Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
It says on your Wikipedia page that you graduated from the University of New Mexico with a degree in journalism. Meaning you’re not that well-educated. As a professional opinion journalist, how do you manage to have informed and certain opinions about everything?
Just Curious,
Durango, CO
Mercifully, I don’t. I mean, true, like most people in our seedy little media racket, I’m practiced at pretending to have absolute expertise about things I just started considering roughly a half an hour ago. Knowingness is a hazard of the trade, the way carpenters have Carpenter’s Knee or plumbers have Plumber’s Crack. Then there’s reporting, in which you talk to people who actually know something about what you’re pretending to know something about. Also, there’s Google, or for those of us who consider it both cheating and dangerous to outsource your brain to a diabolical character like Larry Page, there’s Bing. But in opinion journalism, only amateurs let ignorance get in the way of inflicting their limited knowledge on other people.
After 25 years or so of doing this, going back to my unexceptional college years, I can say with some degree of confidence that the rationalization made by most journalists, who are dilettantes by nature and training, typically unburdened by self-awareness, is that you, the reading public, are paying not for our expertise, but for our sensibility. (Though this being the digital age, when everything is given away in the hopes of going viral, you’re probably not “paying” for either. So maybe whine a little less about what the media feeds you?)
The trick, on our end, is to feign certainty about whatever we’re uncertain about—and to then sell the hell out of it. Here, I’ll demonstrate: “There’s no chaos in the White House!” This statement is baldly untrue, quantifiably so. Though when I sell it with absolute certainty in a simple sentence, with no subordinate qualifiers and with an exclamatory cherry on top, you’d almost think I believe it. But I don’t. Voila, opinion journalism sleight-of-hand! To boot, I’ve just serviced the prejudices of approximately half the country. And here, the reading public is to blame as much as the media is. Since what too many people opt for these days isn’t the unvarnished truth, but the version of the “truth,” even if it’s false, that most closely adheres to what they wish to be true.
I’ve just revealed the secret of Hong Kong Hannity’s success. In my Hannity-watching experience (I’ve studied at his virtual dojo), he has never met a sticky set of circumstances or gray area to which he cannot apply absolute moral certitude. Yet that is not just Hong Kong’s secret, but nearly every talking head’s. Television abhors reticence, complexity, or ambiguity. And, to a lesser degree, print does as well, as you have probably noticed when lefty journalists, by contrast, demonize global-warming skeptics as being “science deniers,” while they just as blithely ignore ultrasound science (when it comes to abortion) or chromosomal science (when it comes to pretending that men who declare themselves women aren’t still biologically men). Truth is no respecter of partisan hacks.
Journalists, by nature, are insecure, petty, and vain. Their lives have very little constancy, since they are ever-dependent on ever-changing news cycles, which now lasts about as long as lunch. And they are doing so while competing against each other in what could be described as the look-at-me business. Which is not an environment conducive to genuine thoughtfulness, sustained reflection, or admitting uncertainty. It’s more like sticking your bare ass out the shotgun window of a moving car, hoping to attract some attention, any attention, no matter how undignified the spectacle.
And therefore, doing it with a modicum of integrity occasionally requires its practitioners to say the three most dreaded words in the journalism business: “I don’t know.” An admission nobody should be afraid to make. For there’s a lot we don’t know. An infinity of the unknown. There are, of course, things we hold to be immutable laws of nature: gravity, for instance. And there are general guideposts around which enlightened people can navigate their lives, and over which there should be little-to-no argument: Diet Coke is better than Diet Pepsi, real books are better than e-books, bourbon is better than scotch which is better than vodka, dogs are better than cats, the Stones are better than the Beatles, Rakim is better than Kendrick Lamar, Fitzgerald is better than Hemingway, and Protestants are better than Catholics (only kidding, mackerel snappers—just trying to go viral with my Southern Baptist brethren, at least among the ones who can read.)
But there are also vast unnavigable oceans, and the most honest among us are those who know their own mind well enough to understand their limitations. It is important to be certain about the importance of remaining uncertain. Certainty forecloses all other possibilities. And when you don’t even know what you don’t know, that’s a dangerous place to live.
For as theater director Tim Crouch once told the Scotsman: “Uncertainty is a very good thing: it’s the beginning of an investigation, and the investigation should never end.” And as Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet: “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and … try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.”
Or if you prefer science to art, it pays to recognize that even science itself is about as uncertain as it comes. The very method named after it requires testing hypotheses which are then subject to modification. As Lewis Thomas, the physician, scientist, and poet, wrote in Discover: “Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.”
Or as Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in physics, put it in his 1955 address to the National Academy of Sciences:
For my money, however, one of my favorite moments of uncertainty came several years back, just before my old friend, drinking companion, and occasional theological sparring partner, Christopher Hitchens, succumbed to esophageal cancer. Shortly before he died, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg conducted a video interview with Hitchens in his living room. As Hitchens was doubling down on his commitment to godlessness, as the world’s most famous atheist often did, the two were interrupted by Hitchens’s houseguest and dearest friend Martin Amis, a self-professed agnostic, who took a seat and gummed up the works a bit, offering:
At one point, Hitchens even nodded in assent. Though as a believer, I generally disagreed with him, it’s one of the things I always liked most about him. To the end, even when he’d manned his battle station, and had already pulled the pins on two grenades that he was about to double-chuck over enemy lines, he’d recognize a good argument when he heard one. Allowing that he thought he knew what he knew, but that there were plenty of things that could not be known with certainty.
Which seems about right to me. Show me a man or woman who is always certain that they should never be uncertain, and I’ll show you a sad person. Of that, I am (almost) certain.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
