Commitment in the Gray

Many praise doubt as a critical virtue—but what happens when skepticism becomes an excuse to waver in the face of injustice? As Gaza burns, intellectual ambivalence becomes a mask for moral evasion.

In October 2024—one year into Israel’s ongoing campaign of extermination in Gaza—Vox’s podcast “The Gray Area with Sean Illing” released an episode featuring acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates discussing his new book, The Message. As a fan of Illing’s show and a close observer of the media firestorm that accompanied the publication of The Message, I eagerly tuned in. As it turned out, however, the conversation went beyond Coates’ argument about Israeli apartheid; it spoke directly to a subject I had dedicated the past decade of my life exploring: doubt, moral conviction, and commitment.

Illing’s exchange with Coates centered around the latter’s forceful insistence that what is happening in Palestine is quite straightforward and easy to understand. As Coates says, “The math is clear…It’s so obviously Jim Crow.”

The ensuing exchange is worth quoting in full:

Illing: I’m glad we got here. You know, because, you’re on the show, it’s called ‘The Gray Area’ for a reason, right? And—

Coates: and I’m giving you black and white [chuckles].

Illing: No, I love that. I mean, this is the shit, man. This is what we’re here for. It’s called that because I think life is messy and complicated, and the temptation to blot out complexity for the sake—

Coates: [cackling in knowing laughter]

Illing: Hold on now [laughing], hold on professor…Just, the tendency to blot out complexity for the sake of a more simple story is understandable. But I do think it can become dangerous in its own way. And I’m constantly attuned to that threat. Maybe too attuned, actually. And I like that this is a reflex you challenge in the book and you’re challenging here, because it really forced me to think about it.

Illing’s faith in the principle of doubt is by no means unique. Doubt is widely celebrated as an enriching and liberatory orientation to the world, even as the liberal order that helped elevate this principle is coming apart.¹ Yet valorizing skepticism often amounts to little more than a sophisticated cover by which to dress up existing commitments while avoiding any real reckoning with them. Between stable certainty and endless suspension of judgment, there is another option: sustaining commitment to a collective cause or form of life, while still acknowledging the uncertainty and ambivalence we inevitably carry as individuals.

Doubt Is Not a Useful Principle

Illing’s invocation of the virtues of doubt and uncertainty draws its appeal from a longstanding celebration of skepticism that is traceable to the European Enlightenment. Thinkers like Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Mill, among others, prescribed a hermeneutic of skepticism as the only reliable path to truth and freedom. It is now a cultural commonplace to claim that we must be unrelentingly skeptical of inherited truth-claims and communal commitments until proven by the light of reason and evidence. The problem is that partisans of the Enlightenment rarely, in actual practice, call for doubt as a universally applicable principle. Invariably, skeptical questioning is reserved only for certain normative claims, and suspended for others.

The mid-twentieth century scientist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, demonstrated this point in a brilliant critique of scientific objectivity that anticipates the kind of later critiques we usually think of as postmodern. In a chapter titled “The Critique of Doubt” from his book Personal Knowledge, Polanyi engages in a multi-pronged analysis to show that the “principle of doubt” is in fact “illusory.”² He argues that there is no clear way to know when to subject particular truth-claims to doubt and when to passionately defend them. Polanyi persuasively shows that there is no “valid heuristic maxim” in the process of scientific inquiry “which would recommend either belief or doubt as a path to discovery.” There is no generalizable rule by which we can determine when doubt is warranted, and when doubt is paralyzing. As he puts it, “some discoveries are prompted by the conviction that something is fundamentally lacking in the existing framework of science, others by the opposite feeling that there is far more implied in it than has yet been realized.”³

Elsewhere, in a more expanded version of this argument, Polanyi states:

