PRoBitY: Can We Be Honest About What We Believe?

The Quiet Refusal to Pretend

I have been thinking about an old word.

Probity.

It means integrity. Honesty. Moral uprightness. But the more I sit with it, the more I think there is something quieter inside the word. A refusal to pretend. A willingness to be honest about what we believe, what we don't believe, and what we simply don't know.

That last part interests me.

We often talk about political disagreement as if the problem is that people believe different things. But perhaps the more interesting question is how honestly we arrived at those beliefs in the first place.

Friedrich Nietzsche had little patience for beliefs that people continued to hold simply because they were comforting or inherited. He was deeply concerned with what he called intellectual conscience—the willingness to examine the reasons behind what we believe rather than simply accepting beliefs without examining them.

That surprised me when I first encountered it.

I tend to think of belief and unbelief as opposing positions. One person believes. Another doesn't. One has faith. The other demands evidence.

But Nietzsche introduces another question that sits underneath both:

Are we being honest with ourselves?

Then there is Blaise Pascal.

Pascal would probably agree that honesty matters, but he would take the question somewhere else. Reason alone, for him, could not settle questions about God. There was room for mystery, faith, and for something beyond what we can prove.

Two men.

Two radically different conclusions.

Yet both seem to take truth seriously.

That tension interests me more than choosing between them.

What Does It Mean to Be Honest About What We Believe?

This is where I find myself returning to Triptych Dialogue.

I've never wanted the people I interview to agree with me. If anything, the interesting conversations are usually the ones where they don't.

When I approach a stranger and ask my three questions about American politics, I'm not trying to measure their ideology. I'm trying to hear how they make sense of the world.

And increasingly, I find myself listening for something beyond the answer.

Probity.

Can someone speak honestly without performing for the people they imagine are listening?

Can they acknowledge uncertainty?

Can they say, "I don't know"?

Can they recognize that something they once believed might no longer make sense to them?

Can they surprise themselves?

Sometimes they do.

Sometimes I do.

That last question may be the harder one.

The Problem With Certainty

We live in a culture that rewards certainty.

Social media makes it easy to announce what we think before we've had much time to think about it. Political tribes give us ready-made positions. Religious traditions can give us answers before we've asked the questions. Algorithms surround us with people who reinforce what we already believe.

And then we defend those beliefs.

I do it too.

I've had conversations through Triptych Dialogue where I've felt the immediate desire to correct someone. I know that feeling well. Someone says something I believe is obviously wrong, and suddenly my attention moves away from the person and toward the argument.

I want to win.

But what happens when winning becomes more important than understanding?

Perhaps integrity isn't measured by how tightly we hold our beliefs.

Perhaps it is measured by how honestly we examine them.

That doesn't mean abandoning conviction. It doesn't mean treating every position as equally valid. It doesn't mean that truth is simply whatever feels true to each of us.

It means being willing to look at our own certainty.

To ask where it came from.

And to consider whether we would still hold it if we weren't surrounded by everyone who already agrees with us.

Pascal and Nietzsche in the Same Conversation

I find something useful in placing Pascal and Nietzsche beside one another, even though they arrived at such different places.

Pascal reminds me not to dismiss mystery too quickly.

Nietzsche reminds me not to embrace certainty too easily.

Neither offers much comfort.

Both demand something from the individual.

And perhaps that is what interests me about them in relation to dialogue.

When I meet someone whose politics are completely different from mine, I'm not necessarily interested in deciding whether they are right or wrong during our conversation.

I'm interested in whether they have wrestled with their convictions.

Where did they come from?

What experiences shaped them?

Have they ever questioned them?

Have they listened to someone who disagrees?

And are they willing to admit what they don't know?

These questions don't make disagreement disappear.

They may not even make the conversation easier.

But they can change the nature of the encounter.

The person in front of me becomes less like a position I need to defeat and more like a person whose thinking I am trying to understand.

The Courage to Change Your Mind

There is something strange about changing our minds.

We often experience it as weakness.

We've invested so much in a belief that admitting doubt can feel like admitting that we were foolish. So we defend the belief more strongly. We find another argument. We search for another article. We surround ourselves with people who can reassure us that we were right all along.

But maybe changing your mind isn't a failure of integrity.

Maybe sometimes it is an expression of it.

I don't mean changing our minds every time someone challenges us. That would simply be another form of intellectual laziness.

I mean being willing to let an idea change when our experience, our reasoning, or our understanding changes.

That requires a certain kind of humility.

And perhaps humility is where probity begins.

A Different Kind of Dialogue

This is why I'm increasingly interested in the space between certainty and uncertainty.

Triptych Dialogue isn't an attempt to create consensus.

It isn't about converting people.

And it isn't about pretending that disagreement doesn't matter.

It is an experiment in whether two people can remain honest in the presence of disagreement.

Sometimes that means saying, I don't agree with you.

Sometimes it means saying, I don't know.

Sometimes it means realizing that I have been listening only long enough to find the next thing I want to say.

And sometimes it means discovering that the person I thought I understood is more complicated than the category I had placed them in.

Maybe that is part of what I am looking for when I talk with strangers.

Not agreement.

Not even necessarily common ground.

Something more fragile.

A moment when neither person needs to perform.

A moment when we can admit what we believe, what we doubt, and what we don't yet understand.

That, to me, is probity.

And perhaps in a world overflowing with opinions, the willingness to be honest about what we don't know is one of the quietest forms of courage we still have.