‘Look at the state of that garden’, circa just now
The Importance of Being Certain
Once upon a time in a classroom not that far away, your Director found himself in the midst of a lively debate about a particularly stubborn piece of poetry. It was the kind of disagreement that characterises the best of English get-togethers: a collision of interpretations that refused to be tidied away by the end of the lesson. One student announced their conclusion with the serene confidence and absolute certainty usually reserved for people explaining why x equals five, or the relative speed of Monday. Another student disagreed with equal conviction, offering a counter-narrative that was just as internally consistent. Your Director, sensing the stalemate, told them that on such matters there are no right answers, just good ones and not so good ones.
Of course there would have been little or no point in consulting the mark scheme in such a case as it is not, thank goodness, a map of the truth but better understood as a somewhat rickety fence built around a large untended garden. It tells us where the boundaries of reasonable interpretation might lie, but it can say little or nothing about the life of the text itself.
What struck me then, and often does along the various highways and byways your Director shuffles, is the sheer conviction of the certain. Certainty, I am told, is a wonderful feeling. It is neat, tidy, and reassuring. One knows where one stands. In an uncertain world, certainty provides the psychological equivalent of a sturdy handrail on a steep, dark staircase, telling us the world is predictable, that our maps are accurate, and that we are safe.
Truth, by contrast, is rather less accommodating. Especially in the study of Literature, truth tends to be complicated, partial, and fairly regularly inconvenient. It has an irritating habit of refusing to fit comfortably inside our favourite explanations.
And this raises a mildly unsettling possibility that when we say we want the truth, what we often mean is that we want the relief of being certain.
Philosopher, friend of the Column, and knower of a thing or two, Bertrand Russell once observed that the trouble with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. The briefest look around our world will show us many examples of certainty being mistaken for strength and doubt viewed as a form of intellectual or moral weakness. The fanatic’s position is, of course, an attractive one.
It is no surprise that Milton’s Satan, for example, is often lauded as the most attractive character in Paradise Lost. The point about Satan is that he would be fairly useless if he were not able to appear attractive. That is rather the point. But I digress.
Or do I?
As a teacher, I am often in the enviable position of sharing information which, for most in the room, happens to be new. Over the years I have noticed how new information is often treated. When a fact is encountered which confirms an existing worldview, the tendency is to respond along the lines of, ‘Of course, I believe this.’ Standards for evidence quietly drop and the fact is welcomed like an old friend. However, a fact that challenges an existing belief is more often greeted with something like, ‘Do I really have to believe this?’ Much time and energy is then expended searching for any chink in the armour or reason to shoot the messenger.
In the context of a classroom, the fanatic is the student who has found one symbol, perhaps the green light in The Great Gatsby or the albatross in Coleridge, and decided it means just one thing and one thing only. Being asked to let go of that interpretation can feel like losing a grip on the text itself.
The pursuit of truth often requires precisely that uncomfortable willingness to admit that one might, after all, be mistaken. It requires us to trade the handrail of certainty for the open, occasionally dizzying space of genuine inquiry.
This brings us to a peculiar feature of the human mind: our ability to live in a state of what George Orwell called doublethink. The novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was a master at depicting characters who held fiercely contradictory beliefs about themselves and the world. In Notes from Underground, he presents a narrator who is perfectly aware of the facts of his situation, yet chooses to act in defiance of them out of a strange desire to prove his own free will.
Dostoevsky understood that we are not rational calculators; we are walking bundles of paradox. We may know something to be true, yet behave as though it were not.
The contemporary philosopher Alenka Zupančič explores this through the lens of disavowal in her aptly titled book Disavowal (2024). The structure of this response operates roughly like this:
I know that this is not true, but I believe it anyway.
At first glance this sounds absurd. Surely belief and knowledge cannot coexist in such an awkward arrangement. Yet examples abound. We see it in our guilty pleasures, our political biases, and our refusal to accept scientific data that inconveniences our lifestyle. We acknowledge overwhelming evidence for a certain health risk, or a financial reality, for example, and then proceed, quite cheerfully, to ignore it.
This structure also helps explain the peculiar resilience of conspiracy theories. Contrary to popular belief, conspiracy thinking does not always arise from simple ignorance. Often the relevant facts are widely available. The difficulty lies in the intellectual judo of the believer. Evidence that contradicts the conspiracy is not necessarily denied outright; it is simply reinterpreted as part of the conspiracy itself. The absence of evidence becomes evidence of how cleverly the conspiracy has been concealed. It offers closure in the form of a clear ‘Who’ and ‘Why’ in a world that is often governed by a messy, indifferent ‘What’.
In the English classroom we see a mild version of this when a student becomes so wedded to a specific theory of a book that they begin to ignore the actual sentences on the page. They have achieved closure, but they have lost the truth.
