Chapter 12 is a lesson in "faithfulness to life"
Chapter 12 is a lesson in "faithfulness to life"
with gratitude to Joanna Macy, Virginia Woolf and Alfred Einstein.
This is the twelfth chapter in my book, which I’m serialising here on Substack. If you’re new to this, you can start at the beginning and navigate around the first 11 chapters using this Table of Contents. The first part of every chapter is available for everyone. If you would love to read the whole thing, access the audio version at the bottom, and join in the wild, beautiful community conversation afterwards, you can…
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I 😍 UNCERTAINTY
“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
- Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured.”
- Author, Tove Jansson
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“When I cannot say all is well, or all is known, help me say all is held, so I never believe all is lost”.
- Jen Willhoite (a quote that
alerted me to in the comments)*
I try not to ask how bad things will get. Or what will happen in 5, 10, 50 years. Or who will fix things. They are questions that I feel go nowhere now.
No one knows. The prediction models of yore are redundant.
I try to ask instead, Could this be beautiful? Could I make it more beautiful? And who am I becoming?
Meg Wheatley says something similar, and I undoubtedly draw my thinking from hers. In our interview, she said, “When people ask what’s going to happen, I say they’re asking the wrong question. The question is, Who do we choose to be?” The metamodernist writer
also insists on shifting our enquiry from absolutes. The question for “a good apocalyptarian”, he says, is not, “Will there be an apocalypse or not? The new question is: How do we live under the conditions of the apocalyptic mood?”*
The conditions of our “mood” are wholly uncertain. Indeed, if we had to be certain about anything, it’s only that uncertainty is now happening.
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In This One Wild and Precious Life I wrote a chapter inviting us all to “get cool with uncertainty” as the climate crisis unfurled. Wobbly times were ahead and we needed to steel ourselves against them, I argued. I cited studies that found today’s young people have a frighteningly diminished ability to deal with ambiguity and risk right as the world needs such resilience and accompanying creativity and agility. I went to all kinds of tip-toeing trouble to outline how we can build our uncertainty muscle, you know so that we could manage, maybe even “fix”, the climate.
I now ramp up the imperative. We must become fiercely warrior-like in our ability to sit eyebrow-deep in uncertainty, ambiguity, confusion and the unknown. We have little choice but to embrace and to hold in our vulnerable beings all the contradictions, paradoxes and even hypocrisies. Because here we are, in it, up to our eyebrows.
I go further. To really do this crazy thing, we’d do well to delight in uncertainty.
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As I finish writing this chapter my friend JP calls. He works in the renewable energy space and follows this conversation here with critical interest. We like to challenge each other’s certainty (and uncertainty). JP has been at New York Climate Week and he tells me he’s scared. He now thinks AI sentience is a bigger threat than climate collapse (in that it will come sooner), but that it could also solve many of the hurdles to cutting emissions. I thought much the same, until I dug deeper for the collapse and blame chapters. We wrangled back and forth on the competing finer points of whether tech will solve the battery and resources issues inherent in the renewable energy switch-er-oo; whether it can do so without destroying the planet in the process; whether there are actually enough financially accessible fossil fuels to pull it off; and whether it can all happen in time. Oh, and whether, at the deeper, moral level, it should be done if it only enables humans to continue their overlord-ish BAU consuming and squandering of resources. And so on, so forth.
Earlier that day, I’d also interviewed Christiana Figueres, the former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2010-2016) responsible for bringing the Paris Agreement to the world back in 20151. She had also just returned from Climate Week. The interview was uncomfortable. Christiana was determined in her enthusiasm for tech fixes, the renewable energy economy and the belief that we can still choose such a future.
I suddenly felt very…uncertain. What if I have it wrong? What if there is still “hope”?
Of course it was perfect that I’d be hit with this authoritative pushback as I embarked on this very Uncertainty chapter that you’re now reading. I had to smile.
I lay on the floor for a bit in the dark listening to the groan of my fridge and I realised, none of us are saying we know what will happen. All three of us - JP, Christiana and I - indeed agree that the probabilities are stacked against us. And that no matter what, life is going to be shittier, more uncomfortable, more volatile, more alien, more polarised and… more uncertain. Misinformation, fake news, AI-generated imagery, the algorithms - they will continue to drag truth and solid intellectual ground even further out to sea. The challenge going forward will be to work from a set point of “not knowing”, to adjust our positions, to not stay rigidly attached to what we thought should’ve happened, or hoped could’ve happened. And we will need to stay vigilantly alive to where our emphasis and focus should be, where our attention and energy should be spent.
And so, I go back to one of my OG points. How we handle this uncertainty should be our focus, particularly in this liminal time - this time between worlds - when we…just…don’t…know. Because the degree to which things do become shittier and more volatile and unliveable will be determined by how we handle it.
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The precocious Romantic poet John Keats was in his twenties when he lashed out at his (much older) peers for their materialist thinking and coined the term “negative capability”. Negative capability is “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I adore the particular use of “irritable”. Because I do in fact get irritable when I feel the tug to justify the mysterious.
Such a capacity, wrote Keats, was what was required for artists to pursue ideals of beauty, perfection and sublimity. As Albert Einstein wrote, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious”. To access it we need to delight in uncertainty.
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Researchers have since tried to pinpoint how this negative capability, or what’s also called uncertainty tolerance, works. I find this cognitive stuff interesting, to a point. So a brief overview: When we encounter something unexpected, unknown or uncertain, a neural “prediction error” signals a mismatch in our brains between what we assume should occur and what our senses tell us. There are two routes we can take. We can resist and let discomfort take over. Ohio State researchers found those who sink into uncertainty intolerance see unknowns as a threat rather than a worthwhile challenge to rise to, demand predictability and engage in binary thinking. During the pandemic, people who ranked high in uncertainty intolerance tests were associated with maladaptive coping responses such as denial and substance abuse, a British study found. It will come as no surprise leading psychologists have found that uncertainty intolerance is rising dramatically.
Our culture encourages this grasping at certitude and we grasp further the more that the dissonance around us increases. The post-industrial, neoliberal set-up obliges us to talk and act as if we know what we are doing. Even exciting, new, ideas (that are invariably complex, because now all things are increasingly complex), are condescended to three-step YouTube video hacks and 12 Rules for Life bedside bibles, which have been shown to give struggling humans a problematically inflated sense of understanding.
Me, I have to watch myself with this tendency. I’ve developed seductive techniques over decades of being a journalist, a storyteller and self-anointed defender of things. I can often convince others - and myself - of whatever I set my mind to because I have the language, I’ve mastered the certitude game. As I flagged in the last chapter, I have to check my smugness, observe my desire to seek safety in “rightness” and seek out challenges to my thinking.