By Chris Chrappa

Yeats said something to the effect of "all great evil is the result of
passionate conviction." Stop and think about that for a moment. The great
rulers, tyrants, conquerors, the terrible genocides, wars, and political
programmes---the crusades, WWII, atom bombs and smallpox blankets, Iraq
even: the result of passionate conviction.
What I wonder about this is if it's possible that passionate
conviction can ever be sure of itself. It seems that "to be sure of itself"
is the very definition of a thing with conviction. Lately there has been a
tendency to de-emphasize that rather anlytic truth due to the very
atrocities catalogued above, and especially the Holocaust. The motto now
seems to be: "stand for something, without standing on anything." In other
words, go ahead and have some loose convictions, but make sure you
understand that there's no way to be sure that you're right, that there's no
foundation for you to stand on, in fact, you can pretty much be sure,
ultimately, of only one thing: that you're just wrong. But then we want to
ask: how exactly is that conviction? Richard Rorty calls it liberal irony,
which on my reading is a form of public propoganda that knows deep in its
heart of hearts that it can't possibly be "correct." But it is, in the
language of the propoganda, "the best we can hope for."
I don't see this as answering the question. It's like telling someone
that you believe in God when at home you hold to atheism and love Mencken,
on the basis of a supposition that the world would fall apart without a
belief in God. That's not conviction, that's deliberate self-deception.
Which forces another question, basically the one I asked in the
beginning: "Is the content of conviction essentially a deliberate or
non-deliberate self-deception?" On this score, a conviction that is sure of
itself--or in Rorty's language, not "ironic"--would simply be a
self-deception that is not deliberate, not aware of itself, not reflective.
Are you comfortable with this? Because I'm not. It is by no means
our duty to accept the skeptical pseudo-dillemma of "absolute certainty or
total delusion." There are other options, obviously. But still, I despair
of ever finding some reasonable basis for conviction when such bases are so
prone to bias, prejudice, sub-conscious super-ego crap, and so on and so
forth.
From the darkness, however, shines a light. The simple fact is that
there is no guarantee that conviction will not be destructive, dangerous, or
degenerate. These traits are germane to the whole field of conviction, part
of what makes it so compelling and so romantic. One mustn't kid oneself
that one has the Truth, but one mustn't kid oneself either that liberal
irony is the same as conviction. Voltairine de Cleyre had conviction; Al
Gore doesn't. Nor, I suspect, do most politicians.
So what IS required for something to become a full-fledged, whole-hog
conviction? First, it must not be fanaticism. That is, it must not think
of itself as the Truth-bearer. That signals ignorance and
closed-mindedness, and it may seem convenient, but I'll just go ahead and
define fanaticism as ignorant conviction. Second, then, this only seems to
push back the problem, asking for a specification of what ignorance is.
Fortunately, that's an easy one. Ignorance is not about what you know or
think you know, nor is about how much or how little you know or think you
know---it is about HOW you know or think you know, or rather, HOW you
believe. Simply: the less you think, the more ignorant you are. I maintain
that, from here, it is entirely possible to have firm convictions with
regard to some issue, and yet still be open-minded while not going as far as
liberal irony. If a conviction is a conviction, then we must ask if it can
be changed or eradicated, or just given up all together. Answer: of course.
I know many people who are firmly convinced of God's existence, but still
manage to have very interesting and intelligent discussions with me---Mr.
atheist---about their faith. I used to believe in God, firmly, but now I
don't, firmly. But I'm open to the possibility, at any rate.
I will say this in an abstract way to make it sound like a
principium: Real conviction believes in such a way as to increase the
freedom of others. When I converse with theists, we often form wonderful
and dazzling arguments, and produce strange monsters of emotion and mutant
beliefs---all the while breaking open little spaces, little times, little
moments where novelty is able to rear its head beyond the pale of rote
slogannering and liberal ironist propoganda. We literally convene on the
fires of our beings. Take that for granted and you take everything for
granted. And that is a bad idea.
Still, the novelty can be destructive. I accept that. The theist
could become a dogmatic atheist anarchist who assassinates Baptists. And
that is clearly retarded. There is, nonetheless, an extremely fuzzy line
between conviction and what I've called fanaticism (ignorant conviction),
and oftentimes it's just not possible to sift out the two, so often are they
compounded together. Perhaps there is an essential ingredient of ignorance
in any conviction, and thus what becomes important, a la Socrates, is a
knowledge of ignorance.
Be that as it may, no one said thought was about answers, or at least
no one who ever thought about anything. Philosophy especially is about
problems and pathways, as Heidegger said, "being on the way to" knowledge,
wisdom, truth, what have you. The best conviction is a conviction "on the
way to" something, and the only way to be sure that you are not on the way
to, say, Nazism (as Heidegger was) is to not be sure of what you're on the
way to, or to not be willing to smash everything on your way there. It is,
in other words, to keep the mind flexible and open, to keep the ears and
eyes peeled, to keep the nerve endings and taste buds awake. Trying to stay
awake for as long as possible, to stay aware as honestly as can be---this is
not irony, but it is openness, which latter is of the fundament of
conviction. Such conviction cannot be propaganda or a form of ironizing, on
pains of not being a conviction any longer. Politicians use propoganda,
politicians are private ironists. Many honest-to-God theists and many
honest-to-(not existing) God atheists are people of conviction. They are
necessarily extreme, almost sleepless.
Intelligent conviction, finally, is nothing if not a form of insomnia;
fanaticism is nothing if not a dream while being.
"Peel off your eyelids." Remember?