I tend to pretty much disagree with everyone and everything. Feynman's assertion that science is the belief in the ignorance of experts seems like simple good sense that generalizes to all aspects of human endeavor. Humans are fallible: this is a feature not a bug. Fail forward faster etc. Everything that I know is wrong, though I don't know what is wrong with what I know, or what is right, and assume that the same is true for you since I've seldom if ever seen contrary evidence that upon close examination proved to be sound.

I'm comfortable with the fact that we are all lack-wits and bumblers, and comfortable with continuing none the less to pursue immediate objectives that seem to be worthwhile given current circustances and understandings. Our current errors will be revealed shortly, though our general condition will be unchanged by those revealations. Good cheer and a sense of humor are useful as salve for our embarrassment and wounds.

Though I disagree with them - and have often posted about specific objections - I would, if I had the funds for such entertainments, buy books by John Gray and Roger Scruton since they disagree with one another while rooting around points of view that are not as mistaken as those of others.

Evangelical progressives, evangelical conservatives, even evangelicals, set out their stalls in the marketplace of ideas, with many an intellectual trinket to tempt the jaded passer-by. . .

Not all intellectuals, needless to say. Many are deeply uncomfortable with this sort of large-scale visionary thinking and some have set themselves against it with a determination bordering on the fanatical.

Of these, John Gray has been the most vocal and, in my view, the most frustrating, determined to rain on even the smallest parade of those who would seek to advance humanity. But there is no denying his central insight, which is that such parades, if left unchecked, can turn quickly into military marches. Institutions progress but human beings don't, and their capacity for cruelty and violence is infinite.

A pessimistic thought, to be sure. But British philosopher Roger Scruton is rather optimistic about pessimism. Indeed, in The Uses of Pessimism he prescribes "a dose" of that very tendency as the tonic for the kind of utopian thinking indulged in by thinkers such as Badiou and Zizek. We should respond to their irrational exuberance and "unscrupulous optimism", he suggests, through respect for custom and tradition; the "we" of unruffled compromise and gradual mutuality. . .

Scruton identifies seven fallacies that he sees as underwriting false hope. Put briefly, these translate into a tendency to always look on the bright side, a belief that freedom is hampered by law, an unwillingness to countenance refutation, a belief that failure in one human quarter is directly connected to success in another, an inclination to impose solutions rather than letting them evolve over time, the idea that human history has an endpoint, and the tendency to assume agreeable concepts such as liberty and equality are mutually reinforcing. . .

There is a lot to be said for Scruton's argument, especially when it comes to the ill-effects of top-down thinking in the political sphere. For he is surely right to say that in the area of human rights, for example, the British model of slow negotiation between competing interests was greatly preferable to Robespierre's "despotism of liberty". . .

Opposition to the zealotry of the unscrupulous optimists - left, right and other - does not seem like pessimism to me. It isn't, as the various definitions of the word claim, a feeling that things always turn out badly or a general disposition to look on the dark side and to expect the worst in all things. Opposing zealotry is the simple good sense of Feynman that recognizes the reality of ignorance. None are more ignorant than zealots. It takes a kind of militant ignorance to indulge in utopian thoughts, a steely determination to avert one's gaze from reality in order to maintain an ecstatic state of mind until it is too late to avoid a deeply desired disaster.

Zealotry is elaborate suicide as well as homicide.