Wonder Confronts Certainty, Then and Now 

Editors’ Note: This essay is based on a recent lecture delivered at Columbia Law School, hosted by the Morningside Institute and the Galileo Center. 

Today, belief in free speech, legitimate difference of opinion, and open-ended dialogue seem old-fashioned (or worse) to many highly educated people. Or they define free speech, as Herbert Marcuse did, as pertaining only to those on the right side.  

Many lessons about free speech and dialogue can be learned from the Russian experience. In what follows, I will share three examples. 

First Lesson: The Basic Test 

Tolerance for different opinions makes sense only when one realizes that one’s own belief just might turn out to be wrong. Even when I have been most confident, there has been something I left out or did not anticipate. Because experience is always partial, in both senses of the word, one needs to consider the opinions and experiences of those who see matters differently. To do so, one must actually be able to grasp what opponents are saying. The basic test of whether one understands an opposing point of view is whether one can state it in a way that a proponent of that view acknowledges is accurate.   

For certaintists, the world divides itself neatly into the good and the evil.   It’s “intersectional,” with all moral causes linked together on one side opposing all evil causes on the other. How else to explain “Gays for Hamas”? (Or as one of my colleagues likes to say, “chickens for KFC.”)   But that Manichean picture of the world is entirely false and terribly pernicious. In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes how, as a dedicated Communist, he was absolutely certain the Party was right, and so he did horrible things without a qualm:    

In the intoxication of youthful successes, I felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that … gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good from evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. 

You cannot have an exchange of ideas when the line between good and evil passes between parties. If all good is on one side, there is no reason to have a democracy instead of a one-party state. That is why I suspect that those who most vociferously accuse opponents of being Nazis, racists, or otherwise evil cannot seriously believe in democracy, unless for them “democracy” means the rule of righteous people like themselves.     

Second Lesson: The Alibi 

Solzhenitsyn wanted to know “how a human being becomes evil and how good.” How did Stalin enlist so many agents willing to torture millions whom everyone knew to be innocent? One explanation—we find it in various places in Dostoevsky—is that human beings love evil as much as they love good. Sentenced to four years in a prison camp, Dostoevsky discovered that people commit crimes not only for personal gain, or because they have been treated unjustly, as utilitarians or social justice proponents presume, but also for the sheer pleasure of doing so. Like virtue, cruelty can be its own reward. Dostoevsky encountered prisoners who had slowly murdered children for fun, and guards who loved, for the sheer sadistic glee of it, first to promise leniency to prisoners about to run the gauntlet, and then, after receiving humble expressions of gratitude, to lay it on with special ferocity.    

Believers in original sin, Freudians, and Darwinists all know that violence and aggression are ineliminable. Beauty may be skin deep, but cruelty isn’t. When Ivan Karamazov asks whether evil is due to superficial bad qualities or is inherent in our nature, he clearly meant the latter. Dostoevsky agreed.    

People love power over others not only to gain something, but just to dominate. Sometimes we exercise power just to show we have it and humiliate others for no reason but to demonstrate that we can do anything, absolutely anything, we like. Solzhenitsyn cites Tolstoy’s character Ivan Ilych, who enjoyed being a judge because he could “destroy any person he wanted to. All without exception were in his hands, even the most important.”   

For Ivan Ilych, the consciousness of power was enough, but Stalin’s interrogators reveled in actually stripping away the last shreds of human dignity. Varlam Shalamov’s amazing stories—perhaps the best of the twentieth century—describe a sort of experiment: how much can you strip from a person’s sense of self—by torture, starvation, and humiliation—before he or she ceases to be a person at all? Solzhenitsyn concludes that Dostoevsky was right: “Power is a poison.” It is attractive, Solzhenitsyn explains, and, indeed, for many “attraction is not the right word—it is intoxication.”   

