Uncertainty

I decided to not read Embracing Uncertainty by Margaret Heffernan in the end and not because I knew it all, nor was an amazing, artistic soul or was fully up on uncertainty itself.

It was because, more so for me and my partially-sightedness, the book I read was poorly typeset in its general chapters, but just about readable, and shockingly typeset in its ‘artistic filler’ chapters which I wasn’t able to comfortably read and so didn’t.

I’d bought the paperback of it (from a bookstore) as I could then pass it on or donate it to charity after I had finished it (which I will still do) and didn’t purchase a digital form as you cannot do much with that unless it’s via BrrowBox and the library you’re with has it available (of which my local library has no books by Margaret Heffernan, digital or physical, anyway!).

It did seem to me after reading the prologue and the few snippets I snatched on random flicks and reading the book’s epilogue that there were some similarities to Margaret Heffernan’s book Uncharted, of which I had recently read but obviously, in this Uncertainty title were more attuned to the arts, the creative and somewhat (or mostly?!) unknown beauty and exhilaration of potential and possibility our world needs more of, as she implies in her writing.

Anyway, here are some good words from the prologues that rang true for me and that you should definitely take the time to read and appreciate . . .

Learning one new truth doesn’t automatically cancel the old one. Such binary thinking militates against learning and there is good evidence that resisting binaries leads to better insights and decision making.¹⁶ ‘Reality is the ensemble of all these things’, he argues. ‘We understand reality by looking at the reality between things.’ Once you reject simple binaries in favour of the true complexity of life, reality is no longer a question of whether the men in the caves or the shadows on the walls are real. Both are real. Both stand in relationship to one another. To reject uncertainty would be to accept the end of inquiry. To reject uncertainty would be to turn one’s back on what is true.

Most famous for his loop quantum gravity theory, [Carlo] Rovelli can’t be sure whether he is right or wrong, and he may not find out in his lifetime. ‘The search for knowledge’, he insists, ‘is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty’.¹⁷ While politicians may talk about ‘The Science’ as if it were a solid bedrock of certainty, scientists themselves acknowledge that science is only the best we know . . . so far. The same might be said for all disciplines: history, poetry, astronomy, painting, geology. ‘Between full ignorance and total certainty’, Rovelli says, ‘is a vast intermediate space where we conduct our lives.’¹⁸

[...] They [institutions and companies] recognize that their old ways of living and working have become archaic: rigid, too slow, hard to change, slow to adapt and fundamentally anti-creative. Management was designed to reduce risk, but dealing with uncertainty requires taking more: to start before all the information is in (when it may be too late), to think beyond binaries, to imagine more deeply, consider what’s never been thought of before. A painting is not a solution to a problem, nor is a piece of music or a great novel. But the ability to think beyond boundaries, to develop ideas that are more than pat answers to recognized problems, is almost impossible to find in institutions today. But getting ahead of an unknown future demands imagination, creativity, the capacity to think freely and work across disciplines, and the ability and nerve to take action before it’s obviously needed. That’s what artists do all the time.

Yet for the bureaucracies and hierarchies that govern large organizations, this has become almost impossible. Working longer hours won't solve it. The whole rigmarole of performance management isn't delivering either. Precise job descriptions, key performance indicators, targets, goals and incentives work – they do make people do exactly as asked – but these actively militate against creativity, which requires risk taking, thinking about or doing what hasn’t even been thought of yet. Giving people well-defined, straitened paths to follow makes the chances of them coming to work with bright new ideas vanishingly small. Throw in bonuses, precarity and surveillance technology, and conformity is guaranteed. So-called scientific management, a system designed for the certainty of control, is now a recipe for killing creativity, not engendering it.²⁰

Nor do our education systems prepare young people for the future they face. Taught that for each question there is one answer, that identifying it marks them out as clever individuals who will get a chance of more of the same, produces good soldiers but is poor preparation for workplaces that now crave creative thinking, high levels of collaboration and a lifelong passion for learning and exploration. Our 21st-century problems are mostly now being addressed by 20th-century minds, the products of school systems that loathe risk, love rules and routine, and which concertedly defund, disparage and marginalize the arts. Lacking the skills that uncertainty requires, it’s no wonder so many young people feel depressed, frustrated and afraid. It was said of Picasso that he had no use for menus; many today seem unable to think without them.

This is not just an institutional management problem. In the Western world dominated by an efficiency ethos, the overspill of management thinking into our personal lives exhorts us all to become concerted self-maximisers. Not just to quantify our lives (steps, sleep, weight, income, friends), but to develop the habits, modes of thought, communication and existence specified for ‘a superior life product’.²¹ The self-help movement has become [B. F.] Skinner’s acolyte, keeping us on track, on schedule, walking, talking, writing in lockstep, looking more and more the same. We have freedom, we just don’t know how to use it. Cleaving to rigid routines for work, health, family and holidays, we become more anxious and create yokes for ourselves in order to fit everything in. I am frequently reminded of the dancing bears of Bulgaria who, when liberated from a brutal working life into a wildlife refuge, still continue to dance.²²

[...]

The cost of certainty is high: loss of freedom, imagination, agency and autonomy, with no guarantees of human flourishing. While art alone won’t solve all our problems, we stand no chance of addressing them without the open minds and disciplined courage that artists cultivate. If we don’t want to surrender to [B. F.] Skinner's desiccated totalitarian daydream, or to my thought experiment, we will need the adaptive, creative, free minds of artists more than ever.

It’s one thing to have freedom; it’s another thing to know how to use it. And that’s what artists develop. Eyes that are always watching, seeking, picking up on detail and anomalies. Curious minds that wander, drawn to ambiguity, asking questions. With courage and humility, they don’t believe that anything is beneath or beyond interest. With the imagination to experiment, the freedom to think without banisters, the nerve to begin and the stamina to keep going and to change, their work shows them and us who and where we are. Who we might become and where we could go next. These are precisely the qualities that uncertainty demands of us now.

Margaret Heffernan Embracing Uncertainty

. . . and some good words at the end of the book’s epilogue . . .

[...] There is no simple recipe, no single path to the new ways of living and working that could sustain us; we want a proliferation of these now.

Individually, we need to take this to heart, rejecting the salesmanship, propaganda and technologies purporting to save us the trouble of experiencing life for ourselves. Seize the freedoms we have and use them to wander, notice, listen, enjoy developing our own thoughts, exploring new paths, alone and together. Surrender to our native curiosity to try new people, places and ideas and to practise the conversations that now frighten us. The rewards are great: recuperation, resilience, energy, delight and growth. Yes, we need institutional change, but fundamentally we need a mindset shift: less intimidated by uncertainty, recognizing in it our chances for freedom, imagination, connection and possibility.

[...]

Neither fear of uncertainty nor fantasies of perfect control should make us abandon the creative agency we are born with. The great multitude of ideas and styles, subjects and themes, with which artists enrich the world, is, and has always been, as fundamental to human flourishing as diversity is to nature. There is no predetermined script. The reinvigoration of human creativity isn't a small task, but we begin with the necessary ingredients. We just have to use them. And keep going.

Margaret Heffernan Embracing Uncertainty