And of course this is where old friend of the Column, Iain McGilchrist (Bingo!), comes in. As we have discussed before, in The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist argues that the two hemispheres of the brain approach the world in strikingly different ways.
The left hemisphere is the master of the model. It favours clarity, categorisation, and control. It likes things that can be counted, bounded, or placed neatly into a list of key themes. It is the part of the brain that loves the mark scheme because it offers a version of the world that is static and manageable. And that is very useful, of course, because without the left hemisphere’s analytical abilities we would struggle to organise knowledge at all. Or indeed write a coherent Director’s Column, although I must leave it to you, dear reader, to judge how my left brain is doing.
The right hemisphere, by contrast, is more attuned to context, relationship, and lived reality. It understands that a poem is not merely a collection of literary devices but an experience that unfolds in time. It is comfortable with the in-between.
Problems arise when the left hemisphere’s simplified model becomes mistaken for the whole of reality, when the map begins to believe it is the territory. Certainty thrives in such conditions. A model provides clear boundaries and definite answers. Reality, however, is seldom so obliging. The world is messy, relational, and full of exceptions. Truth, in other words, is usually larger than our explanations of it.
McGilchrist suggests that wisdom lies not in abandoning our models but in remembering their limitations. The mark scheme of life can only ever be a tool and a useful simplification; it is not, and could never be, the truth.
There is a specific name for the ability to resist this rush to certainty. John Keats called it Negative Capability. In a letter to his brothers in 1817, Keats wrote that a great thinker is someone who is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
This irritable reaching is exactly what I saw in my students that day. They wanted the answer to be A or B. They wanted to solve the text so they could move on. But the most profound encounters with literature happen when we stop reaching for the correct answer and start listening to what the text is actually doing to us.
Negative Capability is not about indecision. It is about having the strength to remain in the in-between long enough for a deeper truth to emerge.
If literal facts and models often fail us, where do we turn? It will come as no surprise to you, dear reader, that literature has long understood that the most profound truths are often found in things that are, literally speaking, false.
Oscar Wilde once suggested, with characteristic Oscarness, that the telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of art. While that sounds like a defence of lying, Wilde was pointing to a deeper reality. Art is not concerned with the literal accuracy of a mark scheme. It is concerned with the deeper patterns of human experience.
A character who never existed in the way that you or I exist, Hamlet for example, can illuminate our lives with greater clarity than an entire spreadsheet of facts. In Hamlet, the prince famously stages a play, a beautiful untrue thing, in order to test the conscience of the king. A fictional performance reveals a moral truth.
Shakespeare understood that truth is rarely straightforward. It must be approached cautiously, from multiple angles, and with a healthy suspicion of those who claim to possess it in its entirety. It is something of a truth universally acknowledged that those who claim to possess the whole truth are either lying or trying to sell something. Often both.
If we accept that certainty is often a trap, what is the alternative?
The alternative is a particular intellectual posture we might call humility.
Scientists know this well. Each discovery generates new questions. The more we learn about the genome, the more we realise how much remains mysterious about the so-called junk DNA between the genes. Historians uncover documents that complicate familiar narratives. Philosophers spend entire careers clarifying the meaning of concepts like justice or goodness that once appeared self-evident.
Certainty is the luxury of those who have not looked too closely.
This is not to say that truth does not exist, nor that all opinions are equally valid. That is the trap of relativism, which is simply another form of certainty. Some claims are demonstrably false. Some interpretations are far more persuasive than others. The pursuit of truth remains one of the most worthwhile human activities.
But it is a pursuit that demands patience. It requires us to resist the seductive comfort of premature certainty and to tolerate the uncomfortable silence while the picture gradually becomes clearer.
Education, at its best, is not merely about the acquisition of correct responses. If education means only teaching students how to find the answer in the mark scheme, it has failed them. Education should also be about learning how to navigate the places the mark scheme cannot reach.
Students must learn how to weigh evidence, how to consider context, and how to remain open to the possibility that their first and most certain impression might be their most limited one. We are all, one hopes, trying to cultivate a generation that can pursue truth without becoming intoxicated by the feeling of being right.
In an age where confident claims circulate faster than careful arguments, where the loudest voice is often mistaken for the truest, the ability to pause and ask, ‘Is this actually true?’ is a radical act.
Truth is rarely loud. It does not always arrive with a triumphant flourish or a trending hashtag. More often it emerges slowly, through conversation, reflection, and the patient accumulation of insight.
The real challenge of leadership, of education, and of citizenship is not merely discovering the truth, but cultivating the kind of intellectual character capable of recognising it when it appears and having the courage to follow it, even when it leads us away from the safety of the handrail.
Until next time, Happy Reading/Being certain
Director’s Detritus #6
A quotation often attributed to Mark Twain observes that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. Ironically, historians are not entirely sure Twain ever said it. But that shouldn’t get in the way of a good quotation!