I used to think a watchful uncertainty was the sign of someone paying attention. Boy, I miss those days.

I've been effectively off social media for about a year, I think. I left for two reasons. One was my sanity, the other was because I got tired of everyone complaining about how much they thought Elon Musk was the devil but then stayed on Twitter/X, because they didn't hate the devil as much as they wanted to keep the platform the devil provided. But my sanity was the bigger of the two. It was partly that I already feel like a huge underachiever in life, and seeing all the perfect lives others project--even when I know they're probably fake--made me feel even worse about myself. But it also had to do with how so many of the people I followed seemed so certain about so many things in the world, when I myself am seldom certain about much of anything. 

My lack of certainty in the face of so much sincere confidence about the right answers made me feel somehow deficient. It didn't used to be that way. When I got out of the Marine Corps and started college, the world that belonged to intellectuals seemed like a haven far away from the Marine Corps precisely because smart people were permitted to be uncertain. Ambivalent, even. Look at almost any intellectual subject that has been discussed since the beginning of written history, they'd say. You'll find highly learned scholars at this school who feel one way about it, and equally learned scholars who feel a different way. That doesn't mean that you can't have an opinion yourself, but it does mean that you should approach your opinion with a certain amount of circumspection.

Last week, I started parallel blogging on Substack. Substack is sort of a blend of social media and a blog site; there's a feed where you can see the people you follow post things, and their post can be short, like Twitter, but it can also be a direct link to their Substack blog. I've ended up in the stream of comments a few times this past week almost by mistake as I've been trying to figure out how Substack works. 

What I've seen is a deluge of posts from people I either know and chose to follow or who Substack thinks I ought to want to follow concerning the situation in Palestine. And man, are they sure they've got the answer. They sure they've got the answer, and they're so mad that anyone wouldn't accept their answer, they're willing to let someone with a clearly worse answer win an election in order to increase their relative bargaining power. 

Bojack basically gave this answer to say, "I'm trying hard not to make anyone angry here," but this answer is as likely as any to make people angry now. 

I might have once believed I had the right answers for most of the major geopolitical hotspots in the world, but I am cured of that belief now. What cured me was going deep on just one of those areas. I may not be the most knowledgeable person in the world on the Korean Peninsula, but I do know a hell of a lot about it. With the exception of one reader of this blog, I know a lot more than you do. Going deep on just this one area of the world has made me see how incredibly complicated it is, and I'd assume most other areas in the world are at least that complicated as well. Complicated enough that while I probably have a responsibility to at least understand the broad outlines of what the issues are, I should also keep my face shut about what the right answers are to fix the problem. 

I've spent so much of my life trying to understand just one problem in depth, I probably have neglected my duty to understand as many broad outlines elsewhere as I should have. When the latest flare-up in Palestine started last year, I tried to amend that shortcoming at least a little bit. I read The Hundred Years War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. I know some people will think I'm a rube and that I only read the Palestinian side of the story, but that was kind of the point. I'd heard the mainstream version before. I wanted to get the Palestinian version, knowing that it might not be the truth, but it would be a side of the story I hadn't subjected myself to before.

I thought the book was reasonably convincing. Rashid was mostly objective, although there were times I thought he was downplaying atrocities from the Palestinian side. My general takeaway was that yes, the Palestinians have a legitimate gripe with both Israel and the West, especially the U.S., and they deserve a state of their own. 

That doesn't mean I know what the situation on the ground is, what steps it would take to create such a state, or how seriously to take Israeli insistences that they remain under serious threat. Moreover, I don't know how close we are to this blowing over into a regional war. Most of all, I don't know what steps a president can take--or a presidential candidate can promise to take--and still get elected. 

The world being complicated isn't a reason to do nothing, ever, of course, but I do think it means the general attitude of thoughtful people on most issues should be watchful uncertainty. We should be alert for evidence that a particular course is warranted, but always ready to change course if more evidence comes in to change that belief. This...does not seem to be the attitude most people in my orbit adopt.

I'm particularly surprised that people in the writing world, who I'd think would be the most likely to be willing to believe issues are complicated and have many sides to listen to, are often the quickest to call for uncompromising action. This has put me back in the same malaise I was in a year ago before I finally got off social media. Either I am wrong about the importance of watchful uncertainty, or I'm completely off my rocker about specific situations in the world. Either way, I seem to be in a minority, and I'm not nearly certain of myself enough that I'm comfortable believing I'm right where so many others are wrong.