What Dostoevsky overlooked, in Solzhenitsyn’s view, was that to scale up cruelty to the point where it takes the lives of millions, something more is needed. Very few people can knowingly torture others for no reason but the pleasure of doing so. It took Soviet experience to make that “something more” apparent, as it had not been to even the greatest writers before totalitarianism. As Solzhenitsyn observes in Gulag, “When the great world literature of the past—Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens—described evildoers in the blackest shades, … it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers” and know they love evil. Like Iago, they deliberately act out of sheer hate. They say to themselves, like Milton’s Satan: “Evil, be thou my good.” 

But that is not the way it is, Solzhenitsyn further insists. Almost always, “to do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it is a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.” A person seeks “a justification for his actions.” “Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble, … and even Iago was a little lamb” by Soviet standards. Shakespeare’s villains “stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology,” in the sense of an all-encompassing, absolutely certain explanation of human life.   

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. … Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing at a scale calculated in the millions.  

Ideology works by giving people what Mikhail Bakhtin called an “alibi”: they imagine that they act not personally, but “representatively.” That is, it is not I who am doing these things, it is the Party or History or some other abstraction acting through me.    

But the central fact of human life, in Bakhtin’s view, is that “there is no alibi.” Human life is always lived in a state of “non-alibi.” People must “sign” their actions. When Klara, in Solzhenitsyn’s novel In the First Circle, is distressed by Bolshevik cruelty, Ernst answers “gently but firmly, … ‘Who is doing these things? Who wants to do them? It is History. History does what it wants.’” Klara is satisfied with this answer. 

The Third Lesson: The Package 

When one adopts an ideology, one usually accepts it as a whole; one does not then examine each of the conclusions it entails. And that can be true even for political belief systems much less consistent or thought-through than Soviet Marxism. I am referring to a phenomenon we see all around us: people who accept their beliefs as a package. If you know what they think about climate change, you know their position on abortion, though there is no logical connection between the two issues. When people think this way, no arguments about any particular issue can matter, because package thinkers do not arrive at their position by examining pros and cons. All that matters is that the position is part of the package. When evidence against that position arises, they do not ask whether they should change their mind. Instead, they learn what they are supposed to say to defend the package position. As a last resort, one can always impugn the motives of those who mention inconvenient evidence. As Jonathan Swift remarked, no one was ever talked out of a belief he was not first talked in to. 

Package believers make only one choice: which package to buy. Consider Tolstoy’s description of how Stiva, Anna Karenina’s brother, arrives at his views. Stiva, we are told, “had not chosen his political opinions; … [they] had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were in style.” Once Stiva chose the liberal side, his entire intellectual wardrobe was determined. Stiva, we are told,  

took and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority [of his circle]. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and his paper and changed them only when the majority changed them—or, more strictly speaking, they seemed to change of themselves within him. 

What does it mean to “firmly hold” views one has not actually considered? Does one really believe them? The answer depends on what one means by “believe,” which, I think, is one word used to designate several distinct states of mind. If by “believe” one means a willingness to act in accord with the belief one professes, then those who resemble Stiva can be said to believe. They can be relied on to contribute to the proper advocacy groups and raise their hands at the right time. But if it means actually caring about the truth of one’s beliefs, or a willingness to maintain them even when one’s friends and colleagues differ, then they do not. We may note that when liberal positions evolve, as must always happen, all of Stiva’s views evolve in lockstep along with them, as would be almost impossible if he did not accept them as a package. That is why Tolstoy says his beliefs “seemed to change of themselves within him.” No agency is involved. 

