Why US ‘certainty’ about the China threat is a danger in itself
- Americans’ insistence on seeing China as an increasingly assertive power affects their judgment and undermines needed reflection
- Let’s hope China and its leaders are too smart to play the role that has been marked out for them by the West’s fearmongers
In its quest for certainty about China and whether it is a moral threat or merely a robust competitor, the American consensus now claims to have taken the measure of China and is not in doubt. It would be better if it was. The Western mind might be creating something that doesn’t really exist.
It is wrong to be so sure of things, 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume said. The sun will probably rise over the horizon tomorrow morning – but only probably, so don’t be so certain. Even quantum physicists accept that measurements of the tiniest particles can work out as little more than momentary approximations.
But history moves on even as frozen minds remain behind. In his 1929 book, The Quest for Certainty, the philosopher John Dewey singled out the corrosive hegemony of ideology and inelastic theory for degrading our ability to cope with reality by getting in the way of it. Dogma feeds on a continual process of self-certification of prior beliefs.