Microcosmographia lxxii: History of Uncertainty
Cleaning the house every Saturday morning has become my de facto philosophizing time. At first it was just because of the rare chance to focus on a physical task while feeling relatively distant from concerns of more weighty projects. Then I began to associate the motions and rhythms of cleaning with deeper patterns of thought. Now the intellectual mode grasps the brain as soon as the hand grasps the vacuum cleaner.
On a recent cleaning day, my brain decided to synthesize a model of the human condition. It seems to my amateur sense of philosophy that much of what it feels like to be human can be described as layers of certainty and uncertainty about how to live, layered croissant-like in the psyche.
The certainty of nature — Start five hundred million years ago, at the Cambrian Period, for good measure. It’s been plausibly suggested that before this, life was characterized by well-defined evolutionary niches with no variation or freedom of choice in how to live. Behavior for a trilobite was automatic: Do what is most likely to lead to survival and reproduction, without any need for processes like judgement, satisfaction, stress, or suffering. That is, there wasn’t much consciousness to be found on Earth at the time. This manifestation of life represents the ultimate in certainty: brute unconscious determinism — a certainty so certain, in fact, that it isn’t even experienced as certainty, because the whole notion of uncertainty wasn’t even necessary yet. Any adaptation that occurs is in evolutionary time: many orders of magnitude beyond what an individual has any capacity or need to be aware of. Even if any subjective experience is happening at all, it’s likely in the form of a simple like-o-meter: approach what you like; withdraw from what you don’t like; otherwise stay put. A low-consciousness animal in homeostasis isn’t fretful or bored or even content; it just is. (Just look at an idle insect or microbe.) Humans today spend a fair bit of effort trying to get back some semblance of this state via Buddhism, mindfulness, and the like: not worrying about the future; not ruminating on the past; not approaching nor withdrawing; just accepting and existing in the moment.
The uncertainty of adaptability — Humanity has long equated the origin of suffering with the acquisition of knowledge, most famously in the story of original sin in the Garden of Eden, a story still yielding meaning today: “On the day you eat from it, your eyes will be uncovered and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil”. When you live just like the animals, you know nothing and have no need for worry. The next layer in our model, then, is about consciousness, knowledge, and freedom. After billions of years of adapting in evolutionary time over the course of thousands of generations, humans developed a sophisticated enough mind to begin to adapt within the span of one lifetime. People and tribes found themselves in new environments, via expansion or migration or cataclysm. There was no longer one hardwired way to live, but an infinity of possibilities. Savannah? Sure. Jungle? Desert? Tundra? Alpine? Steppe? Humans said bring it on. Humans figured it out. This made us outrageously successful at surviving (and outcompeting our hominid cousins) but also introduced, for the first time, the inevitability of uncertainty. If you could live anywhere, and eat anything, and arrange your tribe in any social configuration, which is best? What way of life is correct? Anthropology and evolutionary psychology may offer what seem to be suggestions about how we are “meant” to live, from the most foundational eons of human history when persistent enough effects left traces in our mental wiring. But Kahneman and Haidt point out that much of that old wiring is bogus anymore. And Graeber and Wengrow point out that there is no single correct way to organize human society; humanity is more about improvising on top of an obsolete ancient nature than about adhering to a correct one.
The certainty of society — So what did we do? We erected structures of absolute certainty as to how life must be lived. Each tribe had its own sacred things, places, foods, and practices; and their taboo counterparts. For at least as long as we have had recorded history, societies have been prescribing how life is to be lived, down to the micro-decisions of each individual member. Obey the precepts of the one official religion. Behave in accordance with the code of etiquette, politeness, and tradition. Inherit the profession of your parents. Marry appropriately to your station and reinstantiate your family for another generation. For better or for worse, there was an unambiguously correct way to live. For farmers and nobles alike, there was little room for wondering about whether there might be a better way. We developed moral foundations about the sacred and the taboo, loyalty to the tribe, and respect for authority. This order represents another devil’s bargain on top of the previous one: we could patch over most of the uncertainty of adaptability by agreeing to live our entire lives within strictly defined constraints. The paradox, then, is that the very same adaptability allowed some of us to thrive and achieve sublime heights even within those strict constraints.
The uncertainty of freedom — Life since modernity, and especially post-modernity, precipitated by industrialization, has been a process of disassembling those certainties (nature, hierarchy, ceremony, religion, and even the idea of progress toward a better order) to create ever more freedom. (Right about here is where I start to acutely feel the sense that I’m writing a sophomoric term paper for an undergrad class in a field where I have no particular context nor expertise. Still I soldier on.) We largely mitigated, for much of the people much of the time, much of what had preoccupied us since being in a state of nature: hunger, exposure, disease, and violence. In doing so, we also eliminated much of what the certainty of society was needed for, to keep everyone productively and predictably perpetuating order. As that freedom has increased, so has atomization into an individual-focused society, and uncertainty about what is good. We’ve found ourselves with ever fussier worries. We can spend our whole lives faffing around up in the higher tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy, because the lower tiers have been so locked-in for so long. What kind of person should I be? What job should I do? Where in the country, or the world, should I live? Who should I marry, if anyone? What hobbies should I pursue? Which particular hill should I fight to the death on in the inscrutable holy wars occurring within that hobby?
This has been happening over the course of the several generations since modernity began. The art of the 20th century can be seen as a slow procession of ever more anxious grappling with the disintegration of millennia of certainty. It doesn’t feel like it, because from within any given generation we’re set up to see only about one or two prior generations and base our understanding of the world on them, but for the past few generations this approach has diminished almost to meaninglessness. All we get is a vague sense that things used to be “better”, based on a perception that people back then seemed to have things somewhat more “figured out”, based on their having lived earlier on in the disintegration process. We have collectively no idea how to live.
Build your own certainty — The central realization for me in mapping out this model is that there is no correct way to live. There are certainly better and worse ways, given one’s disposition and environment. But no one has a monopoly on defining it for anyone else, anymore. We feel in our genes that there ought to be a certain and correct way to live. We long for one, and we feel anxious and guilty in its absence, especially if we’re responsible for someone of the next generation. Am I doing it right? Am I raising my children right? Shouldn’t I be doing it more like my parents and grandparents did? Shouldn’t I be doing it more like this or that traditional society that has been shown to have healthy, competent children? Shouldn’t I be doing it more like this or that historical era that produced great people?
It turns out that yes, there is plenty to learn from psychology, history, anthropology, sociology, religion, tradition, and the communities around us: the pieces that have sifted out of the long, slow deconstruction of everything. The entire genre of self-help, in books and online, exists to offer systems and tools of the kinds that people crave, that just might prove to be the skeleton key needed to complete their worldview and lifestyle. But ultimately, there is no single answer to be found. The assembling of a sufficiently complex and satisfying answer to what is true and good is up to each of us individually, and takes a lifetime. Whether we are cut out for it or not, whether it’s fair to ask this of every individual or not, each of us is on the hook to piece together some coherent sense of certainty about how to live, from the material available. Or to invent new material when what’s already there is insufficient.