We Live in Uncertain Times… But Haven’t We Always?

Uncertain Times are bad times. The phrase describes decades of Cold War, the sudden crash of the housing market, years of a pandemic, and the nervous months before an election. When we’re happy, content, or confident, when ominous global powers fall, when the housing market turns around, when vaccines are developed, and when the officials are finally sworn in, the phrase falls out of fashion.

But aren’t all times uncertain?

The phrase Certain Times, by contrast, almost never appears—yet that’s just what Uncertain Times implies: that while sometimes we do not know what will happen, others, we do. It’s comforting: If there is uncertainty, then there must be certainty.

Of course, I know that Uncertain Times is just a shortcut to describe a general feeling of unease; no one is foolish enough to believe they know the future. Or maybe it’s like discombobulated, disgruntled, and disgusted, which seldom, if ever, appear without their prefixes.

But, rightly or wrongly, we do experience certainty. It would be impossible to go about our days if we didn’t: By seven o’clock the sun will be out, when I eat food it will give me energy, when I drink this tea it will not kill me. Certainty is relative. Certainty is also flimsy.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote at some length about the concept of uncertainty, and probed for many years about its possibility, was certain that man would never walk on the moon, rather, could never walk on the moon. Yet, less than twenty years after making his notes that would become On Certainty, Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface. In 1903 The New York Times was sure that manned flight was millions of years away, just weeks before the Wright Brothers took off on the coast of North Carolina.

Certainty, or uncertainty, is a matter of feeling, not fact. Consider the “vibecession” of 2023. Americans were sure the economy was in a sad state when in fact, overall, it was humming along just fine. Despite Wittgenstein’s certitude that we would never blast past the earth’s atmosphere, he was shrewd enough to allow for his own errors. Uncertain enough to be certain about this: “From its seeming to me—or to everyone—to be so, it doesn’t follow that it is so.”

Remedies for uncertainty
Given just how common and recurrent uncertainty is, there are people ready to capitalize on it, and those ready to pay to be rid of it.

Op-ed writers, pundits, religious figures, scholars, consultants, influencers and hot-takers ready to prescribe remedies for all of your feelings of uncertainty: travel preparedness, political influence, literature, advice from football coaches, insurance, environmental sustainability, and self-acceptance. Their advice never seems to be that we should just get used to uncertainty.

Once we consulted oracles and soothsayers, then we looked to prophets and religious figures, we read tea leaves or Tarot cards. And no matter the epoch, we are prone to despots and demagogues ready to create certainty for us. Now we look for it in the big, nebulous sea of data. We implore statisticians to tell us who’s going to win an election or just the baseball game. We never seem to ask them how to just get used to not knowing.

To say that nothing is certain is the old saw of the egg-headed philosopher, but neuroscientists question the plausibility of certainty too. Our sense of certainty, writes the American neurologist Robert A. Burton, is born in the hidden layer, or “the anatomic crossroad where nature and nurture intersect.” What you’re certain about is constructed out of past experiences, what you’ve seen before, heard, tasted, or touched. Those inputs will be different for the next person. In other words: Your certainty is not mine.

“True belief is not identical with knowledge,” writes Wittgenstein’s friend and contemporary G.E. Moore. Likewise, something feeling certain is not identical with it being certain. After all, you may get food poisoning from your breakfast, the Russians may have put radioactive liquid in your tea, the sun may burn itself out.

It may also be that whether one feels certain about heretofore unoccured events has a great deal to do with their confidence in getting their way. To Wittgenstein, “it’s not that on some points men know the truth with perfect certainty. No: perfect certainty is only a matter of their attitude.”

Why we need uncertainty
In the midst of crisis, in the aftermath of a tragedy or unexpected blow, as we approach an unavoidable change, as we wonder what economic and political leaders will do, we find comfort in declaring Uncertain Times. And in doing so, we prepare ourselves to face the outcome, and beg the return of our illusive pal certainty.

It’s quite easy to stomach the idea of living in Uncertain Times. It’s something else entirely different to live in unknowable perpetuity. If we’re uncertain, perhaps we can be made certain, which is why we’re ready to whip out our wallets in exchange for a little confidence, however short-lived.

It could also be that we have come to prefer the paradigm of certainty (and therefore uncertainty). And I don’t mean because it’s horrible to think of another pandemic or another bloody war, but because we reward certainty. Zero-sum thinking about resources, in-group/out-group behaviors, and the good-guy/bad-guy habits of the present social atmosphere lure us to reward the confidence of certainty and its opposite. One does not exist without the other.

How, then, shall we think about a future we do not understand and cannot see? Let us learn to be comfortable with unknowability. We don’t know what will happen next, and we cannot know. We’ve never known. And yet, as a species we survive an uncertain, unpredictable, and indigestible existence. That is the living core. “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next,” wrote Ursula K. LeGuin.

“For ‘I know’ seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as fact,” Wittgenstein wrote. “One always forgets the expression, ‘I thought I knew.’”