Find Part I, Part II, and Part III at the respective links.
Caveat Emptor
I must engage, for a moment, in an act of minor cowardice.
You students shouldn’t trust me. I will fail you. I will get things wrong. I will teach you things that wind up not being true.
Why cowardice? Because it’s such a load off my shoulders to blame students for my poor teaching. They should be able to trust me, and the reason they can’t is primarily because I’m an insufficiently good teacher to get it consistently right. I don’t want this to give me wiggle room. I will try my best. Yes, I will still fail, but those failures are serious, and I need to teach what is true and real. It’s a copout to just yell “caveat emptor” when you’ve sold a defective product.
Fortunately, there’s another reason why I am warning you about me: because the most important thing I can teach you is to figure out truth for yourself.
Do not run from the responsibility.
You were mentioned in my patriarchal blessing. I have known I was meant to teach since I was a child. It is simply a part of me—what I sometimes say is “in my DNA.” This is who I am. I received my blessing at 13—a rather young age—and immediately felt that it confirmed what I’d always desired. It wasn’t new, it was right.
“I bless you to become a great teacher of truth, especially truth as it pertains to the things of God. I bless you that you will teach the doctrine by the spirit…”
Watch out, here’s where you come in:
“…so that those who listen to you will by that self-same spirit come to know the truthfulness of the things which you teach.”
You will have to evaluate. You will have to weigh. You will have to discern. Not because I intend to teach falsehoods, but because it is far more important that they learn to taste truth for themselves than any other thing I could ever teach them.
Mostly Kernels
Another way to think of skepticism is as a matter of judgment. I love this quote by Dinah Maria Craik:
“A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”
Dinah Maria Craik
She said of friends what I feel about ideas: what is worth keeping? The name of my substack, “mostly kernels” comes from this quote: may I give you more kernels than chaff, and my you find the wisdom to tell twixt the two.
When I was younger, we had publishers and writers and speakers, and the publishers were strong enough so that you only saw the very best of a writer. Your conception of them was about their best writings, not their many flaws. You looked for good voices, and only accepted the ones that passed your very high bar.
Social media has unravelled it all. There are no heroes anymore—no voices that really deserve your trust. You’ll have to do as Craik suggests: gather the kernels, and kindly blow the chaff away.
The old Russian proverb says: trust, but verify. Try ideas out. See what works. Test things. Scientific method. Empirical observations. Judgment. Discernment. Keep the kernels, discard the chaff. Caveat emptor: it’s your job to figure out what is true. Take that work seriously.
Sufficient Skepticism
Do you want a little indicator of when you’ve achieved skepticism?
When you become skeptical of it.
I know a man who stood up in testimony meeting and bore testimony of what he did not know. Another friend told me, very seriously, that he doesn’t truthfully know if the sun will rise tomorrow. He also told me that he could not possibly beat testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel on the grounds that he could still be wrong.
Perhaps, my dude, you should stand and say “I know the gospel is true as much as I know that the sun will rise tomorrow.”
Hugo Mercier is cognitive scientist and author who researches gullibility and what we truly know. He literally wrote the book on gullibility. You know what he found?
That we just aren’t very gullible.
From the article:
People aren’t gullible
“Everyone thinks they’re hard to influence, while others are easily swayed even by the most shallow or biased information. This is called the third-person effect. Clearly, not everyone can be right on this. Which is it? Are we more gullible than we think, or are others less gullible than we think?
It’s the latter. People aren’t gullible; they aren’t easy to fool into believing unfounded things. There is now a wealth of studies in experimental psychology showing that people, instead of accepting everything they read or hear, consider a variety of cues to decide how much they should listen to others.”
I’m writing a paean to skepticism, so I obviously value it—but hear me well: most of you are already quite skeptical. It’s something we preach, it’s something we believe, and it’s as American as apple pie—if apple pie is even all that American!
Mercier observes that we are actually rather rational. We update our beliefs. We listen to good ideas, and we discard bad ones. Propaganda doesn’t work very well. We do have lots of terrible beliefs—but most of them are about harmless things.
The first step is skepticism 1.0. Then it’s on to turning the skepticism around on itself.
You will be better when you realize the holes in your thinking: when you spot your blind spots, and meta-cogitate a bit—when you think about your thinking and try to improve it. I will defend the first three articles in my series, because it is morally necessary to question, to doubt, to investigate, and to wonder—but if I’m not careful I’ll drive you to the philosophies of Pyrrhonists: that life is better when you don’t ask hard questions; or to the academic skeptics like Arcesilaus, who loudly proclaim that nothing can be known except that we know nothing.
The Bomb Works
I had the privilege of taking a class from the late Bill Dibble at BYU. He was a professor and scientist, and if it helps, you can imagine him as some mix of gentle grandfather, absent-minded professor, and mad scientist. (At one point, his handwritten feedback on science papers was so hard-to-read that it was dubbed “dibblish” rather than English.)
One day, he was setting up a demonstration—constructive interference, if I recall correctly—using large coils of wire. There were always interesting demonstrations in his class, and this was just one more.
He was muttering a bit to himself as he got the whole thing set up and reminded us to put all the standard assumptions in place: ignore friction, assume sea-level-altitude and so on.
Suddenly a student hand shot up.
“What use is science with all these assumptions?”
We all gasped. It felt sacrilegious. How dare he? And yet, we all wanted to ask the same question! We were on the edge of our seats! What would he say? What wisdom would he dole out?
Professor Dibble looked at the boy like he was daft.
