When Convictions Are Dangerous

And when we need them most.

From the moment I slid wailing into the world, I “knew” things. Mind you, I had to wait two years before I could properly vocalize everything I knew, but if I could’ve talked at birth, I likely would’ve had something to say to that doctor about the right way to do his job.

I can’t remember a day I didn’t have opinions.

Me, age 6. I have some opinions about that hat.

What was most convenient about the state and church and moment in history that raised me¹ was that the right way to do things had already been determined before I got there. I learned that “right way” real good, studied at it better than all the other kids and most of the adults, memorized it backward and forward. By the time I was twelve I understood that, for the rest of my life, all I had to do was convince the world I had it right and they had it wrong. And anybody along the way who told me I was wrong only made me feel righter.

Of course I had more to learn about tax codes and trigonometry, but not about the things that really mattered: God, politics, or people.

It's safe to say: if you’ve mastered knowledge by the age of twelve—when your newly oily hair is blunt-cut at your chin and your braces are hunter green and your lip gloss is shinier and stickier than bacon grease² —you just might be missing something. You might not be as smart as you think you are.

(To my long-suffering parents, consider this a formal apology.)

Humility came slowly for me, and then all at once. The surer you are at the start, the more painful the unlearning that follows. What was real, and what was cultural? Biased? Warped? Inaccurate? Well-intentioned but misleading? It’s like the center of the stage you’ve been standing on is a trap door swinging open, and there’s nowhere for you and all your opinions to go but into the inky black below.

Alan Jacobs, in his essential book How to Think, reminds us, “All of us at various times in our lives believe true things for poor reasons, and false things for good reasons.”

For many people I’m sure, it’s not so dramatic in either direction—the knowing or the not knowing. This isn’t everyone’s story; it’s just the only story I have to tell. First I knew everything, and then I knew nothing. And now I don’t know what I know.

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Where does this leave us? It’s not that I know nothing now. It’s just that, once you’ve been wrong—really, really wrong—all future knowing is laced with a kind of terror.

You’re haunted not just by the things you were wrong about (that would be just a personal, intellectual problem) but by all the people your convictions hurt along the way. You’re haunted by the damage you’ve done in the name of knowing. And you’re haunted by the fact that you were certain every single one of those hurtful things, you were doing out of love.

Maybe all knowing should be laced with a kind of terror. We see, after all, through a glass darkly.

Opinions, as they say, are (ahem) common—everybody has one. I have opinions about which Latin restaurant in our city is the very best, which shoes I want to wear on any given day, and the best shows on television.

But there are opinions, and then there are convictions. This is a tricky concept because the word “conviction” implies something deeper is at play than a workaday opinion. The implication is that a conviction comes from an outside source, something greater than us, maybe even God.

This would be all well and good, of course, if people across the proverbial aisles weren’t shouting contradictory God-given convictions at each other. (Does God want Clemson to win or the University of Georgia? We can’t know until heaven.)

I understand conviction. (Boy do I.) It is so important. If unexamined conviction didn’t guide the large majority of our daily interactions, nothing meaningful would ever be accomplished. (My kids got their first baby Nintendo for Christmas, and all I can think of here is that game Animal Crossing. The avatars wander around a little plot of digital earth, picking oranges and fishing and trading twigs gathered from the ground for striped shirts and sunglasses. Sometimes they just walk their tiny avatar feet around the neighborhood with nothing to do. I find the pointlessness of the whole thing a bit maddening. Perhaps Animal Crossing is a model of a world without conviction?)³

This is the blissful demeanor of a person devoid of conviction.

A person (or society) without convictions is about as useful and interesting as a frog on a log. But conviction is problematic, too. For every loving conviction, there’s a hateful one. Even the “rightest” convictions can be weaponized, and sometimes the strongest convictions are still wrong.

The neo-Nazis are every bit as convinced they are standing up for what’s right as the lady waving a poster outside the abortion clinic, the professor teaching critical race theory, and the sweaty preacher wielding a snake under a revival tent. (Slow down. I’m not equating anything about these things except the degree of conviction present within each person.)

T. S. Eliot, way back in the early nineteenth century, wrote,

When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.

If I’m honest, this is where the tension piece really holds me hostage. Righteous conviction on one side, humility on the other. Action on the one side, curiosity on the other. Knowing versus wonder.

I believe in holding that tension, but I also know it can be paralyzing. Agonizing, even. On my worst days, no matter how deeply I believe “nuance is the refuge of the hopeful,” I long to seek refuge inside simplicity.

It’s like a Russian nesting doll of tension; even the tension reveals, inside it, more tension. If I only hold tension, or if I hold none at all, I am a useless avatar picking up twigs to build a fire that offers no warmth.

Sometimes the only way to break the tension gridlock is to consider what the world seems to need most. Or what the people around you seem to be forgetting. Or, most importantly, what you are most prone to forgetting.

When I look around me these days, there seems to be a surfeit of conviction and a dearth of curiosity.

In his book But What If We’re Wrong, Chuck Klosterman writes,

I think there’s a greater detriment with our escalating progression toward the opposite extremity—the increasingly common ideology that assures people they’re right about what they believe… It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be.

Even if I’m considering only myself (as opposed to everyone else), tension has to be dealt with differently in my interactions with the world than inside my own brain and heart. For the past decade, I’ve needed to lean hard into curiosity to “correct” a lifetime of absolute knowing. I believe this is what the world-at-large, too, most needs during this—our—dot on the historical timeline. But lately, I’ve had to remind myself that, at the same time, conviction is okay. If I’m going to make any positive difference at all, some conviction is absolutely necessary.

The difference in my approach now versus when I was younger, at least theoretically, is that I no longer feel the need to make everyone see it my way. When I do get caught up in changing other people’s minds, I am flooded with angst, blinded by self-righteousness, and rendered not only ineffectual but the same kind of dangerous I was at twelve and twenty. And while I need some convictions, I need fewer and fewer of them the older I get. Too many, and what I don’t know is crowded out by what I think I do. If you ask me, people who can’t learn (a definition of arrogance, perhaps?) are not just boring but downright unpleasant.

But how do we know what we know?

I don’t know.⁴

1. Georgia / Southern Baptist / the Moral Majority boom of the 1990s

2. A photo from this era will be unlocked when this newsletter hits 1,000 subscribers.

3. It is entirely possible that none of us understand the game at all.

4. But I have some ideas. Maybe that’s a part two. :)