Caution is commendable in science, but only in so far as it does not hamper the boldness on which all progress in science depends. And there is no rule to tell us at the moment of deciding the next step in research what is truly bold and what merely reckless, and we can therefore have no rule either how to distinguish at such a moment between doubt which will curb recklessness and will qualify as true caution, and doubt which cripples boldness and will stand condemned as unimaginativeness or dogmatism. We call ‘caution’ only that kind of doubt which we consider to be, or to have been, reasonable. Hence ‘doubt’ described as ‘caution’ acknowledges our appreciation of a successful operation of doubt, without telling us how to achieve such success...‘Caution’ is a form of approval, masquerading as a rule of procedure.⁴

This fundamental ambivalence in the application and value of doubt is quite apparent in our contemporary political landscape. The public discourse around us is in many ways defined by highly charged claims about truth and belief, credulity and skepticism, or conformity and free-thinking. Consider, for example, the various contentious controversies over science in the public sphere, from vaccines to climate change and beyond. Those who entertain “conspiracy theories” are often regarded by the “mainstream” as far too gullible, believing far-fetched claims without proper evidence. Yet a common response to the proliferation of such conspiracy theories is the mantra, “believe science.” In other words, it is the opponents of conspiracy theorists who demand assent to authority, while the conspiracy theorists themselves honor the Enlightenment’s deep skepticism about officially authorized truths. This is what Naomi Klein refers to as our “doppelganger culture,” in which the highly polarized ideological camps of our society actually mirror each other in striking, uncomfortable ways.

Speaking about the conspiracy-theory-laden culture of the far-right, Klein points out:

When looking at the Mirror World, it can seem obvious that millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy, to make-believe, to play-acting. The trickier thing, the uncanny thing, is that’s what they see when they look at us. They say we live in a ‘clown world,’ are stuck in ‘the matrix’ of ‘groupthink,’ are suffering from a form of collective hysteria called ‘mass formation psychosis’ (a made-up term).⁵

This doppelganger culture highlights how the ideals of doubt and skepticism continue to have purchase today, despite the advent of an absurd “post-truth” era. Across the political spectrum, each ideological camp proclaims its superiority by invoking the virtue of critical thinking and painting the other side as mindless sheeple (and their claims to skepticism as mere foolishness and false posturing). This doubling or mirroring effect demonstrates that skepticism in and of itself is no guarantee of careful thinking and proper judgment, and that merely advocating for doubt will not resolve our societal dysfunction.

So why do we often sing the praises of doubt? Why is skepticism made out to be such a vital epistemic value? Polanyi argues convincingly that the invocation of doubt is most often just a way to mask and validate our preexisting commitments by pointing to our supposed independence and the superiority of our critical faculties. Suppose that we take seriously the glib advice of Bill Maher—the notoriously polemical defender of Western civilization and liberalism—who, in his documentary Religulous, sagely decrees that we “question everything.” Polanyi points out that if we were to truly apply such a program of absolute and universal doubt, we would necessarily question every framework of understanding we have available to us, and thereby devolve into “imbecility” and an inability to communicate or think about anything at all, rather than arriving at more certain knowledge.⁶

Total doubt would offer no foundations from which to reason to better knowledge. Such an application of doubt is of course rejected by its proponents. Yet rarely is a basis for such a rejection articulated, and Polanyi argues that their own principles demand such a conclusion. The principle of doubt simply does not provide its defenders any logical means by which it could be contained. As such, the appropriate scope of doubt is simply asserted rather than argued, by sheer ideological fiat:

Philosophic doubt is thus kept on the leash and prevented from calling into question anything that the sceptic believes in, or from approving of any doubt that he does not share […] Since the sceptic does not consider it rational to doubt what he himself believes, the advocacy of ‘rational doubt’ is merely the sceptic’s way of advocating his own beliefs.⁷

