understanding

Richard Rohr: 2 Kinds of People: Certitude and Understanding

There are commonly two kinds of human beings:

there are people who want certitude and

there are people who want understanding;

and these two often cannot understand one another.

Those who demand certitude out of life will insist on it even if it doesn’t fit the facts. Logic has nothing to do with it. Truth has nothing to do with it. “Don’t bother me with the truth—I’ve already come to my conclusion!” If you need certitude, you will surround yourself with your conclusions.

The very meaning of faith stands in stark contrast to this mind-set. I think Jesus (or the Father or Spirit) is actually dangerous if taken outside of the Trinity. Jesus held separate from the other members of the Trinity implies that faith is a static concept instead of a dynamic and flowing one.

.. In this space, God gives us a spirit of questing, a desire for understanding; it seems to me it’s only this ongoing search for understanding that will create compassionate and wise people.

If you think you have a right to certitude, then show me where the Gospel ever promised or offered you that. If God wanted us to have evidence, rational proof, and perfect clarity, the incarnation of Jesus would have been delayed till the invention of audio recorders and video cameras.

.. Rational certitude is exactly what the Scriptures do not offer us. They offer us something much better and an entirely different way of knowing: an intimate relationship, a dark journey, a path where we must discover for ourselves that grace, love, mercy, and forgiveness are absolutely necessary for survival in an uncertain world. You only need enough clarity and ground to know how to live without certitude! Yes, we really are saved by faith. People who live in this way never stop growing, are not easily defeated, and frankly, are fun to live with.

You can tell mature and authentic faith by people’s ability to deal with darkness, failure, and non-validation of the ego—and by their quiet but confident joy! Infantile religion insists on certainty every step of the way and thus is not very happy.

Understanding the undecided voters

When George and I spoke, I told him I had been in his town several times, and he told me how the Miners Bank building had been turned into luxury condos. “Nice, but not for me and my neighbors,” he added.

.. “The government never helped me, but I was OK with that,” he said. “I made mistakes, had some scary moments, and my wife worked also at the local library to help out. I paid my bills, including my doctor bills.“Now I see my tax dollars going to handouts for others who don’t want to work as hard as I did, and I can’t afford my health care. Everyone is being taken care of but me. I feel left out, and it makes me feel that I want my country back.”

.. Voters didn’t care whether he paid taxes or not — and thought he was smart to pay none. But they thought Trump’s returns could show whether he was charitable (important) and whether he was as rich as he claimed he was (more important).

.. And they weren’t worried that Trump didn’t know what was going on in Crimea, because they didn’t either.

.. It bothered them that Trump was a bully and was outrageous in his insensitivity to people with disabilities. It bothered them that someone on Clinton’s staff literally took a hammer and smashed her Blackberries.

.. He told me that he looked up the word in the dictionary, and that it meant something so bad that there is no hope, like the aftermath of a tsunami. You know, he said, Clinton ended up being the biggest bully of them all. Whereas Trump bullied her, she bullied Wilkes Barre.

.. I remember wondering whether that moment was like Romney’s 47 percent

.. a rally on Oct. 15 for Trump, along with 10,000 other neighbors. He told me that the Trump rally was “the most fun I have had in years. Trump would say, ‘What am I going to build?’ And we would scream, ‘A wall!’ He would say, ‘And who is going to pay for it?’ We yelled back, ‘Mexico!’ He thought we were smart and he didn’t talk above us. We know that he’s not actually going to get Mexico to pay for it, but it was fun to lighten up, to cheer along with everyone else, just like back in high school, when we would cheer that our teams were definitely going to win, even when they were bad.”

.. They didn’t like either candidate. They just wanted to be understood. At the end of the day, they cared less about Trump’s temperament and more about whether he “got” them.

.. instead of speaking about each other, we need to speak with each other

.. If you had asked me to describe a Trump voter last spring, I would have been largely wrong about their motivations, dreams, and even their values.

.. Empathy — trying to understand others as deeply as possible — is an important first step, whether around the Thanksgiving table or in social media

What is it like to understand advanced mathematics?

You are often confident that something is true long before you have an airtight proof for it (this happens especially often in geometry). The main reason is that you have a large catalogue of connections between concepts, and you can quickly intuit that if X were to be false, that would create tensions with other things you know to be true, so you are inclined to believe X is probably true to maintain the harmony of the conceptual space. It’s not so much that you can imagine the situation perfectly, but you can quickly imagine many other things that are logically connected to it.

.. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion.

.. you do not spend much time straining to visualize those things that do not have obvious analogues in two and three dimensions. (Violating this principle is a huge source of frustration for beginning maths students who don’t know that they shouldn’t be straining to visualize things for which they don’t seem to have the visualizing machinery.) Instead…

.. you automatically focus on very simple examples that are easy to think about, and then you leverage intuition about the examples into more impressive insights

.. To me, the biggest misconception that non-mathematicians have about how mathematicians work is that there is some mysterious mental faculty that is used to crack a research problem all at once

.. by the time a problem gets to be a research problem, it’s almost guaranteed that simple pattern matching won’t finish it. So in one’s professional work, the process is piecemeal: you think a few moves ahead, trying out possible attacks from your arsenal on simple examples relating to the problem, trying to establish partial results, or looking to make analogies with other ideas you understand

.. in calculus classes you think about functions or curves. In functional analysis or algebraic geometry, you think of spaces whose pointsare functions or curves — that is, you “zoom out” so that every function is just a point in a space, surrounded by many other “nearby” functions

.. Indeed, you tend to choose problems motivated by how likely it is that there will be some “clean” insight in them, as opposed to a detailed but ultimately unenlightening proof

.. You develop a strong aesthetic preference for powerful and general ideas that connect hundreds of difficult questions, as opposed to resolutions of particular puzzles. .. Mathematicians don’t really care about “the answer” to any particular question; even the most sought-after theorems, like Fermat’s Last Theorem, are only tantalizing because their difficulty tells us that we have to develop very good tools and understand very new things to have a shot at proving them. It is what we get in the process, and not the answer per se, that is the valuable thing.

.. structuring things in a modular way allows you to spend several days thinking about something you do not understand without feeling lost or frustrated.

.. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it’s all illuminated.

.. You can sometimes make statements you know are true and have good intuition for, without understanding all the details.

.. You are good at generating your own definitions and your own questions in thinking about some new kind of abstraction.

.. “[After learning to think rigorously, comes the] ‘post-rigorous’ stage, in which one has grown comfortable with all the rigorous foundations of one’s chosen field, and is now ready to revisit

.. They are not typically intellectual superheroes. For instance, they often become resistant to new ideas and uncomfortable with ways of thinking (even about mathematics) that are not their own. They can be defensive about intellectual turf, dismissive of others, or petty in their disputes.