Certainty

Certainty

Now and then you come across something that says it perfectly, that’s just right, spot on. It showed up again this morning, this time as the Thought for Today in the email from Wordsmith. Today’s word is “nosy parker” which is interesting if not all that useful; the thought however --

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure." -H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956) 

The most certitudinous among us are not only the most insufferable, they are also, Mencken says, culturally inferior. Inferior is comparative, though, so, being careful not to spill over into snobbery, inferior to what? Inferior to the average person, the mean, the median. But not to the mode, which, at least in the Bible Belt of the South, is where most may be found, and most obnoxiously and offensively among the XnRt, and as political campaigns are waged, and also in Comments left at the foot of online articles. The cultural, Mencken’s word, and intellectual human equivalent of what an earlier generation of Southerners might have called White Trash.   

Mencken’s morally certain insist that everyone else must think as they do, and if we don’t think as they do they constitutionalize their values so that everyone must do as they wish anyway. They have their certitude and found a Bible verse that proves it. It's not only Mencken's morally certain, it's also and most especially the religiously certain. 

Thomas