I have only recently begun to celebrate ‘not being sure’. It is a tremendously liberating experience – uncertainty! Gone are the rigorous truths and the mendacious confidence when faced with questions that belie simple knowledge. “Is now a good time to invest in real estate?” “What’s a quark?”, “Should I change jobs?” “Is there life after death?” Now, I simply don’t know. And that’s OK! This wonderful epiphany swept upon me like a fresh breeze of the first rain. And with it came this huge grin on my face any time somebody asks me a difficult question. I don’t have to know all the answers. What at one time was unthinkable for a control-freak like me is now second nature – I don’t know! Who’d have thunk not knowing could be this powerful!
Bertrand Russell’s famous aphorism “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts” dulls the edge of knowingly wanting to be the latter while unknowingly carrying the burden of the former. Simply having our consciousness raised enough to understand the Dunning-Kruger effect makes it doubly entertaining when we come across people suffering, and causing suffering, while wallowing at its wrong end.
Sure, knowing is advantageous and helped keep our ancestors alive enough to reproduce. Knowledge helps us navigate the world we live in with its circumstances and agents. It shapes the direction of our actions in ways that are advantageous to us in a competitive environment. Not knowing, on the other hand, is intuitively uncomfortable and dangerous. What we have no knowledge of can carry enough latent agency to kill or maim from the time we first encounter it to the time we learn enough about it to form a response. We are afraid of that which we don’t know. It resonates in our current anthropological state in our racism, homophobia and general bigotry against the strange. In days of yore, lack of knowledge was more fatal than it is now. Even now, those in the know are more successful than the ones that are not.
I’m not rooting for a state of lack of knowledge. Rather, I hold out on the benefits of a lack of certainty. True knowledge’s strength is its uncertainty. I was watching Disney’s ‘Moana‘ recently with my 6-year-old and the lesson I came away from it was that it is far more life-affirming to be adventurers seeking out new islands to populate than stagnate and waste away on the one we are safely on. And in our next weekly father-daughter movie time, the movie we picked was ‘Frozen 2‘ in which the theme song is ‘Into the Unknown’. What a one-two wallop to wake someone up from a ‘comfort’ slumber of familiar knowledge!
Everyone I’ve ever loved is here within these walls; I’m sorry, secret siren, but I’m blocking out your calls. – Into the Unknown (Kristen Anderson-Lopez/Robert Lopez)
The comfortable is all around us. And what is around us is comfortable. The sense of safety of the familiar is powerful. Everyone and everything you respect is within bounds of what is commonly known. The unknown is calling but we do not heed easily. There are walls of self- and community-imposed stricture that will need scaling or breaching. It requires motivation, courage and a willingness to encounter rebuke to be able to answer the call of knowledge and education. In answering difficult questions with an ‘I don’t know’ we shape ourselves into seeking out answers and in doing so opening up our horizons.
What I’m am standing against is the certitude humans display while within these safe boundaries of things without! Knowledge or degree of confidence in a belief is a strange thing within a brain. It exists as delicately as a whiff of a fragrance while yet being solid as a rock. We easily go through life knowing something to be so true that it defines you. Effectively that makes every person who has an opinion about something to be right in their own eyes and it would be corrupt of them to believe the opposite. There are people who have never considered an aspect of their normal life through an alternate lens. So there is no choice involved… whatever is for them just is! Unless there’s a loss of freedom or persecution, such minds wouldn’t begin to think of changing. For someone to be fortunate, brave and open-minded enough to learn so much about something that they are able to see a different paradigm than the one that they are used to is a huge epistemic step! I salute these folks! Our world needs more of this (Dunning-Kruger again!) phenomenon happening.
And when we do study something enough that it resonates within us to change a behavior pattern, knowledge has successfully expanded us. One such instance happened to me when my daughter played the ‘why’ game with me after asking me why mommy likes her gold jewelry so much. Because gold is precious. Why? Because people pay lots of money for it. Why? Because it is rare. Why? Because it is a noble metal. Why? Because it doesn’t react with air or change with heat? Why? I don’t know, sweetie.
I went on to study more about this why and the answer blew my mind! Gold, as an element on the periodic table, is not easy to build with normal heat and pressure conditions of the universe and is usually assembled in only the most furious and violent of conditions in the cosmos and those are supernova explosions – very high temperatures, superlative pressure and other such unimaginable quirks of cosmic happenstance at the deaths of the most massive stars. And gold is precious because those conditions only exist for less than one minute per galaxy per century.
Now I know and gold takes on a whole new paradigm of precious!
My 2 cents 