“The bomb worked, you know.”
He then went back to his work setting up the experiment.
It took me a moment to realize that he was speaking most precisely about a specific bomb—or two, I suppose—that had detonated in Japan near the end of World War II.
There are things we know. There are things that work.
Teacher Collective Efficacy is the teaching strategy with the highest effect size on John Hattie’s list of over 200 teaching interventions. What does it mean? That teachers believe that they are agents that shape outcomes for students—as a collective group.
You want to make a difference for kids? Don’t just avoid learning styles. Believe that it is you and your team that makes the difference. In fact, of the top ten most effective teaching interventions, a number of them have to do with a feeling of agency or efficacy for students. Beliving that you make a difference is what makes the difference.
There will always be a market for the skeptics who tear down bad ideas—and I’m glad they’re around. It’s thrilling to see someone say “Alright, let’s see it,” and destroy a bad idea. But there’s something deeper needed if we’re going to be effective teachers. We need to believe in—and live up to—what works.
The Turning of the Cultural Tide
Culture seems to be most easily predictable based on mockery. We started with traditionalism, but we mocked it for not being scientific enough and got the age of scientific modernism. Then we mocked that certainty and got post-modernism. Now we’re mocking post-modernism, and I’m eager to see what we get next.
If I had to vote, I’d push for a return to some of the older things: the glory of mystic traditionalism, and of scientific courage. Yes, we know less than we think sometimes—but the bomb worked. In all the valid post-modern critiques of religion and science, there is one brute fact that demolishes the edgy hipster culture: the bomb worked. There are limitations and problems and imperfections, and there are also a few things worth keeping. There are things that are true. There are things that we know.
In religious terms, it seems that Latter-day Saints have gone from the age of correlation (with its undertones of certainty and modernism) to the age of social media post-modernism. Nothing is sure anymore. We don’t know what is true.
And yet, the tide is turning. If we’re in a post-orthodoxy moment, I’m eager to get beyond it. I want to know what comes next.
I recently heard someone mock the “why I stay” trope. It may not be nice—that’s not my point—my point is that it’s getting mocked, and that suggests that something else is coming. I’ve heard students mock faith crises. I’ve heard plenty of people define themselves as “whatever the nuance bros are not.”
If we had an orthodoxy moment, the post-orthodoxy moment has arrived—and is already on its way out. I can’t see clearly what will come next, but I am eager for its coming. I am not too fond of the current culture that valorizes doubt and struggle. Elder Rasband recently talked about testimony and said, simply, “I have believing blood.” It was a breath of fresh air.
In economics, there has been a rush to study poverty. That’s silly, of course. Poverty is the natural state. The really interesting question is where wealth comes from. I have had doubts. I don’t mean to minimize people who have—and I want to protect them from ill treatment. And yet, uncertainty is the natural state. Why valorize it?
Why on earth would you want praise for standing at the pulpit and proclaiming how much you do not know? Kudos for reaching the beginning of wisdom, but the beginning of wisdom is overrated.
There are things that we know. What are they? What price will have to be paid to gain more? Where does truth come from? How do we get more of it? How do we unlock the laws governing this wealth—of knowledge?
A Word to the Snide
Having been on the receiving end of doubt, I want to clarify that most doubters are good people who have insufficient evidence for belief. I respect them. Following what you believe to be true has profound nobility to me, even if we come out on different sides of a question.
But there is a different kind of doubter that deserves critiquing.
During World War II, Orwell wrote of the pacifists:
“The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Morover they do not as a rule condemn the violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the inidians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitlerare preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough.”
There are many good pacifists. But the pacifist propaganda during war time will always be supported by the enemy. In contemporary times, I have never seen such an influx of pacifist propaganda as when Russia invaded Ukraine—all from very-likely Russian propagandists.
Some who preach doubt and fear and concern are doing so because they feel them. They have passed through the hell that is the crucible of doubt, and it has become their story. I consider them comrades in a battalion that has passed through hell together.
But there is another group who use doubt—and in the religious sphere, complexity, faith crisis, and nuance—to peddle influence and prestige; or worse, to sneakily pull down the walls defending the kingdom. Some who shout “big tent!” simply want to be inclusive (even if I think they are a bit misguided). Some, however, know that the bigger the tent gets, the flatter it becomes until it becomes uninhabitable. Some would expand the stakes of Zion because they want to see it expand, and others still would expand them because with each stake that expands the contours of the holy city, the borders blur and the gate becomes harder to defend.
Don’t be so snide when you rip apart someone’s schemas. You’re not as clever as you think. You leave in your wake a great deal of pain—and a new set of schemas that are not always much improved from the previous set.
Note, too, how easily the tone of snideness disarms. No joy, no conviction, no courage or heroism can come from those who define goodness as caution, care, and nuance. The snide are the ones who click their tongues at any set of beliefs—except their own.
There is a unique courage needed to not be neutral—especially when neutral is on-trend.
Jordan Peterson and the Need to Testify
A student came to me recently and said, “I feel deeply that I will lose the testimony I have if I do not testify of what I know.”
I have wondered in the past what eternal laws govern spiritual truth. Her statement is a strong candidate. Here is a related one: we will not gain more light and truth if we are not willing to live up to the light we have already gained.
When I spoke earlier of sifting kernels from chaff, I thought specifically of Jordan Peterson. I disagree with him some. I agree with him in other cases.
This video is compelling.
If we would acquire truth, it will require that we answer the call to defend it—joyously, and enthusiastically—when the time is right.