THE BLESSINGS OF UNCERTAINTY

Recently, I was asked if any of my spiritual heroes were yogis.

I said, “Yes. One of my key heroes was Yogi Berra, the Hall of Fame catcher for the New York Yankees.”

It is fitting to bring up Yogi Berra since it is spring and the Major League Baseball season has just started. Berra was famous for his “yogi-isms.” They were totally illogical statements that ironically really made sense and drove home a point. They were sort of like wisdom from Alice in Wonderland.

For example, Yogi was asked why he didn’t go to a certain beach anymore. He answered, “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.”  He also said, “When you come to a fork in the road, my advice is that you take it.”

Yogi’s advice about forks in the road really gets to the subject of uncertainty. In life we often face forks in the road, and we need to make a decision. But in reality, there is so much that we don’t know about either possible path. In effect, we have to make a decision based on a high degree of uncertainty.

Maggie Jackson

Author, journalist, and university professor Maggie Jackson has written an excellent book about uncertainty. It is entitled Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. Maggie’s work was nominated for a National Book Award and I can see why!

I remember when teaching economics at George Washington University, I would always remind my students that there is: Certainty, Probability, and Uncertainty. In Certainty we think we know something for sure. If “X” then “Y.”

Well, many of us like Certainty, but this is often not how the real world functions. Many things that we face are in the realm of Probability.  We don’t know for certain that if “X” happens then “Y” will occur. But we do know the probability distribution of the likelihood that if “X” appears then “Y” will follow.  If a woman becomes pregnant, she may not know for certain if it’s a boy or a girl. But she can know the probability that it will be a girl. Quantum mechanics is based on probability and not certainty.

However, for many things in life not only don’t we know for certain what will happen, we don’t even really know the probability distribution. This is the world of “uncertainty.”

For example, during the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy did not know for certain how the Russians would respond to our naval blockade of Cuba. He didn’t even have a probability distribution. Yet President Kennedy came to a critical fork in the road and made a decision based on a lot of uncertainty.

In her book, Maggie Jackson points out how many times— and in so many different areas of our lives— we are facing both uncertainties and forks in the road. Her book explores and documents how, in the areas of psychology and neuroscience, several researchers recently have made pivotal discoveries in dealing with the brain and uncertainty. My favorite studies were the ones that focused on which parts of the brain tend to light up when we have to face uncertain situations.

Ms. Jackson believes that there are several blessings associated with uncertainty. For example, she believes that many of us would rather live in our comfort zones with the sweet sense of certainty. But when we do this we are living with a sense of false security, and we are probably not growing either emotionally or spiritually.

To grow and expand our comfort zone requires us to tolerate— and positively deal with— uncertainty, she says. “No uncertainty, no growth,” is a slogan she often reminds herself about.

But I think there are several other blessings to be gained from uncertainty. Karl Popper was a leading 20th century philosopher who wrote several classic books about the natural and political sciences. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper points out how totalitarian and authoritarian leaders and thinkers down through the ages have claimed a false sense of certainty. In contrast supporters of open and democratic societies have tended to realize and acknowledge the reality of uncertainty, Popper adds.

One of my favorite quotes is by the late jurist Oliver Wendell Homes. He said that for every problem “there is a solution which is neat, simple, and wrong.”

But I also believe that uncertainty plays a major role in the area of Faith. Let’s face it, this thing called Faith really wouldn’t mean that much if we lived in a world of perfect certainty. What makes Faith come alive is when we can turn to it in the face of what appears to us to be a sea of uncertainty.

So I am grateful to Maggie Jackson, Karl Popper, and even Yogi Berra for pointing out the blessings that can come to us from uncertainty.