How to Write When You’re Wrong.

I have a lot of ideas. But every one of them is couched in ignorance. Every one of them is in some way wrong.

That’s true of all writers. That’s true of all people. Period. With diligence and luck the ignorance recedes. But the terrain is never entirely clear. It just isn’t. It never will be.

Even if the terrain were clear, a single piece of writing couldn’t capture all of the contingencies and exceptions needed to fully elucidate fundamentally irreducible reality. An entire lifetime of writing couldn’t capture it.

But we write regardless.

I hope that my written thoughts are useful and novel. But recognize that they’re incomplete. Necessarily. And they’re subject to revision, as all assertion and analysis should be. All thought should be.

Bertrand Russel said “everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”

That this is true — that precision is harder than it looks — should make all of us read with a little more compassion. Nuance and ambiguity make any attempt to explain or even describe an impossible task. An infinitely receding horizon.

In his lectures on political philosophy, John Rawls advised his students to read generously. It’s easy to knock down John Locke and depict his theory as groundless propaganda for an emerging merchant class. Karl Marx is a popular target of derision mostly informed by political and socioeconomic events that took place a century after he wrote.

But read generously and you might learn. Appreciate the historical context and understand that every written thought is arbitrarily curtailed and imperfect. You will get more out of it. You will improve. There are no points awarded for dunking on Locke.

And so back to me — and back to you too, if you write. If intellectual titans can’t hold their own, let’s recognize that we can’t either. That makes writing hard. Sometimes impossible.

But it also, in its way, makes writing easier.

Embrace the impossibility of flawless, comprehensive truth. Recognize that your limitations are your perspective. This isn’t to say that you should write irresponsibly. But don’t hide from your limitations or hide your limitations from the world.

Orwell said “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” And so it is. Pretending to ultimate, timeless truth is the mark of poor thinking and worse writing. Gather up your courage. Embrace your perspective. Think deeply and creatively. Write seriously. Write responsibly. And above all write honestly.