Certitude Read online

  “You have no faith in anything,” Wallace objected, “only in your mind.”

  “That is not faith,” Rand replied. “That is a conviction.”

  At the time of the interview, Rand was engaged in an extramarital affair with a much younger man—twenty-five years younger, to be precise. The affair dragged on until 1968, when the erstwhile boy-toy (who had become a tireless promoter of Objectivism) hooked up with a young actress. When Rand found out about it, the apostle of rational self-interest lost any vestige of rational cool: She flipped—publicly, angrily—disowning her protégé but not owning up to the cause of her sudden fury.

  Having espoused selfishness as a moral virtue, she found the selfishness of another intolerable. A paradox presented itself: Ego, it seems, can get in the way of self-interest.

  John Cleves Symmes

  (1779–1829)

  Not everyone finds concentric circles compelling, but for John Symmes they were the key to a great discovery: “The earth,” he declared in 1818, “is hollow and habitable within.” This simple formula (and the less simple pseudoscientific theory he elaborated) became the obsessive focus of the last twenty years of his life. On his death, his dutiful son marked his grave in Hamilton, Ohio, with a Hollow Earth monument—an obelisk with a sphere resting on top (the sphere, which has a hole drilled through it, looks a bit like a pitted olive).

  A hero in the War of 1812, Symmes was an otherwise unremarkable man, with little formal education, an unprepossessing appearance, and a bad case of stage fright. And yet his lectures and “circulars” (not surprisingly, he preferred the term “circular” to “pamphlet”) were convincing enough to earn him a minor celebrity. Despite poor health and his dread of crowds, he lectured in frontier towns and across New England; the aim of all his relentless proselytizing was to launch an expedition to the Arctic, where he believed one could gain access to the worlds within our world.

  Though ridiculed by scientists and the press, Symmes garnered enough popular support for his polar venture to bring a petition before the Senate in 1822—but a motion to refer the matter to the Committee on Foreign Relations was tabled. Imagine if Symmes’s ideas had been referred to the Department of the Interior…(Alas, it was only established by Congress in 1849.)

  Norman Mailer

  (1923–2007)

  For the first thirty-odd years of his life, Norman Mailer wrote, his “pride… was to be an atheist.” But in his mid-fifties (around the time he began corresponding with Jack Abbott, the convicted killer whose parole he successfully, tragically engineered), he began rethinking his relationship with the Almighty. In Pieces and Pontifications, a collection of essays published in 1982 (the year Jack Abbott was tried for the murder he committed just one month into his parole), Mailer explored a new faith: He conceived of a god who is not all-powerful—but who shares power, in fact, with the Devil.

  As he explained decades later, literary celebrity gave him an inkling of what it might be like to be a fallible God: “Obviously,” he conceded, “a celebrity is a long, long, long, long way from the celestial, but nonetheless it does… [give] you power that you usually don’t know how to use well. So the parallel was stronger than I realized.”

  Over the years, his beliefs hardened into doctrine. Less than a month before his death in 2007, he published On God: An Uncommon—his last treatment, as it were—in which he lays out in impressive detail his private theology, the cornerstone of which is a fallible deity with a particular professional orientation: “God is an artist. And like an artist, God has successes, God has failures.”

  As Montesquieu remarked, “if the triangles had a god, they would give it three sides.”

  Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna

  (1872–1918)

  In 1904, after giving birth to four daughters in succession, Czarina Alexandra Fyodorovna at last brought forth a male heir, Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov—but the baby, it soon became apparent, suffered from hemophilia.

  When doctors proved powerless to treat the disease, Alexandra turned to faith healers—in particular Grigori Rasputin, a Siberian peasant-turned-monk thought by some to have mystic powers and by others to be a shockingly oversexed charlatan. The czar and czarina soon convinced themselves that when Rasputin prayed for their ailing son, his condition improved.

  In 1912, while the royal family were at their hunting estate in eastern Poland, Alexei suffered a life-threatening hemorrhage. A desperate Alexandra telegraphed Rasputin, begging for his intercession. He promised that the future czar would get well: “Don’t let the doctors bother him too much; let him rest,” he cabled back—and lo, the boy recovered. The czarina was hooked.

  Though false, the widespread rumor that she and Rasputin were lovers was profoundly damaging. By the time Nicholas II set off for the front during World War I—leaving his wife in charge of the government—the monk, vodka soaked, notorious for accepting bribes, was arguably the most powerful man in St. Petersburg.

  In December 1916, a conspiracy of nobles, dismayed by his undiminished sway over Alexandra, arranged to have Rasputin killed. Three months later, the czar was deposed by the Bolsheviks; a year after that, Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children were executed.

  Madonna

  (b. 1958)

  Madonna doesn’t believe in death. With a name like that, why would she?