An illuminating case study of how the defenders of doubt delineate its boundaries in purely self-serving terms comes from the 2009 book, In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic, co-authored by Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld. Berger’s earlier work was influential in my own thinking on modern doubt, but where his work becomes more forcefully prescriptive and polemical, it betrays the incoherence of doubt-positive discourse. Berger and Zijderveld call for a measured embrace of doubt to keep at bay the fanaticism of “true believers.” This amounts to making a case for a centrist white liberalism as the one true ideology, as it exhibits the correct balance of doubt with certainty, commitment, reason, and basic moral intuitions. All other ideologies—communism, Nazism, Islamism, fundamentalism, relativism, post-modernism—are fanaticisms that insist on one certainty or another. Meanwhile, the authors’ own brand of moderate liberalism is without a hint of irony presented as worthy of “passionate commitment”—one can indeed be “passionately, indeed immoderately, committed to these values,” they insist.⁸

The problem with “true believers,” Berger and Zijderveld tell us, is that when faced with uncertainty (as we all inevitably are in today’s pluralistic world) they suppress their doubts in an attempt to hold onto their commitments. The authors condemn this instinct, arguing that one must embrace doubt rather than push it away. But that instinct is also exactly what the authors recommend in relation to the moderate liberalism they uphold. Given “the permanent threat to democracy on the part of ideological true believers,” there emerges for them “a remarkable paradox: In order for doubt to exist, it needs to shield the constitutional state and the democratic system from doubt.”⁹ They do not try and address this paradox. Instead, they proclaim:

It’s not our intention here to deny anyone the right to doubt the institutional arrangements of democracy and to freely express this doubt, as long as there’s no active attempt to overthrow the democracy. But those of us who cherish democracy will seek to quiet such doubt within ourselves when true believers, of whatever ideological coloration, threaten the very existence of the democratic order.¹⁰

Berger and Zijderveld’s tribute to doubt as a fundamental virtue rings hollow. They insist on interrogating others’ absolute certainties, while declaring their own absolute certainties off-limits in the name of resisting relativism, cynicism, and nihilism.

This is but one example of how calls for doubt as the cornerstone of objective inquiry tend to be self-serving, presuming the outcome in advance and reserving doubt for those positions with which one disagrees. Moreover, in distinguishing between their own reasonable doubt and the fanaticism of “true believers,” such rhetoric is not only self-congratulatory but also frequently racialized. It typically devolves into a secular ideology of Western civilizational supremacy, whereby “our” doubt and critique is rational and enlightened, and “their” doubt and critique is just stubborn refusal to acknowledge the obvious truth.¹¹

Ambivalence, Practical Commitment, and Palestine

Returning to the conversation between Sean Illing and Ta-Nehisi Coates on Palestine, Illing begins their exchange with the recognition that the suffering of the Palestinian people is indeed tragic and horrifying. In his words, what is happening to the Palestinians is “a moral obscenity.” In the same breath, however, Illing also insists that the situation is “complicated.”

Coates responds by considering two comparable historical episodes from American history: slavery and Jim Crow. He points out that those situations were also quite “complicated” in their own time, in that they seemed very difficult or near impossible to resolve, and the solutions on offer raised serious concerns about the potential consequences. But Coates insists that such complexities do not render us incapable of making categorical moral judgments on the matter—of declaring that these systems of domination and discrimination were wrong, unjust, even evil. Coates pushes Illing to recognize that, though the path forward or solution might indeed be difficult and complicated, we must begin from the basis that the current reality of Israeli occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing is categorically wrong and must be challenged and dismantled.

Throughout this conversation, we see how the rhetoric of uncertainty and complexity is at times invoked as a cover for fear. Illing says in the outro: “This is a topic I don’t feel like I understand very well, and I try not to weigh in on things I don’t understand very well. But it was important to talk about this, and I didn’t want to let not understanding it perfectly be a justification for ignoring it altogether.” Yet the fact is that Illing not being an expert on various subjects has not, in the past, stopped him from hosting episodes about them, especially since the whole point of his podcast is learning from experts on any given subject and addressing the difficulties therein. But in the case of Palestine, Illing had simply avoided the topic, likely from fear of condemnation. He asks Coates what compelled him to write about Palestine given that it is so “impossibly charged,” betraying his fear of censure from “both sides.”

