Doubting Vargas Llosa

Vargas Llosa spoke primarily about the role of culture in contemporary society. He endorsed “an elite ... with the moral authority to establish, in a flexible and renewable way, an order of important values for the arts and sciences: This was how it was in the most famous societies and cultures of history, and this is how it should be.”

His problem is not that an undeserving elite has usurped our cultural order. Rather, he is frustrated that the exercise of critique has gone so far that it is impossible to subscribe to a set of objective standards by which one could establish a cultural order. In this sense, he is not exactly guilty of elitism. Rather, he is guilty of wishing for a more certain world.

According to Vargas Llosa — and here I agree with him — our certainty has been shattered by phalanx of academics and intellectuals. Since Rene Descartes — Mr. Cogito Ergo Sum himself — we have understood that nothing is certain beyond our own existence. While Vargas Llosa — and probably many readers — are better read than I, I know enough to sympathize with his frustration with such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Thanks to their efforts, it feels as though we are always on the brink of a doubt-induced paralysis.

Foucault, for example, is forever questioning our methods for producing knowledge and seeking to deconstruct whatever categories we have built in order to understand the world. Biomedicine as we know it? A construct. History as we practice it? A narrative. When he is done, it feels like nothing is left standing. Though I may be a clean-shaven capitalist, it was not for nothing that Karl Marx remarked that “all that is solid melts into air.”

How can we confront this academe-induced crisis of uncertainty? One strategy is to ignore it. (Vargas Llosa justifies this on the basis of their being out of touch with reality.) We have developed an army of metaphors to silence the high priests of doubt. We dismiss those who wish to introduce more doubt into our lives as “purely academic.” From this view, the “ivory tower” is not a comfortable palace; it’s a jail meant to keep the professors away from the rest of us.

This strategy has worked. After all, we do things all the time. As one professor pointed out to me, doctors do not deconstruct the categories of disease on their charts; they read them and make diagnoses that save lives.

With all due respect to the professors with whom I have shared a (very comfortable) cell for the past three years, it is nice to be able to act without the doubt that they have introduced into society. Certainty allows us to believe in things like truth and the moral certainty that Vargas Llosa is reaching for.

But certainty is dangerous when it allows us to remain uncritical of ourselves. And contrary to Vargas Llosa’s diagnosis, it seems that our society is in danger of becoming too certain. For example, people like Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann are dangerous for our political discourse precisely because they are so certain in their correctness. They are symptomatic of a larger shift in American society: Democrats and Republicans are so certain of their arguments that they no longer pause to consider the validity of the other side. Certainty has also had a damaging effect at the global scale. Wall Street quants were so certain of their models that they did not consider the possibility that they could be creating the conditions for the Great Recession. As a more extreme example, suicide bombers do not kill themselves because they are racked by doubt; rather, it is because their heads are clouded by certainty.

Doubt is, it turns out, a necessary evil. Contrary to what Vargas Llosa believes, it is only when we doubt and question society and ourselves that we are able to cast off the old order and travel down the road of progress.

Vargas Llosa has been a well-respected author for many years now, and the Nobel Prize will only increase his standing as a public intellectual. He should use this newfound prominence to deliver a message that society needs to hear. That means speaking out not against doubt, but in favor of it.

Adam Bradlow is an anthropology major from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at abradlow@princeton.edu.