To believe is human, to doubt, divine.
These words by author and philosopher Peter Rollins —whose theology feels more at home in a pub than a pulpit—confused me. I assumed the guy must have made a typo on the cover of his book, Insurrection. You know, maybe it should have read: ‘…to doubt is from the devil’. But, no.
It took me a while, and by a while I mean years, to realise how profoundly true this statement really was. And in those years I had to face many personal and professional difficulties. It was, and in all honesty, still is, tough.
I guess that’s what happens when you move into the Second Half of Life. You begin to question things that made sense in the first half of your life. Things like health, wealth, security, stability (and flexibility) and all the other things we take for granted. The Second Half of Life jolts you to attention. It flips the light switch on in a very dark and musty comfort zone. It’s a mess. No order. No discipline. Spiritual and emotional lethargy. Who, honestly, wants to face that? The easy solution? Flip the switch and kill the lights. Business as usual.
But it’s not business as usual. The pretty and impressive building your ego constructed over the course of the first half of your life is coming apart…brick by brick. The foundations crumble. The walls come down. And that’s a really good thing.
It’s also called a midlife crisis.
The thing we try to grab onto first when this happens is of course, security. We double down on it. Work harder to make more money. Take out loans to buy bigger houses. Start going to church and pray harder…you know, just to cover all the bases. But the walls are coming down. Nothing can stop it. You start realising security is an illusion. You get a nauseating feeling that you’re actually not in control of your life…and probably never were. You begin to see yourself as you really are. And then, you begin to doubt.
This is where things get interesting.
When I went through my midlife crisis in my early 40s it made no sense at all to trust in doubt. But as the years progressed, doubt became a trusted companion. I learned that doubt is what we need to break free. Doubt is the key that unlocks the door and sets the prisoner free. Doubt is the light that shines into the mouldy, murky corners of our comfort zones and kicks open the doors to new possibilities. Author and Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis writes about it like this:
“Without doubt, no truism is transcended, no new knowledge found, no expansion of the imagination possible”
Even worse, when we try and cover up our doubts with low-hanging certainties, we’re brewing up a slow poison, lethal to the soul. Hollis continues…
“The suppression of doubt is the secret seed of fanaticism in all its forms, and therefore the secret drive engine in bigotry, sexism, homophobia, fundamentalism, and all other forms of contrived certainties.”
The attractive and highly addictive thing about certainty is that it gives us comfort. The food we love to eat. The music we add to carefully curated Spotify playlists. The celebrities we love to tweet about. The culture we deeply identify with. The religion we love to defend. The political party or sport team we’ve ingrained into our ego identity. This all brings certainty and creates a well-defined personal comfort zone. But it won’t last. And if you’re serious about growing and maturing you’ll let it burn and suffer the consequences.
One of the biggest gifts you could ever give yourself is to question and doubt. Even, and especially, those practices and mental frameworks inherited from society, elders and family. I’m not saying discard it. I am saying, question it. Test it. Doubt it, and learn it anew for yourself…or ditch it. Or, learn to hold the tension of it, as Hollis writes, “…something deeper pushed even harder and I came to see that doubt led to an ever-larger world in which contraries may in fact finally embrace.”
We’ve seen the frantic, panic-stricken grab for certainty play out in real time recently in Davos. So-called world leaders congregate to discuss how they can make things more certain, and I’m certain, more so for themselves. But, their motives, actions and words should be tested and doubted. We all know what happens when a leader doesn’t tolerate doubt.
“Totalitarianism is terrified of any doubt of its powers, its certainties, or its precepts; democracy flourishes when we express our doubts over a policy, over the motives of our leaders” writes Hollis.
We've seen this play out in South Africa with the African National Congress (ANC) government unwilling to engage in any open debate…even for the past 34 years. It’s a pseudo-democracy where certainty is portrayed publicly, but ironically, public doubt is at an all time high. Yet not only in my country, this is happening globally. Even the term globalism came under fire at Davos. To this political agenda, Hollis remarks,
“Compare this with those who flee troubling ambiguity by wrapping themselves and their vehicles in flags, drown honest debate with chauvinistic clamor, and encourage a pseudo-patriotism that ill serves its nation by silencing serious dialogue that might lead to more refined judgement”
Certainty is a cover-up for our anxiety. And it works. Until it doesn’t.
“The paradox is that the hysterical certainties propagated by political and religious institutions are in fact an unconscious confession of their own insecurity” says Hollis. Our personal, religious, political, and even national and global anxiety, fuels our mad rush for certainty…at any cost.
But, to embrace doubt. To befriend it and listen to it. To invite doubt into the conversation, alleviates the anxiety. “To bear the anxiety of doubt is to be led to openness” Hollis says, “openness leads to revelation; revelation leads to discovery; discovery leads to enlargement”.
To doubt is an underrated gift. It acknowledges the truth. It breaks open consciousness and brings about true awareness. It is in the suffering created by doubting, that we move beyond the childish confines of certainty constructed in the first half of our lives, to a mature openness in the Second Half of Life.
I conclude with this final quote by James Hollis,
“How can we not doubt everything when the world is so rich, and our conscious capacities so limited? Our doubt, then, is a form of radical trust, a trust that the world is richer than we know, so abundant that we can hardly bear it, and our growth requires a willingness to embrace the paradox that doubt is the key to its further riches.”
To believe is human.
To doubt, indeed, divine.