Radical acceptance of uncertainty
I wrote an article for a journal a couple years ago considering the concept of “radical uncertainty” as it might bear on the subject matter with which I was most familiar. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a hypothetical scenario in which I were forced to choose my favorite of all my journal articles thus far, I chose that one. It was certainly the most intellectually stimulating (for me, anyway).
Radical uncertainty is a concept in economics going back just over a century. Basically, it means the uncertainty that remains once we’ve employed all the predictive powers of probability (as a mathematical discipline) and whatever relevant data we can bring to bear on attempting a prediction of how the future will go. I’ve written here before about this stuff; I won’t rehash all that. The important bit is that we get ourselves into trouble by refusing to recognize the ineradicable existence of radical uncertainty. We tend to become overconfident in our models and graphs and charts. Why? Because we are so desperate to know what’s going to happen. That’s understandable, but by taking it too far, we cause ourselves a lot of grief.
We also have a strong tendency to look to history for predictive powers. “Doomed to repeat it” and all that. I’m a professional historian and have been for a while and I can assure you that history has far less predictive power than we could wish. In fact, given our limited time alive, I would argue that history is not worth studying for that purpose. History is worth studying for its power to deepen our understanding of being human on Earth in every way. That may not help us predict the future, but it does better-equip us to adapt to it and thrive in it. And yes, we do, like other primates, and some other species, have the ability to transmit learned experience to our young (and to our peers and elders, for that matter), and history obviously has much to contribute there. It is the adaptability of mammals that has made us as successful as we are. Adaptability doesn’t mean prescience. Yes, we may have more prescience than a red deer. But prescience won’t serve any creature as well as adaptability—at least, not in remaining alive and able to reproduce life.
Two concepts related to our yearning for prescience sit in the front of my brain today. One is hope, and the other is despair. They are opposites. It occurs to me—for the first time in almost 57 years—that one actually does not have to choose between the two. (If you figured this out before you could drive, or were legal to drink, you can laugh at me now.)
The reason I didn’t realize this seems obvious now. We are so driven by this yearning to predict the future that we just assume that we have to choose between hope and despair. What I’ve learned from the disaster of this week is that, actually, we don’t, and for myself, I’m convinced that it’s best not to, and I’m going to lay that out as succinctly as I can.
“Hope” is an assumption that there is at least some possibility that the future will turn out the way we want it to. In most real-life cases, it’s more than that; it’s us betting that, somehow, it will. We don’t bet tangible assets, usually, but we do bet emotional energy—frequently, a lot of it. “Despair” is the assumption that the future will not turn out the way we want it to.
The truth is, we don’t know how it will turn out. We never have, and we never will. Sure, we know that everyone will die, but we don’t know when or under what circumstances. We do not have to choose between hope and despair. We can choose, not radical uncertainty exactly, because that’s just a fact, but a radical acceptance of uncertainty. We assume so uncritically that we must choose hope to be healthy and productive that we just keep doing it even when it sends us crashing down time after time with bewildering disappointment—or worse. I would suggest that, the more obstinately and desperately we cling to hope, the more at risk we may be of falling into despair.
I also think that, because we don’t usually realize that there is a third option—because we assume that we have to choose either hope or despair—that if we don’t choose hope, we will be paralyzed. We won’t do anything to try to make our lives and our world better.
If we are choosing despair, that is likely true. But not if we choose radical acceptance of uncertainty.
It occurred to me that choosing radical acceptance of uncertainty does not bring with it apathy, fatalism, defeatism, cynicism, or anything of the like. It does alter the motivation we have for our behavior.
To use a specific example: if I had turned to despair after losing hope this week, I would be adamant that I would never again expend any time or energy doing what I’ve been doing a lot lately—working to support an election campaign. But I don’t need to turn once again to hope to leave my options open—to remain adaptable. And that feels deeply freeing. I could see myself doing that sort of work again in the future, not motivated by the expectation of a certain outcome, but motivated by two things: the satisfaction I got from doing it, and the knowledge that it was the right thing to do. Those two things are, obviously, inseparable, and that’s fine.
