Between Believing and Knowing

When my wife and I moved from the city to the country years ago, a grizzled, salty, and (usually) very meritorious life-long resident of this area and his wife befriended us. He appreciated having new people around who would lend him an ear. Whenever he got to the end of one of his numerous stories and expositions, a twinkle would appear in his eye and he would say with great emphasis, "Now I'm not telling you what I think. I'm telling you what I know." And that was always the end of it.

One of the things that he knew was that the blue-tailed skinks (not skunks) that you see scurrying around here in the summer are extremely poisonous and can kill a person with one bite. He didn't have any evidence of that. He was just going on what one of his forebears had told him in ancient times, and so he would without hesitation smash every one of those harmless, beautiful, and ecologically handy little lizards that he saw. (They help to keep the wood roaches from becoming too ambitious.)

...In perhaps the most dramatic and eloquent chapter in his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides tells of how the Athenians landed on the neutral little island of Melos and demanded that they join the Athenian side. If they didn't, they could expect to receive the most extreme punishment.

The Melians must've been a proud, brave, and reckless bunch, because they answered that they recognized that the Athenians had become a superpower, but they preferred to keep their options open, and they would depend on the protection of the gods.

The Athenians responded with an expression of bluntness that in its eloquence has rung down to us through the ages:

"You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. ...In the gods we believe, but of men we know, that by a necessary law of nature they rule wherever they can."

Through the next three years the Melians put up a stout resistance, but in the end they were all but completely wiped out by the Athenians.

...How cruel and nonsensical it is that people dance on both sides of the difference between believing something and knowing it. When they decide on some aggressive, hurting action to get their way, any distinction between the two that they might've made previously disappears in the heat of their action, and thereafter there is no belief involved anymore, and everything is known. Through the millennia, millions have been put to the sword not on the basis of the sure knowledge of something but because of beliefs that rested on the flimsiest of grounds.

It ought to be a key part of the American Way that if we are considering attacking someone, we ought to do so only after putting the utmost effort into marshalling all the facts that we can, instead of shooting and killing first and then hoping to find the truth as we go along, or, more usually, letting the truth find us. Surely it is much better to expect young people to fight and risk death for things that are known rather than for things that are merely believed. It is even worse when they are ordered to do so, as in Iraq, for things that an aggressor U.S. President knows to be false, yet he demands that the public stow them away among its beliefs as unvarnished truths.