this direction as having attained the status of a faux paradigm shift. I have reacted against it. I refer to it as ‘relativism’. What I think is that though I accept that penultimate proof can never exist, because the universe is in continuous motion and therefore variables continuously shift, we can and must move toward truth. The very capabilities that have helped us prove that nothing can be proved also help us establish probabilities with more than conjecture. The physical world is more susceptible to clinical data, and clarity is not only as important and possible as it was a thousand years ago, we can link our conclusions better each day.

The dialectical system, a fancy name for argument, goes back, I think, to Plato. We compare notes on reality. We take turns presenting and challenging evidence. Why? We share the place in which, or on which, we live, and agreement that is grounded in facts enables us to solve problems. Our species seeks improvement, of ourselves and of our quality of life, and we live by the golden rule, that great, pragmatic summary of applied symbiosis. We must act cooperatively if we are to survive. This can only happen if we think of truth as (relatively) self-evident, and as something that exists beyond our individual skin.

So I return to the idea that conviction is healthy. It is an intrinsic paradox, because even as we stand up for what we believe in, we know that new information could alter our belief. So a conviction can be both very strong, and yet not immutable.