Leigh Sales on doubt
There is certainty. Then there is doubt. There is opinion. Then there is objective truth. There is faith. Then there is trust.
It is a strange state of affairs when we have a journalist, such as Leigh Sales, telling us all about doubt. Journalists might practice doubt, but they certainly don’t produce it, package it, and push it to the public. Journalists peddle certainty, not doubt. This happened. That happened. This person’s an expert. That person’s a victim. Never does a ‘maybe’ or a ‘might’ make the front page headlines. But maybe that’s just a matter of news style and form. Maybe that’s why Leigh Sales wrote an essay on the subject rather than put together a Lateline news bulletin. A news report that could have been followed by an interview with an expert on doubt. An expert that would probably be Leigh Sales now, she has, after-all, produced a book on the subject, albeit a very little book.
For Leigh Sales, doubt is instinctive, a natural state of being. She is uneasy about those who don’t doubt. According to her, people like Sarah Palin, with their “unwavering certainty in themselves and their beliefs and opinions,” suffer from a form of “moral vanity.” But Sales isn’t certain about this. If Sales was certain, she would fall into league with the rest of Australia’s high-profile commentators. That obnoxious bunch of people “who act – in public at least – as if they have never experienced a second of self-doubt or entertained the thought that they might be wrong.” So Sales might be wrong about doubt, but that doesn’t mean we should disregard her 10,000 word essay. It is after-all an essay. On doubt. Which is what the essay form is all about. Doubt.
According to Sales, most contemporary commentary stinks of certainty. Yet she has a nostalgia for journalists such as Walter Cronkite, Edward R Murrow and Walter Lippman who “were the voices of reason and cool authority”. Surely a writer with a voice of authority would also stink of certainty. But possibly the difference here is a matter of hot authority versus cool authority. Sales infers that the hot authority of the contemporary commentator is achieved by shouting “more inflammatory invective louder than anybody else”.
Cool authority is probably accomplished by following the sage advice of 12th century French philosopher Pierre Abelard, a man that would be the doubt expert sitting opposite Sales in a Lateline interview, that is of course if he wasn’t long dead. The philosophy of Abelard informs much of Sales’ ideas ‘on doubt,’ she even chooses to open the book with a quote from him:
The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.
Sales shares the view of the former face of Meet the Press, Tim Russert, who says that he tries “very, very hard not to tell people, ‘This is what I believe’, or ‘This is good’, or ‘This is bad’. But rather, ‘This is what I’m learning in my reporting’.” So cool authority comes from learning, not necessarily from what you have learnt, but rather from acknowledging that you are still learning. Sales writes that the “application of a doubtful mind is the best way to wisdom and insight” and that doubt is “is enshrined in journalism‘s foundations – objectivity and balance”.
But objectivity is a tricky concept, especially for the doubtful mind, and Sales acknowledges this. Sales writes that “no reporter can be perfectly objective – every day every story involves subjective judgments – but if we give up striving for objectivity, if we stop examining ourselves for closed mindedness, then all is lost”. Striving, learning, seeking, and most significantly trying or trialling, these are the tenets of a doubtful mind, but these are also the functions of the essay form.
The word essay was born from the French essayer, to try or to attempt. Sales is in a sense arguing for the essay form. The doubtful mind attempts to understand, or to know. But the doubtful mind never knows, the doubtful mind always has another question to ask, and the doubtful mind is always ready and willing to hear another’s answer.
Sales mentions the recent dispute between Robert Manne and Gerard Henderson. Manne had written an article for the Monthly about radical journalist Wilfred Burchett and Gerard Henderson disagreed with some of what was written. Henderson and Manne debated the topic via email, and then decided to publish all of their email correspondence through their respective journals, the Sydney Institute Quarterly and the Monthly. Sales couldn’t comprehend how each could have such an immovable sense of rightness:
I can’t understand how each could have felt so certain of his own rightness and of the value of his own opinion that he was prepared to move so many pages of an argument from the private inbox to the public domain.
A true essay expresses no illusion of rightness. An essay is an exploration, an attempt. An essay doubts. An essay writer doubts themselves. Sales writes that this is the problem of contemporary commentary. Not enough doubters. I would argue that the problem is that there are not enough essayists. Essayists who write that they lived, they experienced this and they think that. They think. They consider. But most of all: they try. This is the beauty of Melbourne University Press’ Little Books on Big Themes, of which ‘On doubt’ is a part of. Writers are invited to choose a topic, and write a 10,000 word essay on it. They try the topic out. Sales chose doubt. Her second choice was embarrassment. The Little Books bring essays onto the bookshelves and out of the journals. The independent publication of each essay, in its own little book, also seems to withdraw the writer from any particular scene or sphere of influence. There are no battle lines drawn, no binaries, and the culture wars seem to be far off in some distant land.
The Monthly, under Sally Warhaft, was one of the few regular publications that was beginning to foster an essay culture in Australia, but that too, under the influence of Robert Manne, began to regress into the kind of commentary that Sales describes as “more concerned with point-scoring than with educating audiences,” a commentary that plays to its ‘own cliques, neglecting the wider public’. The Monthly’s downfall commenced when Manne stonewalled a decision by Warhaft to publish an article by Peter Costello.
According to Gideon Haigh, “Manne stated weightily that The Monthly was a ‘social democrat’ magazine,” and that Warhaft was wrong in believing The Monthly to be independent of any cultural or political bias. It is probably naive to expect any publication to be completely independent in the same way it is naive to expect any journalist to be completely objective, but the Monthly under Warhaft strived to be such a publication.
The Monthly doubted itself, it never seemed to be sure of what it was; was it a political journal, was it a cultural magazine, was it a literary review? The Monthly experimented and meandered. It was a publication that always seemed to be attempting to be something, and because of this, it was a publication of doubt. It could have been the journal of essays this country needs, a journal that documents people trying to work things out, a journal where we could read about what people are learning, not what people know. Instead it’s a social democrat magazine.
After reading ‘On doubt,’ I have become a certainty sceptic and a doubt seeker. Sales writes of the culture of certainty in the Bush administration, where Bush told his advisors ‘I don’t need people around me who are not steady… And if there’s a kind of hand-wringing attitude going on when time’s are tough, I don’t like it’. People want certainty in their leaders. We never hear the Prime Minister say “It might work, it might not work, but goddamn-it, we’re going to bloody try”. Rudd can’t even admit that the treasury projections are only a possibility, and he doesn’t want to doubt his treasury, they’re experts, and he is a man of faith. In a culture of getting-things-done, doubters aren’t doers, but as Sales writes doubts “prevent us from acting recklessly without regards for consequences.” The world would probably be in a little less trouble if we had a few more doubters, but what do I know, I’m just trying things out.