The inevitability of uncertainty

The Inevitability of Uncertainty

One of the main reasons to “give in” to the lure of perfectibility is the desire for certitude. This need for certainty is ancient.  In Traditional societies, as the clan was huddled together around the hearth, the darkness just beyond the light thrown by our fires was filled with scary things, wild noises, unexplained deaths, and worst of all, the mysterious, the unknowable.  We made up stories or myths to make ourselves feel more at ease with the presence of this darkness. 

If myths are the stories we tell ourselves to explain our experiences at the boundary of the known and the unknowable, at the boundary of the hearth and the wilderness, then we made up myths that placed us, that explained us, that gave our lives meaning.  We told these stories to our children and to their children.  Our children’s children retold the stories.  At some point, we wrote those stories down, and they became our Book.  These stories capture our best understanding, in a world of obvious uncertainty, what it means to lead a Good life.

Modernity challenged those stories.  Modernity is the belief in the ability of reason and science to address our needs.  Modernists are the heirs to medieval Arab scientists, to Galileo, Descartes and Newton,  the followers of the Enlightenment, the scientists, technologists and builders of the Century of Progress.  Modernity said that reason and technology were all we needed to explain, to survive, to prosper.  Myths became quaint.  We taught our children about the physical world.  We invented the social sciences, and we offered each other a path into permanent light, where there would be no darkness, no mystery, only science and understanding and rationally supportable conclusions.  People bought lots of books by Dawkins and Harris, who challenged and attempted to vanquish once and for all the “dangerous” myths of Traditionalism.

Post-Modernity

But the promise of modernity has, I believe, petered out.  Our complex social, economic, and geopolitical problems resisted easy technological fixes.  The darkness of prejudice, of power-madness, of greed, of tribalism were unavoidable.  We could fight them, and we did.  But they never went away completely, and their rebirth in every generation underscored the magnitude of the over-promise that was modernity.  Science and reason were very important, but ultimately not enough. 

We fought a World War that started in the tribalism of the Balkan Peninsula.   It was to be the last war.  Our understanding of the science of economics was not sufficient to prevent a world wide depression of stunning proportions.  And Modernity didn’t reckon with fascism and imperialism, Soviet expansionism, or fanatical jihadism.  We viewed pictures of the emaciated, skeleton-like survivors of a monumental horror that will never be explainable.  We hired “the best and the brightest” from industry to apply their technology to the waging of a war in post-colonial Indochina, only to spend millions of lives proving modernity’s inefficacy, and at the cost of our government’s credibility.  

The ultimate accomplishment of modernity, standing on another planet, was a heroic achievement, but left us no better off in confronting poverty and prejudice in the country to which the astronauts returned.  At the dawn of the 21st Century, tribal extremists employed one of the most expensive products our technology produces to lay low twin symbols of our modern world.

Uncertainty is inevitable

The lesson of the 20th Century, say the post-modernists, is that uncertainty is inevitable, that the ultimate Truths of our existence can not be known with certitude.  For the Traditionalist, all Truths were revealed, first by the Elders, and then by their Book.  For the Modernists, all Truths were the inevitable product of science.  Post-modernists say that all Truths are achieved neither by revelation nor by rational deduction. 

We are never going to explain everything.  We are simply going to have to live in a world where some things are explainable and fixable, and some things are mysterious and intractable, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to make perfect sense of which problem is which.  The uncertainty that is the ground of post-modernity is disquieting for many and completely unacceptable for too many.  We are so much more powerful than our ancestors huddled about the hearth, but for us, too, the darkness that cloaks the wild, the mysterious, is a source of fear.

Many who hear this discussion have a similar reaction to those who read Ehrenfeld’s critique of perfectibility as a denial of progress.  If we can’t know for certain all Truths, they say, then we can’t know that anything is true.  Everything, including moral precepts, must be relative. No, says Stanley Fish.  Even though there is no bedrock, no “privileged” position from which all wisdom certainly flows, there is still wisdom, there are still moral values.  It’s just that, from now on, our moral truths will come with bounds of uncertainty that reason and logic can’t reduce to zero.  This is not all bad since, as we will see, the line between moral understanding and moral certitude is the same as the line between righteousness and self-righteousness.  

Modernity overthrew Tradition with the promises of completeness, safety, certitude.  But it didn’t fulfill its promise.  Facing Post-Modernity requires acceptance of the inevitability of uncertainty, that there are no rules, that there is no Rulebook.