Do as Cromwell said, not as he did

A little humility can go a long way

Oliver Cromwell was an unlikely poster boy for humility. But in a world awash in certitude, you take what you can get.

Religious wars don't lend themselves to second-guessing. Religion requires faith, and faith makes believers stop asking questions and take a leap. War demands commitment that compounds the conviction of religious belief.

Cromwell didn't win the title Lord Protector for nothing. The English civil war was nominally a secular conflict to determine whether king or parliament would rule. But it had roots in the deeply held religious views of Anglicans and dissenters. Cromwell entered the fray as a stern Puritan who hated the Romish practices of the Anglican establishment and embraced predestination. In every battle he believed he rode with God and God with him.

So it might have sounded odd when he pleaded for humility on the part of the general assembly of the Kirk of Scotland ahead of the 1650 battle of Dunbar. "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken,” Cromwell wrote.

Of course Cromwell would have been more persuasive as a model of humility if he had embraced the possibility of error in himself, and if he had not slaughtered his Scottish enemies when they stuck to their convictions.

But the quote is still a good one, and it has often been employed in an effort to open closed minds.

The results have been mixed, at best. People naturally resist the idea that they might be mistaken. Religion militates against it, as noted above, but so do many other arenas of human thought.

Science above all should be open to challenge. In science every result is tentative, forever susceptible to disproof. In theory this is so. But in practice things get more complicated. Scientists are humans, and humans become set in their ways. Moreover, science is often hierarchical in structure. Those at the top train new scientists and administer funds. They decide which research projects are most promising. Not surprisingly they see promise most frequently where they themselves feel comfortable. Old ideas are hard to shake.

It wasn't the Catholic church alone that resisted the novelties of Copernicus and Galileo but generations of scientists schooled on Aristotle and Ptolemy. Darwin faced resistance from his fellow biologists, who faulted his failure to identify the mechanism of evolution, long before the legislature of Tennessee banned Darwin from classrooms. Wegener’s theory of continental drift raised no religious or philosophical hackles yet required half a century to replace old beliefs about terrestrial geology.

When the heterodox eventually becomes the orthodox, sometimes the heteros forget what it was like to be on the outside. For decades after the genetic basis of evolution was discovered, biologists roundly rejected the Lamarckian idea that acquired traits could be inherited. But recent work in epigenetics reveals that the venerable French naturalist wasn't entirely wrong. After public health officials in most American states won the battle to fluoridate water, defeating the conspiracists who called fluoridation a communist plot, most questioning of fluoridation was shouted down. Lately studies have indicated subtle neurological effects of fluoride previously overlooked.

Sixty years ago scientists who predicted a warming trend in the earth's climate were ignored or laughed at. Cooling was thought more likely. But as the evidence mounted and the models improved, global warming and other aspects of climate change became the new orthodoxy. Today almost any questioning of the concept is condemned as anti-scientific and probably mercenary.

Some of the questioning of the consensus certainly is cynical. People and groups with a hefty stake in the economic status quo don't like the costs that would be associated with remediation of climate change.

Yet a little humility on the part of the climate change believers would go a long way. Among themselves they admit there's a lot they don't know about where things will change and how fast. But to the world they tend to present a solid front, as though admitting uncertainty will weaken their case for reform. And it's almost impossible to hear anything from the scientific community about potential benefits of climate change, to particular regions if not to the planet as a whole.

Maybe the scientists are right in this strategy. Maybe ordinary people are too distracted or stupid to understand complicated subjects like climate change. Maybe reform requires making things simpler than truth.

But maybe not. Most people manage just fine with weather predictions that don't say that it will rain tomorrow or it won't, but rather that the rain chances are 30 percent or 60 percent or whatever.

Climate scientists could do something similar. In certain cases they already do, but they could extend the practice. Even if the numbers were hardly better than guesses — there's a 50 percent chance that global temperatures will rise 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2040, say — the simple fact of admitting uncertainty would make the scientists seem less removed from ordinary life. Perhaps paradoxically, their confession of uncertainty would increase the confidence their predictions inspire.

Cromwell's call for humility didn’t save the Scots at Dunbar. Nor did it save him. After his death by natural causes, his English enemies regained the upper hand. His body was disinterred and his head cut off. It was displayed for decades on the roof of Westminster Hall.