In my experience, this is how most people arrive at their beliefs. Or rather, most people of the sort I encounter, intellectuals for whom political positions are a matter of identity. Konstantin Levin, a key character in Anna Karenina, stands out because he actually keeps changing his mind! “Ah, a new phase! A conservative!” his friend Stiva laughs. When experience shows Levin’s ideas to be mistaken, he reconsiders them.  What’s more, he listens attentively to people he disagrees with, so long as they have arrived at their opinions not by buying a package but authentically, by serious thinking and reflection. When Levin is visiting his friend Sviazhsky, a genial liberal of the Stiva sort, Levin encounters a guest described simply as a “reactionary landowner,” whose views are very different from Levin’s. While Sviazhsky exchanges glances with Levin “and even made a faint gesture of irony to him”—get a load of that guy!—Levin actually attends to what the landowner is saying because 

the landowner unmistakably spoke his own individual thought—a thing that rarely happens—and a thought to which he had been brought not by a desire of finding some exercise for an idle brain, but a thought which had grown up out of the conditions of his life, which he had brooded over in the solitude of his village, and had considered in every aspect. 

All Dostoevsky’s great novels examine package thinking, which he referred to as “wearing a uniform” or as professing “ready-made” opinions. There are always package liberals or radicals in Dostoevsky’s novels, and usually some characters who plead for individual, authentic thinking. In Crime and Punishment, Razumikhin argues that it is much better to talk nonsense than to parrot received opinions. “Through error you come to the truth!” he explains:  

You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen, … but we [Russians] can’t even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s. In the first case you are a man, in the second you’re no better than a bird.    

Two Kinds of Courage 

Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak, Vasily Grossman, and Mikhail Bakhtin all agree: the real danger of package thinking is that it can lead one to justify literally anything. I am guessing that it is package thinking, rather than bloodthirstiness, that led most of those Harvard students to endorse what Hamas did on October 7, 2023, and, as I mentioned, I grew up with gentle, kindly Communists who supported anything Stalin, and later Mao, did. There must have been package Nazis who in their hearts bore no hatred to Jews. Does that excuse them? 

Lara, the heroine of Doctor Zhivago, discovers “the root cause of all the evil” around her—people’s willingness to slaughter or to celebrate slaughter—in “the loss of confidence in one’s own opinion. People imagined that it was out-of-date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people’s notions.” In Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Satan’s sidekick Korovyov literally makes people sing in chorus without the ability to stop. They just find themselves singing together, again and again. As with the beliefs they profess, the agency is not their own. 

Vorotyntsev, the fictional hero of Solzhenitsyn’s November 1916, finds himself—this is before Bolshevik rule—at a meeting of Kadets, the Russian liberal party. He listens as everyone voices the proper views they all already hold and yet regard as “imperative … to meet and hear all over again what they collectively knew. They were all overpoweringly certain they were right, yet they needed these exchanges to reinforce their certainty.”    

As an army colonel, Vorotyntsev knows that what these Kadets are saying about ordinary soldiers is nonsense. But they make sure no contrary evidence can be heard. Not only do they have no interest in this army man’s observations, but they look at him disapprovingly if he says something even slightly at variance from their shared beliefs. 

To his surprise, Vorotyntsev feels the need to join in expressing views he does not share. Is there any one of us who has not experienced something similar? When I was much younger, I remember finding some private qualification that allowed me to say what others were saying even though I disagreed. I will always be grateful to the late Joseph Frank for pointing out to me that that was what I was doing. Vorotyntsev asks himself, “What is it that always forces us to adapt to the general tone?” It was like a magic spell, and under it Vorotyntsev says things he knows aren’t true. “He had lied, prevaricated, betrayed his beliefs. Why couldn’t he manage it? Say this is my opinion. … Why was he so feeble?” Unless one understands this pressure, this “hypnosis” as Solzhenitsyn calls it, one will not understand political life, especially when well-educated people begin to form an intelligentsia in the Russian sense. 

The hero of Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate experiences a similar pressure to conform, and he knows that something more than fear of Soviet punishment is involved. He would feel the same pressure to conform without that fear and realizes that fear can even serve as an excuse for what one would do anyway. Unlike Vorotyntsev, Grossman’s hero fails the test, then regrets it. But his regret teaches him how to do better in the future. The same thing happened to Grossman himself.    

