Uncertainty

Uncertainty can be terrifying. When will the shutdown end? When will there be a vaccine? What should we do now? How many people will die? When will the next pandemic strike? Will it be worse? Those questions, all without certain answers, can strike fear and anxiety like daggers into our viscera.

Certainty, too, though, can be terrifying. Stalinism, Nazism, religious fundamentalism.

Indeed, there is evidence from psychological and sociological studies that we are inclined to prefer authoritarian leaders who demonstrate certainty when we feel particularly uncertain.

Certainty doesn't always lead to a totalitarian vision: it can also lead to the denial of hope. Rather just denounce all possibility than strive for the uncertain fruits of idealism. That way cynicism lies. Or despair. Or the position of the angry, disappointed, disenfranchised critic. As W.B. Yeats wrote, ‘The best lack all conviction / while the worst are full of passionate intensity.'

They may seem two sides of the same coin as, in reaction to uncertainty we can default to a certainty that brooks no opposition and that barricades itself from any doubt, nuance or ambiguity. In reaction to the dissonance caused by uncertainty, we can opt into an existing belief structure and put all our faith there. American evangelicals may believe they are safe through prayer. Staunch capitalist bigwigs might believe that salvation lies in the economy. Green Party advocates focus on the way in which it has been possible to slow carbon emissions - and that's one sure thing to come out of this. Many on the left focus on the way the pandemic hits those already victims of social injustice. So, in answer to, 'What should we do now?' at this stage of the pandemic, we might feel that there is only one sure path out. Or no path at all. We might be right and, ten years down the line, history might see us as right. Or not. A hundred years down the line, a different option that none of us seriously considered might appear blatantly obvious as the best course.

Who knows? Whatever we do or don't do will have some rightness and some wrongness about it. The rightness will be saluted by those who advocated it, the wrongness condemned by those who did not. Such is life. Such are humans.

Maybe there is no single answer. Or maybe there are a host of possible different answers. Or maybe it's a cocktail of complexity.

Doubt for me is not always an uncomfortable place to be. Sure, it's incredibly painful at the point when a decision is required, but as a mental state of holding up a range of possibilities, well, that feels somehow appropriate. However, just like most people, the ego-self wants me to be 'right' and will seek to defend whatever is currently my preferred option. That is a state I hate. I feel genuine self-condemnation at my defensive-aggression or aggressive-defence of an idea. I feel ashamed, profoundly, and that I have genuinely let myself down when, and it happens all too often, I allow that reactive emotional 'I don't like this!' to have its intolerant say. It does that when faced with another's certainty - perhaps reacting to the certainty rather more than to the idea or concept held certain. I flip into faith faced with cynicism and cynicism when faced with faith.

In my own cogitations, though, I feel happy to embrace what the poet John Keats described as negative capability - 'that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason –'. Keats felt that one of the qualities that defined great art was its willingness to accept complexity and uncertainty. Is Othello a good man or a bad man? He is both - and a victim and a killer and a fool and a fine soldier and a man capable of great love and a man capable of great hate. The richness of the text mirrors the plurality of life. The satisfaction lies not in there being an easy answer but in there being a variety of interpretations. Desdemona is wholly good and Iago wholly bad - and though one empathises with her and rails against him, Othello is the character we consider and argue about. It is his portrayal that makes the play so long-lived, so fascinating.

Little tangent here: one of the things I loved in studying English Literature was the way in which certainty and uncertainty play out in texts and in the writer's imagination. Sir Philip Sidney started writing his Arcadia as a straightforward romance. Simple characters, traditional themes. Then he got fired up by the complexity of the character of his villain (whose name I no longer recall), making him rounded and human. At this point the easy answers offered by the traditional form of the romance didn't play out so well. A genre of certainty couldn't contain a character of complexity. The reverse occurs in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. He creates a scene of perfect harmony and balance, these female characters dancing around the queen, an image that felt like the crystallisation of his values and imagination and, that certainty attained, his creativity died. As did he. It seems a similar thing happens in Shakespeare's Late Plays with the ideal of the redemptive daughter acting as the father's salvation.

Maybe both certainty of a solution and certainty of the impossibility of any solution kill progress. To be inspired is to be in a state of ambivalence and flux.

Anyway.

The attitude of uncertainty-as-possibility may be harder to hold on to in real life than in aesthetic projects or in philosophical inquiry, despite the inevitable complexity and uncertainty of existence. We want to control this chaos! Right now, we all want science to come up with solutions. But, consider again, science is a process of investigation, discovery, rebuttals, further questioning and testing and reanalysis. The very beauty of science - and what makes it capable of progress - is its internal recognition that every theory is falsifiable, every answer is contingent. There is no guaranteed end-point of rightness, no absolute certainty. The search for a 'theory of everything' is a Don Quixote quest to turn science into religion or ideology.

Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion offers some important insights on political disagreements, suggesting both that more connects us at the foundation than separates us in terms of policy. More importantly it suggests ways to communicate across the apparent breach. Jordan Peterson and Dan Siegel both contrast chaos and rigidity, to either side, with, between them, a central and idealised space of harmony. Though I rather wonder if one man's harmony isn't all too often another woman's rigidity...

So, with my doubts even about harmony, and my suspicion that uncertainty doesn't of necessity mean chaos, though certainty surely maps onto rigidity, I want to offer up a manifesto for fundamental, unalloyed uncertainty; for openness to new ideas; for curiosity, rather than disgust, in the face of divergence; for a celebration of novelty as well as a praise for tradition.

Of course, action is required - but I'd argue that uncertainty may be a better path to right action than certainty - a topic I plan to delve into further soon. Though my credentials are rather uncertain: I seem to make devastatingly bad decisions when I do feel certain about anything.

And maybe that's why I hold on to the view that uncertainty isn't just the opposite side of the coin to certainty, it is also the precious portal into possibility. It is the place where 'What if?' can happen. It is the tinder for inspiration and the clay for creativity. It is the primeval pond of origination.

Uncertainty could be our launching pad rather than our sinkhole.