It is, I fear, incontrovertible that radical skepticism is not a valid ideology. It is also natural that this should disappoint any learned man – for so many people are wrong about so many facets of life, that skepticism simply must be the default perspective when dealing with others, as a manner of self-defense. But it cannot function alone. A man who describes himself as a skeptic is merely a husk, whose brain is a mirror diverting any idea that wings its way hence.
Inherit the Wind is a so-called message film, nominally about the Scopes trial in 1925, directed by Stanley Kramer. I forget the actor who portrays Jennings Bryan, but Bryan is anyway an afterthought to the central point of the movie – one which strays from history into morality. Darrow is an aging, leonine Spencer Tracy, and Mencken is well-casted as an unusually biting Gene Kelly. The film does not hew to reality: the climactic scene comes after the jury has delivered its unanimous affirmation of guilt –but crucially, Darrow has claimed the minds of the crowd, winning the battle of moral systems that Kramer has set up as the primary conflict of the movie. Thus while Bryan has persecuted Scopes to completion, he believes he has failed to adequately defend God. He attempts to give a final, brimstone-laden speech, and his heart fails in the courtroom. This never happened.
But none of those things is really the point. Kramer has one last blow to land. In the final scene of the movie, Mencken is composing Bryan’s obituary for his newspaper, musing aloud that he is “writing the obituary of a man who died 30 years ago.” He is no more reverent of death than he was of life. Darrow reproves him, gently but firmly – that there was a great spirit in that body, that Bryan had much to give to the world. Eventually Mencken turns on Darrow, calls him a hypocrite. And then Darrow delivers the last lesson of the film. Kramer has set Mencken up as the representative journalist, the conscienceless automaton that observes, reports, and draws his paycheck. The man who knows that the faster the world burns, the better off he will be – the classic hard-broiled skeptic. And Darrow says: you who do not believe anything (oh ye of little faith?), you whose brain reflects ideas more staunchly than any mirror – you will die alone, with nothing. He does not mean physically. He means that skepticism is no true ideology, that if all men were skeptics our society would be less than nothing. “When you go to your grave, there won't be anybody to pull the grass up over your head. Nobody to mourn you. Nobody to give a damn.”
It is easy to be skeptical, and hard to be anything else. Some people seek only to tear down, never to build up, and most of them never realize their error. The world does not realize its error, and someday it will be too late.
But finally Mencken smiles, with one more ready witticism: you, Darrow, you will be there; an idealist to the end. “Who else would defend my right to be lonely?” Mencken has chosen the easy path, and Darrow the difficult, but they both made the choice.
“He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.”
I think you're conflating two senses of skepticism here. Contemporary talk of skepticism is usually really talk about authority; capital-s Skeptics oppose religious authority but accept either scientific consensus or the blathering of pop-science writers as authoritative, depending on whether they're angry teenagers of not; climate change skeptics accept the propaganda of the oil industry as authoritative and reject scientific consensus as liberal propaganda because they watch too much Fox News and haven't read a book since they got out of school or because they make money off the oil industry; that trend in continental philosophy that started around 1968 and ended around when Bruno Latour noticed the climate change denial kooks rejected anything useful to the capitalist class as authoritative on the grounds that knowledge can be identified with power in a much more straightforward way than most people citing the proverb usually mean. It sounds like an epistemological position, but is really a political one; the other side is wants to claim power by making a claiming to have some kind of truth, so you reject their claim to truth. If I interpret your use of "radical skepticism" correctly, it hasn't really been a thing since late antiquity, and it was more about suspending judgment than rejecting anything, the Skeptics just learned how to suspend judgment by learning how to undermine any claim; "don't worry about it, because... and on the other hand ..." at great length.
Not exactly, but sort of. One is true skepticism and one is the modern cynicism of the professional intellectual -- which is not the category climate change denial and all that fall into. Radical skepticism, in the actual sense you mention, is intoxicating but ultimately sort of nihilistic. It does not scale. Cynicism is... sort of similar. Have you seen the movie? I would say Scopes and his students are portrayed as radical skeptics in a very real sense. (They are not equivocators, I'll grant you, but they are in a state of suspended belief.) Mencken, on the other hand, is a pure cynic -- but not a denialist. He's too educated to be that. Maybe it's the difference between rejecting the truth and believing that knowing the truth won't help anyway. EDIT: I think I could use the word cynic more and the word skeptic less, but both have their place here.I think you're conflating two senses of skepticism here.