  News that the queen of pop was not just a material girl began to spread in 1997, after she gave a cocktail party at the headquarters of her record company to promote the Kabbalah Center, an organization (some would say cult) dedicated to the dissemination of the ancient teachings (some would say mumbo jumbo) of the mystic branch of Judaism. Madonna embraced Kabbalah, she told the guests at her party, when she had been pregnant, exhausted from making the movie Evita, and in need of some kind of anchor. Since then she has become a great benefactor of the Kabbalah Center, donating many millions—and allowing it to bask in the reflected glory of her multiplatinum aura.

  In return she gets life everlasting. According to the Zohar, the key text of Kabbalah, our souls “reenter the absolute substance whence they have emerged. But to accomplish this end they must develop all the perfections … and if they have not fulfilled this condition during one life, they must commence another, a third, and so forth, ’til they have acquired the condition which fits them for reunion with God.” In plain English, we’re recycled ‘til we get it right. Or plainer still, she’ll be back. And she’s been here before: The good people at the Kabbalah Center have reportedly convinced Madonna that she’s the reincarnation of the biblical queen Esther.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  (b. 1932)

  In an administration notoriously impervious to doubt, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stood out as more certain than the rest. Even ignorance was for him an opportunity to show off a decisive control of the situation: “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” Contained and neutralized by this tidy taxonomy, the unknown unknowns were ignored— especially when it came to the certainty to which he gave his name: the Rumsfeld Doctrine.

  Thomas Friedman coined the term (and defined it: “Just enough troops to lose”), but we all recognize it as an arrogant refusal to prepare for contingency. The Iraq war was a testing ground for his adamant belief that a smaller force (less than 150,000) could defeat the Iraqi army, control a population of more than 24 million, and secure a nation the size of California. He strenuously resisted the arguments of generals who called for the deployment of several hundred thousand troops.

  A month before the invasion, asked to estimate the duration of the war, Rumsfeld answered, “It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” Stuff happens.

  Pope Leo X

  (1475–1521)

  In the mid-sixteenth century, John Bal
e, Bishop of Ossory, cited an exchange between Pietro Bembo and Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici (a.k.a. Pope Leo X). Bembo quoted scripture at Leo, to which the pope replied: “How very profitable this fable of Christ has been to us through the ages.”

  We can’t be certain—we’re barred by our devotion to doubt—but we’re confident that even if he never actually uttered the infamous words ascribed to him 430-odd years ago, the sentiment is pure Leo. It could have been his credo.

  As pope, he lived high on the hog; during his seven—year reign, he spent ducats at a rate unmatched in the history of the Holy See. We’re talking excess that would make Caligula blush: banquets, hunting parties, festivals, and a pervasive mood of rampant licentiousness. (As for his personal sexual proclivities, one contemporary historian observed that the pontiff “was exceedingly devoted… to that kind of pleasure that for honor’s sake may not be named.”)

  How to fund such reckless extravagance? One solution was to sell indulgences, a way of profiting from the “fable of Christ” that incensed a young Augustinian monk named Martin Luther. Hence the Reformation…

  Perhaps a last sonorous word of censure should go to the great church historian Philip Schaff: “Leo despoiled his high office of its sacredness and prostituted it into a vehicle of his own carnal propensities.”

  Charlton Heston

  (1923–2008)

  You wouldn’t believe it, looking back over his fifteen years of unblinking support for the National Rifle Association (of which he eventually became president), but once upon a time, Charlton Heston was capable of changing his mind. Early on, for example, he was opposed to the whole concept of activist movie stars. Then, in the early 1960s, he marched in support of civil rights and endorsed Democratic candidates. In 1968, in the wake of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, he joined Gregory Peck and James Stewart in calling for stronger gun control legislation.

  Twenty years later, he had become the gun lobby’s preferred celebrity spokesman, host of the annual Charlton Heston Celebrity Shoot (a three-day extravaganza featuring many pulverized clay pigeons, a handgun competition, and a smattering of Hollywood stars). From the late 1980s on, Heston was the nation’s most prominent defender of the Second Amendment.

  How convinced was he of the people’s right to bear arms? He liked to fire up the NRA faithful with this signature flourish: Standing at the podium, he’d raise a rifle over his head and thunder, in his famous baritone, “From my cold, dead hands!” (That’s short, in case you’re wondering, for “I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands!”)

  In December 1998, when Heston was made president of the NRA, Mike Wallace interviewed him on 60 Minutes and asked about his previous support for gun control. Heston replied, “I’ve made a number of mistakes in my life, Mike.”

  Emma Goldman

  (1869–1940)

  Our favorite radical, “Red Emma” wavered in some of her political convictions (she changed her mind, for instance, about the Bolsheviks). She also found that her feelings of jealousy and possessiveness vis-á-vis her lover ran counter to her professed belief in free love (“I stand condemned before the bar of my own reason,” she wrote with commendable candor). And she vacillated on the question of violence (though she was happy to help her boyfriend attempt an assassination of Henry Clay Frick, in later life she preferred less drastic measures). But there were two constants in her life: anarchism and action. Every word, every gesture was meant to further the anarchist agenda, and she never stopped speaking, never stopped doing. “The true revolutionist,” she wrote, “will not shrink from anything to serve the Cause.”

