I will never forget a phrase I came across many years ago in a devotional commentary on the Bible. Oswald Chambers, reflecting on Matthew’s famous line, “Judge not, lest you be judged,” says: “There is always one fact in every life that we know nothing about.”
It’s a common criticism of those who disagree with us, and it sounds like a nice indictment of bigotry. But I’m so busy being open-minded. I forget. I show generous tolerance to suffering addicts, difficult colleagues, and those who vote differently than me. But the moment someone cuts me off in traffic or lashes out at me in a meeting, all that generosity evaporates.
The evidence seems clear. I think you know the story. What I don’t have is the phone call they received an hour ago, the diagnosis they haven’t told anyone yet, and what happened to them at age 7 that is quietly shaping everything they do at age 43.
Open-mindedness is a strange virtue. Almost everyone claims it, and those who praise it the loudest are those who have quietly stopped practicing it.
What characterizes our moments above all else is doubt. That’s how good it is. Certainty can be deceptive and make conversations difficult. Spouses who are confident that their partner understands the meaning of the comment usually stop listening. Politicians who abuse the other side while refusing to negotiate are often defending the conclusions they have already reached. Believers who deplore the ungodliness of a culture while despising those who oppose it make their faith ungodly.
in crack upF. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about his struggles with mental health: “The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time and still maintain the ability to function.”
He might have added that truths are often interdependent, each incomplete without the other, and each revealed by the pressure of the other.
Justice without mercy becomes cruel. Mercy without justice becomes indulgence. Freedom without order leads to chaos. Order without freedom hardens into tyranny.
But while holding the opposition requires humility, it is not a common virtue. Conviction is cunning. It turns principles into mere possessions of principles, just as God is reduced to belief in God. Absolute things may be unchanging. Our concern for them is not. Certainty makes faith irrelevant, if not unnecessary.
“In every life, there is always one fact about which we know nothing.” This is not an argument against the judgment. It’s a confidence check.
Whitman understood this. “Am I contradicting myself? Well, then I am contradicting myself. I am big and I contain many things.” This is not a disjointed confession, but a statement about what we are. Black Americans who love their country and are furious at what it has done to its people are not contradicting themselves. They are all telling the truth.
May this be true for the rest of us too. Those who despise liberalism rely on the very things they criticize to be able to debate with impunity. Conservatives who lament the loss of values in modern society depend on their pluralism to be listened to at all. Liberals who believe in progress forget that the modern catastrophe was not a failure of reason, but its most confident expression.
What you and I, friends and foes, critics need most is something called “expanded spirituality.” That is, the ability to think from another person’s point of view without abandoning one’s own. It is not consent, but an imaginative discipline that takes seriously what others take seriously.
To know everything is not to forgive everything, but to condemn with confidence. Among the more polite, the “velvet fist” may be the most dangerous. A smile that is already decided, an open door that leads nowhere, a tolerance that is never fully extended to being wrong.
There’s always one more fact you want others to understand.
notes and reading
daily devotional bible―Oswald Chambers (1992). A widely read evangelical devotional classic by a Scottish preacher known for its emphasis on surrender, discipline, and the searching demands of Christian discipleship.
crack up—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1993), chapter with that title. A collection of autobiographical essays collected posthumously. Fitzgerald reflects on fatigue, failure, and loss of confidence.
About Bullshit: Anniversary Edition—Harry G. Frankfurt (2025). A short philosophical essay that argues that indifference to truth corrupts public life. Moral language adheres to posture and is indifferent to reality.
Divide: How fanatic beliefs are destroying democracy–Taylor Dotson. A work of contemporary political theory that diagnoses how absolutist moral certainty undermines democratic pluralism and proposes humility and institutional reform as remedies.
uncertainty—boston reviews Forum 20 (46.4 – July/August 2021). A multi-author symposium exploring the political, moral, and cognitive dimensions of uncertainty in public life.
About the revolution―Hannah Arendt (1963), “The Social Problem.” between past and future (2006), “Expanded spirituality”—an essential capacity for political life and the practice of “representative thinking.”
Guilty Innocence
Ramadan: Hard Stop Mercy
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