To the extent that we can take Illing’s uncertainty at face value, it does leave us with some important lessons. The first is that the posture of agnosticism does not translate to neutrality in practice. Quite often, an inability to take a position on a contentious issue means accepting things as they currently are. Ultimately, by refusing to challenge the status quo, we implicitly lend our support to a particular reality and state of affairs—in this case, the hegemony of the Zionist narrative and project.

When Illing is pressed by Coates in the conversation to articulate what exactly is complicated about the situation in Palestine, he simply regurgitates some basic Zionist talking points: that many Palestinians reject the idea of a fully democratic state with equal rights for all (and would seek to end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state if given the chance); that Jews are indigenous to this land and have nowhere else to go; and that Palestinian violence renders questionable their status as oppressed victims. As the conversation unfolds, Illing appears reluctant to accept these claims fully, but is nonetheless beholden to them, enough so that he is left feeling stuck and paralyzed. In this, he unwittingly aligns himself with Israeli propaganda and indirectly accepts the facts of Israeli settler-colonialism and genocide.

Even when we feel uncertain and position ourselves as agnostic, we ultimately still inhabit some ideological formation or another. We do not exist in a vacuum that affords us the privilege of pure intellectual abstraction and non-commitment. The rhetoric of doubt and agnosticism too easily overlooks and obscures how we are all inevitably committed (practically speaking) to particular forms of life regardless of intellectual posturing. As Polanyi observes in the case of scientific inquiry: “A scientist must commit himself in respect to any important claim put forward within his field of knowledge. If he ignores the claim he does in fact imply that he believes it to be unfounded. If he takes notice of it, the time and attention which he diverts to its examination […] are a measure of the likelihood he ascribes to its validity.”¹² The idea here is that complete agnosticism is only possible when the subject lies entirely outside one’s field of concern—when one, in Polyani’s words, “knows little and cares nothing” about it. Within one’s domain of knowledge, however, inaction or inattention is never neutral; it is a form of judgment.

In Illing’s case, refusing to confront Israel’s ongoing colonial apartheid and genocidal campaign in Gaza amounts to shirking the responsibility that he bears as a prominent American journalist and public intellectual. As Coates points out while urging him to visit Palestine, Illing’s role demands that he engage seriously with one of the world’s most urgent moral and political crises—one in which he is especially implicated as an American.

Uncertainty cannot become an excuse for silence on matters of critical importance. Illing himself haltingly and hesitatingly acknowledges this, but continues to waver when it comes to Palestine. Yet toward the end of the episode, he summarizes his view on the matter (in abstraction) in light of Coates’ provocation:

I come on the show every week, man, and I praise the virtues of doubt and uncertainty. And I believe in that. But refusing to describe things simply and clearly can become a kind of moral and intellectual crime. Orwell was right about that. You’re right about that too. And I still think sometimes things really are complicated and not so neat, and maybe the challenge of being a writer and really just a human being is being honest and wise enough to know the difference. And yeah, sometimes it is really, really hard. But you know what else? Sometimes withholding moral judgment can be its own kind of cowardice.

Illing’s willingness to engage in some level of self-critique is commendable, but we must move beyond the vague sentiment of “how terribly sad” with which he begins the conversation, and the imperative of moral judgment with which he concludes. The assessment that this system is unjust and unacceptable cannot simply remain an individual moral conviction, as Illing’s language suggests, but rather must translate to a collective commitment and movement against apartheid and genocide.

Those of us who privilege intellectual or academic discourse—the vaunted life of the mind—often balk at the idea of committing ourselves to one side of a partisan struggle. We feel that our internal reflections are nuanced and particular, not fully represented by any existing ideological camp. We harbor too many doubts, perhaps, about the claims made by this or that side. To join a side, we may feel, would be inauthentic to our own genuine convictions. Yet we must be wary of allowing such reservations to paralyze us from necessary action. The fact of the matter is that in the real world of political struggle, there is no free-flowing ether of discourse in which we can simply float and express our personal convictions fully. There are, rather, well-defined camps that are actively working towards conflicting aims, and if we do not align ourselves with one of them, the most powerful side will simply swallow up our highly nuanced neutrality and convert it into support for its own hegemonic project. Ultimately, the stance of agnostic doubt belongs to an individualist and individualizing logic, which disempowers and blinds people from working together towards shared objectives.

