"but I could be wrong"

 “but i could be wrong”  

part one, of two

In the earliest days of The Ambiguities (02.24.14), I wrote:

My friend Gas [Gaspar Stephens] thinks the five most underutilized words in the English language are those making up the phrase, “But I could be wrong.” I think he’s right because − Lions or Christians − we’re all looking at the world through a dark, dark glass. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

     Someone from Boston, New York, or Washington will try.

Gaspar Stephens
sewing doubt

In a recent email, Gas wrote, that lately he has been “freighted with the notion, more poignant than usual, that we’re all wrong about everything. It’s not so much . . .

. . . in the sense we mistake one “fact” for another, but we're all incurable Procrusteans, stretching, hacking, forcing what we know into places that don't fit or remaking the places to fit what we know. I know you and I have beat this dead horse flat. Still, I grow increasingly aware that no one has fuck for a clue about anything.

With regard to politics, I'm sick of the left and the right and most of the center. I don't pretend to understand - I really don't - but I can see through the dark glass well enough to recognize that the warp and weft of everything is way more frayed than we think and that the kazillions of loose threads wander off into places much too far away and way too dark for us to see. Yet, everywhere I turn, there's somebody - to be clear not everybody - but there's somebody in my line of vision and, worse, within earshot that knows. It doesn't matter if he’s on CNN, she’s at a faculty meeting, he’s that guy two stools down at the bar, or she’s the Uber driver who brought me here: somebody fucking KNOWs for damn sure what's going on. (So, this much is certain: humility is not at this moment in vogue.)

     Let me add: I do still “believe” in science. I do think there are some (few) things of which we are rightly sure, but the implications of those things remain wildly uncertain.

“Has humility ever been in vogue?” I start my reply. I stop. The glass through which I see is especially dark, so not only do not know the answer to my question, I am not sure I know what the question means. 
    But you may be interested to see who asked, “But could you be wrong?” long before Gaspar did. Stay tuned for that story, which will come to you next time by way of Lytton Strachey’s delightful Eminent Victorians, which I am finally reading again for the first time.

08.25.17