By Dean J. Scott Miller I recently received an insidious email purporting to come from a credit union where my wife and I had formerly held an account. Although it contained suspicious typos, one threatening line stood out: if we did not respond immediately, “all funds will be lost.” I reported it, and forgot it, until the next morning, when a follow-up email came from the same frauds, this time adding the twist that our “account” was now locked because someone had tried logging in from a foreign country, and our funds would vanish if we did not click the link. Admiring their persistence, I nevertheless imagined others with real money in their accounts, who had resisted the temptation the day before but were now confronted with this second threat to their funds. The fear of someone trying to steal their savings might have overcome their initial skepticism, to ill effect. Such phishing schemes and other contemporary scams erode our trust in institutions as well as people, and may eventually lead us to deeper levels of distrust and doubt. We live in an era of eroding trust, not unlike other ages through which humans have suffered. During the early twentieth century, millions of immigrants from small European villages arrived in the United States through Ellis Island, having made the journey based on their belief in a hyperbolic vision of America. My wife’s ancestors were among those immigrants, and, as she describes it, their spiritual resilience made a tremendous difference in their lives, seeing them through their early struggles that included back-breaking work and suffered the loss of spouses and children to sudden illness or incurable disease. Those who abandoned hope frequently struggled even more. On the other hand, those who trusted in their vision, accentuating positive aspects of their new life, often gained financial stability more quickly, educated their children, and passed the blessings of belief in a better life down to their grandchildren and succes- sive generations. Their challenge, like ours, was to persist in their hope despite negative experiences that suggested their trust was too naive or even misplaced.Sustaining our belief can be hard because it is not a sure knowledge, indeed cannot be, but is rather “knowledge hoped for,” a kind of trust that requires commitment in the face of contradictory evidence. In that sense, belief is a species of endurance, the endurance of imagination. Doubt is the reverse, the extinction of what belief imagines. This issue of Humanities explores the ongoing dance between doubt and belief as it plays out in the human experience. Faculty and alumni share insights about that dance, drawn from their studies, observations, and personal lives. Although we often view doubt as something that diminishes as our belief grows, I see doubt as belief’s shadow, growing and shrinking in direct proportion: the stronger our belief and the greater we place our trust in something or someone, the larger doubt’s possibilities loom. Yet doubt may itself open up doors to understanding and knowledge. Sometimes doubt may lead us to confront false assumptions: we begin with a misgiving about a received truth and, through investigation, either discover our suspicions to be groundless or gain new insight. Hypothesis and conjecture drive science and research as preludes to new discoveries, and in the humanities, our own, idiosyncratic reactions to art or literature can take us into uncharted realms of discovery as we challenge traditional interpretations.
This journey of discovery, fueled sometimes by doubt of received wisdom and at other times by belief in a hunch, allows us to find greater beauty and hope in the world. The course of our lives is determined largely by the small decisions we make, some in faith, tiny wagers of belief placed on this or that principle that we hope will eventually prove fruitful, and others in doubt, suspicions that may protect us but that can also block our growth. All learning proceeds from a delicate balance of doubt and belief that allows us to suspend final judgments and decisons in spite of contrary evidence. We live in a toxic age where the hard work of respecting different views and establishing truth has been abandoned for dismissive polemic and spin, which goes against the very grain of the learning process and can confine us in a state of perpetual ignorance. As lifelong student of the humanities, and as observers of humanity, we trust that there is goodness, even divinity, in ourselves and in others. Maintaining that belief may sometimes require a good deal of tenacity when we witness phishing scams or other, more extreme, acts of inhumanity, and we can be sorely tempted to abandon our faith in ourselves and others. But we can also cultivate the practice of trust in and love for humankind, and choose to be skeptical of the false logic that suggests our temporary inhumanity negates our fundamental humanity.