But to commit ourselves to a collective movement does not mean we must eschew all uncertainties or ambivalences. Whether it is the ethics and politics of anticolonial resistance, the demands of global solidarity, the strategic considerations of political mobilization, the historical and philosophical concerns surrounding Zionism and antisemitism, or any number of other questions and contestations, there are inevitably a multitude of issues that supporters of Palestinian liberation will struggle with in some way or another. It can indeed be important and constructive to acknowledge and sit with our uncertainties, as part of cultivating the kind of communities that mobilize collective action.

This is not to return to the triumphant, prescriptive valorization of doubt that I have already critiqued, but to offer the more modest recognition that we do not necessarily have all the answers fully worked out, and that there are indeed gray areas in grappling with these issues—as Sean Illing and even Ta-Nehisi Coates would insist.¹³ Nor will there be, given the competing orientations within a broad coalition of those who share a common cause of liberation, a single stance on all issues with which we must agree. But unlike Illing’s more nefarious sentiment that “things are complicated,” this embrace of uncertainty must not justify neglecting a just cause or enshrining an impossible ideal of absolute ideological agreement as a prerequisite for Palestinian advocacy. It is indeed possible to face our ambivalence without falling into the common binary: either suppress our questions and discomforts and simply get in line, or give up altogether on taking action as part of a shared moral and political project.

Whether it is on the Palestine question or beyond it, sustaining and upholding any form of life or collective movement (particularly a counter-hegemonic one) requires this balancing act. As I ultimately propose in my book Dilemmas of Authenticity, drawing on the lessons learned from my American Muslim interlocutors who grapple with doubt: “When we share certain key axes of belonging and vision, we must often fit ourselves into the larger collective’s normative standards, at least provisionally and to some extent, if we want to achieve certain shared goals. We may experience ambivalence about those norms at times, we may grapple with unresolved questions about certain matters, and we may express these reservations and challenge community expectations; yet such ambivalence does not mean that we do not share an overarching commitment or vision that we can work toward, nor does it need to translate into disengagement or paralysis.”¹⁴

In this way, the gray area that Illing celebrates need not remain an individualized arena of abstract pontification. It can be the grounds of thoughtful action. Even as we recognize the complexity and messiness of our world, we can and must uphold our commitments in the gray.

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Notes

1. Consider, for example, some recent engagements with Hannah Arendt’s argument in “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” an essay in her volume Responsibility and Judgment, in the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Arendt argues for the necessity of critical thinking and doubt in exercising moral judgment, in contrast to simply conforming oneself to moral norms. In addition to observing excerpts of this essay posted on social media, see the following essay as an example: Arendt, Gaza and Personal Responsibility Under Genocide.

2. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962), 269-298.

3. Polyani, Personal Knowledge, 277.

4. Michael Polanyi, “The Stability of Beliefs,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 3, no. 11 (November 1952): 227.

5. Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 111.

6. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 295-296.

7. Ibid., 297.

8. Peter L. Berger and Anton C. Zijderveld, In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic (New York: HarperOne/HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), 156.

9. Berger and Zijderveld, In Praise of Doubt, 143.

10. Ibid., 145. Emphasis mine.

11. See also Irfan Ahmad, Religion as Critique: Islamic Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

12. Polyani, Personal Knowledge, 276.

13. Even though Coates is adamant that the moral calculus is unambiguous, he very much dwells on many of the difficulties and complexities of these issues, especially in his book more so than the podcast interview.

14. Zaid Adhami, Dilemmas of Authenticity: The American Muslim Crisis of Faith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025), 236.