The importance of being certain

Jonah Goldberg has a great article about the importance of dogma:

This should sound ironic or odd in today's culture, which cannot distinguish between dogma, ideology, or just plain old certainty, but knows for sure that all three are bad. Indeed, "dogmatism" has an almost entirely negative connotation, meaning at best "unthinking" adherence to ideas, usually bad ones, or even outright bigotry. Pragmatism, on the other hand, is the only philosophical school with a corresponding adjective in daily political life that enjoys an unequivocally positive connotation (hat tip to James Nichols). The philosophy of pragmatism, Papini famously remarked, is to do without philosophy. In fact, ever since the end of the 19th century, what we today call liberalism has been at war with "preconceived" ideas of all kinds. William James in America and Nietzsche and Sorel in Europe championed the notion that "willing" something to be true was all it took for something to be true. And anything that can be willed into being can be unwilled.

Anyway, still suffering from the hangover of their ideas, we even see certainty as a trait of the lowbrow, a habit of those unwilling or unable to understand the perspective of others. The most famous — and actually quite funny — example was offered by the New York Times's Anthony Lewis a few years ago. While the war in Afghanistan was still raging and the rubble at Ground Zero was still smoldering, Lewis gave a fascinating interview to the Times. Asked if he'd drawn any "big conclusion" over his long career as the paper's "most consistently liberal voice" (their words), Lewis responded that "certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft."

Now, in many respects, this is the intellectual equivalent of some of the stunts on Fear Factor: It's impressive precisely because of the audacity of its stupidity.

Yeah, the rest f it is that good.