  In her autobiography, Living My Life, Goldman tells the story of her decision, at age twenty-three, to help fund the plot to kill Frick by selling her body: The first man she managed to pick up took her to a bar and told her bluntly that she didn’t have “the knack” for prostitution. “ ‘You haven’t got it, that’s all there is to it,’ he assured me. He took out a ten-dollar bill and put it down before me. ‘Take this and go home,’ he said—I was too astounded for speech.” And that was the end of her career as a hooker.

  Charles Augustus Lindbergh

  (1903–74)

  Heroic aviator Charles Lindbergh went to Germany in 1936 to assess the strength of the Luftwaffe. Hermann Göring helped him out. Lindbergh was impressed by everything he saw; in fact, in 1938 he decided to move his family to Germany. He found a house in Wannsee, outside Berlin. Then came Kristallnacht; concerned by the anti–Jewish riots, he canceled his plans. (But he kept his medal awarded “by order of der Führer,” the Service Cross of the German Eagle.)

  In April 1939, on his journey home from Europe, Lindbergh wrote in his diary, “a few Jews add strength and character to our country, but too many create chaos. And we are getting too many.” Four months later, he noted that “whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur.”

  He was feeling his way toward a powerful certitude, which found public expression at last in a speech delivered on October 13, 1939: “Our bond with Europe is a bond of race and not of political ideology…. Racial strength is vital, politics a luxury.” At the same time he was writing an article for Reader’s Digest in which he stressed the need to preserve the “White race… in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown” and guard against “the infiltration of inferior blood.”

  But he never doubted that “a few Jews of the right type are… an asset to any country.”

  George Armstrong Custer

  (1839–76)

  The doubt and conjecture that surround historical accounts of the battle of Little Bighorn dishonor the man whose unshakable self-esteem caused the catastrophe: George Armstrong Custer would have despised the tedious tangle of claim and counterclaim.

  Here are the facts that matter: Having turned down the offer of Gatling guns and two additional companies of cavalry, having been repeatedly warned by his scouts that the Indian village on the banks of the Little Bighorn River was large—larger than any they’d seen in thirty years—General Custer, confident that the Seventh Cavalry could defeat any number of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, hurried to attack anyway, the reckless charge being the one and only military tactic in his repertoire.

  He split his forces into three columns and left one company behind to guard the pack train. Not a single one of the two—hundred—odd men under his personal command survived.

  Nobody denies that he was brave. Effortlessly flamboyant, with a mean, unpredictable temper and an unquenchable thirst for glory, he was a major general (by brevet appointment) by the time he was twenty-three.

  His last stand was also his first defeat: Custer’s famous luck had run out.

  As he looked down from the bluffs at the vast Indian encampment, he said, “Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them.” In a sense, those were his final words—the last any survivor heard him utter. And perhaps that appalling expression of hubris should be his epitaph, too.

  Jeannette Rankin

  (1880–1973)

  Daughter of a Montana rancher, eldest of eleven children, Jeannette Rankin was a suffragette and a progressive who ran for Congress in 1916 (before women had won the constitutional right to vote)—she was elected, and thereby became the first female to serve in the House of Representatives.

  Just four days after taking office, she joined forty-nine others in voting against U.S. entry into World War I. “I want to stand by my country,” she said, “but I cannot vote for war.”

  Her unwavering pacifism, once American troops landed in Europe, was predictably unpopular. The Helena Independent denounced her as “a dagger in the hands of the German propagandists, a dupe of the Kaiser, a member of the Hun army in the United States, and a crying schoolgirl.” (It was alleged that she cried during the key roll call, though eyewitnesses denied it.)

  She lost a Senate bid in 1918 and retired from politics, only to return in 1940, when armies were clashing anew in Europe. Elected to the House,
she was once again called upon to cast her vote for war—this time, it was the day after Pearl Harbor. Once again she said no—this time the lone dissenting voice. The hostility of the crowds, as she left the Capitol, was such that she had to seek refuge in a phone booth; the police escorted her back to her office.

  Her political career was in tatters, her principles intact.

  Joseph Stalin

  (1878–1953)

  Soviet spies around the world saw it coming: They flooded the Kremlin with news of an impending German invasion. For instance, in mid-April an agent stationed in Prague predicted that the offensive would begin in the second half of June. Stalin refused to believe it. He dismissed the Prague report with an angry scrawl: “English provocation! Investigate!”

  Right on cue (June 22, 1941), the Wehrmacht launched Operation Barbarossa, a massive assault that inflicted staggering losses on the unprepared Red Army. It’s one of the great military disasters in history.

  How could Stalin—cunning, paranoid Stalin—have been blind to Hitler’s intention? He was convinced that Germany, having lost the last war, would never again fight on two fronts. So long as it was at war with the West, he insisted, Germany would honor its nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union.