Vorotyntsev manages to resist: “A jolt. He was free. Free from the unbelievable bewitchment. … He spoke loudly, challengingly addressing the whole gathering.” He asks himself: as a mere colonel, he had had the courage to attack incompetent generals, and he was brave in battle, yet “here he was afraid” of being “reactionary.” In The Master and Margarita, Pontius Pilate wonders why he was brave in battle against German barbarians but lacked the courage to do what was right when pressured to condemn Jesus. The answer is that courage, like belief, is one word for more than one state of mind. “Courage in war and courage of thought are two different things,” observed Svetlana Alexievich. “I used to think they were the same.”  

In battle, one acts with others; in thought, one is on one’s own. In battle, one’s life is at stake; in independent thought, one’s identity. Bulgakov’s Pilate learns that cowardice is not one of the worst sins, as he has thought, but the very worst sin, since no other virtue can be practiced without courage. 

Dialogue 

Vorotyntsev learns to resist saying what he does not believe. Solzhenitsyn himself learned that he didn’t really believe what he thought he did. In The Gulag Archipelago, he describes how he once remarked to a fellow prisoner, Boris Gammerov, that, of course, President Roosevelt’s public prayer was hypocritical. Gammerov furiously demanded how he could be so sure that Roosevelt did not actually believe in God. Solzhenitsyn was shocked to hear such words from someone born after the revolution. “I could have replied to him very firmly, but prison had already undermined my certainty, … and right then it dawned on me that I had not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been planted from outside.”  

Planted from outside: this is how intellectual liberation begins. One realizes that one is professing what others believe. Only then can one go on to discover what one does believe, which, as with Solzhenitsyn, is likely to be a long process.    

Certaintists regard education as planting the right ideas from outside. Remarkably, they call such planting “critical thinking,” by which they seem to mean, not subjecting one’s own beliefs to rigorous scrutiny, but memorizing the right arguments to criticize those on the other side. Intellectual honesty begins with the recognition that one must uproot externally planted ideas and embark on a journey to one’s own convictions. Back and forth, to and fro, one must consider evidence and counterevidence, arguments and counterarguments. 

Is it any wonder that Bakhtin’s central concept was dialogue? A real dialogue, in his understanding, is not just a sequence of speakers talking in turn; it involves a process of empathetic listening, placing oneself in the other’s position, understanding what makes his viewpoint seem persuasive to him, and then really taking into account what one has not previously considered. In a real dialogue, exchange changes: interlocutors evolve and each winds up with ideas he did not have before. In principle, the process is endless, or as Bakhtin says, unfinalizable. 

And so are we. Each authentic self is an endless dialogic process. A person can never be wholly described from outside, because what makes us human is the capacity to render untrue any external definition, a quality Bakhtin calls surprisingness.    

We are used to thinking of truth as a proposition, as something resembling Newton’s laws or the binomial theorem; but what if, when it comes to human beings, truth is best understood as a dialogue, an endless exchange?   

In The Master and Margarita, when Pilate is at last liberated from his two-thousand year punishment, he dreams he 

set out on a shining road and ascended straight to the moon. … He was accompanied by [his faithful dog] Banga and alongside of him was the vagrant philosopher [Jesus]. They were arguing about something complex and important, and neither one of them could convince the other. They did not agree about anything, and that made their dispute all the more engaging and endless. 

This is an image not just of conversation, but of truth itself. 

When it comes to human beings, learning must not consist in committing a pre-packaged truth to memory, but an endless process of discovery and self-critique. If we are truly educators, we must revive the spirit of dialogue. We need to restore the freedom to engage in freewheeling, open-ended exchanges, where one can just try out ideas. What if this were true, or maybe that? We need to be able to play.    

Anton Chekhov’s novella The Duel ends by repeating the same sentence three times: “Nobody knows the real truth.” Or as Bakhtin paraphrased the idea implicit in all Dostoevsky’s novels, “nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future.” 

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