Column | Praise of uncertainty

In the early evening I walk on the quiet country road, the nearby sound of my shoe soles on the road, the low orange sunlight on cows, bushes, buttercups, the sky still warm after the warm spring day, but when walking through sometimes also suddenly cold again, if a green damp coolness appears from the grass and the bushes. It is like when you swim in the sea, I think, sometimes wonderfully in lukewarm water and then suddenly you swim such a coolness. Undoubtedly that is to explain in the large, those layers of different temperatures that sometimes are not neatly horizontal, and perhaps that is, just like the green coolness, sometimes and sometimes does not rise from the road verges and the meadows. But who could tell you, let alone predict, where and when those coolnesses and those heats arise exactly? Many things can be explained in the large and to be placed in models, but not in small. Every grassel moves due to countless causes and consequences, too much to ever find. There is chaos under the warm cover layer of causes and consequences.

It always gives me a pleasant feeling that so much cannot be seen, is not known, for us people. There are phenomena that we are not noticed by animals, but they also do not oversee everything.

Uncertainty does not have a good name. We want to know things, understand, prefer to be able to provide and we would like to pretend we can – just take the commonly used word ‘future -proof’. As if we know what that future looks like. Of course we have an idea, but we only know to a certain extent how it will go, how much we, to have guidance, also pretend that it is different.

Yet there are also limits for the need for guidance. I sometimes ask a good friend, you sometimes ask meaningless questions, just to be able to think together about how you look at life: if you could find out when you would die, would you like that?

The answer, after all kinds of considerations (and they are precisely the pleasure of the conversation, but I now skip them) is always: no. What is interesting: most people crave certainty, but apparently – I not only derive from this one measly example – I have to get a certain degree of and security. Few love completely determinism. That is, as a theory, it is reassuring to think that everything consists of causes and consequences that are understandable if you do your best and/or are a brilliant physicist. But hardly anyone wants every action to be certain and cannot be other than the way.

I do believe that every action cannot be other than the way, that is, afterwards. In retrospect it could never be different than that, and those millions of causes led to this outcome. But there is nothing to say about it in advance and the warm and cold waves on the road remain unpredictable.

We now live par excellence in what people call ‘uncertain times’. As insecure as all times, but with more potential for trouble. Do we want to know how this ends and continues? It is not for nothing that Kassandra was not believed. Nobody wants to know that disaster will come, we live from, as Wislawa Szymborska makes her Kassandra think in a poem ‘some moist hope’ that keeps us alive, makes it curious.

Oh uncertainty. Don’t threaten us too much, then we will always love you.

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