No Doubt
Political observers often chided the late Governor Mario Cuomo of New York for his paralyzing doubt—famously called him "Hamlet on the Hudson" after he wavered on the razor's edge of running for president in 1988 and 1992. The political culture, by contrast, has often prized decisiveness over reflection. Doubt, for them, was weakness. Reflection impeded action. But what if doubt, properly understood, is not weakness but the foundation of wisdom—an essential capacity that could have helped Americans navigate the defining crises of our generation?
Charles Sanders Peirce, the American pragmatist philosopher, offers a more nuanced view of doubt—not as an abstract or academic problem but as a deeply embodied state. For Peirce, doubt is a visceral disturbance; it is not just mental unrest but can cause physical pain, psychological unease, even physiological distress. It is this discomfort that drives inquiry—to quiet the war inside the mind and arrive at belief, which brings peace.
Peirce focuses on lived, immediate doubts—Is my wife faithful? Can I trust this person?—rather than abstract philosophical questions. For him, belief isn't about eternal truth but about settling our minds so we can form habits and act. When one states one has a belief, one has to study the premises behind it.
But what happens when this individual process of doubt and inquiry fails at a national level? What if a whole nation bypasses the agonizing process of questioning assumptions? When belief becomes institutionalized—reinforced by political, religious, or cultural power—it resists doubt altogether. It becomes orthodoxy. I witnessed this process firsthand in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
As a migrant from India to America at a formative age, I felt a sense of belonging to the new nation and its values. Those values were becoming mine. Yet, in the year and a half after 9/11 and before the attack on Iraq, I felt the nation had no doubt at all. Certitude was in place, and its attendant habits were marching forward. There was no need, it seemed, for inquiry. No national conversation. We were attacked; we would attack.
But what were the unspoken premises driving that belief? That Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That Iraq was connected to 9/11. That American force could quickly reshape the Middle East. These were not just intelligence failures—they were assumptions that went unchallenged because belief had already hardened. A Peircean inquiry would have slowed us down. It would have asked: What real doubt do we have? What is the actual basis for these claims?
Instead, certitude steamrolled skepticism. I unsubscribed from The New York Times—a paper my parents had believed essential for my success in our adopted country—because I felt it had failed to ask the right questions. The Iraq War's failure of inquiry proved to be just the first domino, followed by two others: the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic of 2020.
In 2008, American belief in capitalism and its free markets was shattered. The government bailed out banks that pushed risky house loans but not the citizens whose houses were foreclosed—isn’t homeownership the American Dream? Ironically, socialism was used to save banks, but the common man had to suffer the consequences of free markets.
During the pandemic, the authoritative mantra “follow the science” quickly became toxic as health recommendations shifted and misinformation spread widely. Americans found themselves confined in their own homes while belief in science and the institutions that represent it evaporated.
When traditional institutions that have provided citizens with belief—government, academia, corporations—repeatedly fail at what Peirce would call genuine inquiry by examining their own premises, citizens lose faith in the possibility of shared truth. The result is our current vacuum, where Americans retreat to podcasts and conspiracy theories not necessarily because they’re more credible, but because they are the only spaces that seem to welcome doubt about official narratives.
In the age of high anxiety that we moderns inhabit, we crave certitude and eschew doubt to maintain the illusion of a serene life. We must learn to swim in the streams of uncertainty, recognizing there is no such thing as the sure thing. Now we face the strongest doubt of it all—post those three crises—belief in democracy and its accountability.