This is of course far easier said than done; I’m talking about what is for most of us a lifetime’s deeply-rooted default emotional and psychological habit. But I think it will be well worth the effort. And, like everything else, it will get more natural and automatic with practice.
My wife and I both spent hours of total time watching smart, well-intentioned people with convincing data behind them tell us for a while that this was all going to turn out well. We added to that our hope that people were basically good and could reason and could perceive reality at least in a general way, and thus made our hope grow. And every time we did this, we got a little (or big) dopamine hit, and everything made a little more sense, and we could push despair a bit farther way. A whole lot of people, from business consultants to pundits, make a whole lot of money catering to our desperate desire for the false comfort of fooling ourselves into thinking we know what’s going to happen.
That, in hindsight, was not the best use of time and emotional energy, and it made Wednesday morning much harder—and the reality shift now required harder. But, if it taught me what I’m trying to write down here, I suspect it will have been well worth it.
If I could have accepted—really accepted—that I had no idea what was going to happen, and that everyone who thought they did was deluded (which they were), and I had been able to remember, clearly, that humans have a perhaps-pathological aversion to admitting we can’t predict the future no matter how clever we are and how hard we work, I could still have done the work I did—which I don’t regret one whit. But better late than never.
History can be helpful here, but only if we dig into it. On the surface, it is actually quite dangerously deceptive. If you’ve read many of these before, you know how often I bring up “unintended consequences” as a central theme in the history of technology.
Because we know how it turned out—even though we don’t necessarily know why (that’s what historians do; try to figure out why)—history offers us the illusion that the future is predictable if we just know enough of the past and present going into it. It’s only when we get into the real meat of the history of a specific something/somewhere/sometime that we realize just how many things had to go just this way at just this time for the outcome we know happened to happen. So many more things that any one of us can grasp. So, a real historian—or, just an aware person who accepts that this is how history actually works—can push past that illusory veil and realize that what history really has to teach us is the opposite—that reality is too complex for us to be able to use the past and present to predict the future. Our weather models are so sophisticated. We’ve invested so much time and brain power and computer power and historical data into them. But they still make mistakes, because they can’t incorporate all the realities that determine what happens. That doesn’t make them useless, of course. It just means we can only trust them so much. The same applies to history.
My wife once asked our friend Steve the biologist this question. If humans just suddenly disappeared, but all the conditions around us on Earth remained as ideal for our existence as they are now, would we evolve again? To her mild surprise, his answer was an immediate “no.” The chance of that happening was infinitesimal, given all the variables that had to go just a certain way, over spans of time we cannot grasp, for us to exist. We are the opposite of inevitable, and so are the things we call “human affairs.”
To those who would protest that they must have hope to live, I would just ask that they reconsider that assumption, given that I’ve made the case that moving beyond hope does not require taking up despair. What if we practiced conscientiously, to the point where our deltoids became visibly better-developed from shrugging our shoulders so often—any time we asked ourselves, or someone else asked us, what was going to happen?
I strongly suspect that another valuable benefit of this practice would be the ability to really do what we always pay lip service to—living in the present.
Does the “moral arc of the universe bend toward justice,” as King believed? I have no idea, and I never will. It’s best that I make no assumption either way. I’ll do what I think is right—as long as I’m willing to bear whatever I think the cost of that will be—solely because I think it’s right. When I send an idea or thought to one of my kids that I really think will help them, I have no idea whether it will or not, because they control that, not me. Learning, over time, to accept that—really accept it, not just tolerate it like a persistent mild headache—really let it go—was, I think, one of the most advanced bits of human-ing I’ve done. All I need to do now is apply that comprehensively, and I’ll have achieved radical acceptance of uncertainty.
PS I won’t spoil it for you by telling you why it’s relevant, but I highly recommend watching the movie My Old Ass, which just came out.