Can Math Save Your Soul?

The most truthful — and, to me, the most infuriating — thing a certain public figure1 uttered over the course of his ongoing career was “It is what it is.”

Given that he was referring to the deaths of over a hundred thousand people — deaths that, mere months earlier, he had declared with utter confidence would not occur, thereby causing unjustified optimism and imprudent risk-taking — I was angry. I felt that the moment called for an apology, not a tautology.

And yet, who can argue with the proposition that things are what they are? Isn’t this insight — in particular, the insight that our wishing that the truth were different doesn’t change what’s true — the bedrock on which all of science rests?

But belief in the existence of one Truth, in and of itself, is no guarantee that you won’t wind up in some silo of wrong-headedness, believing in wrong answers to important questions, listening only to the people who agree with you. If you want to stay out of such an epistemic prison, you should also believe that Truth is hard to get at, that no one person or group of people is likely to arrive at much of it, and that at any given moment you probably grasp less of it than you think you do.

Leave a Comment