In Defense of Uncertainty

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Commentary

I don’t know.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how squeamish does this sentence make you feel?

If the verbiage floating around social media is any indication, 21st century Canadians score pretty high in terms of our intolerance of uncertainty. In fact, we seem to be drunk on certainty, so completely convinced we are right about what’s going on in the Ukraine, why whites can’t help but be racist, why gender is (or is not) fluid, which fats are the healthiest and, of course, the truth about COVID-19. We live fanatically, but possibly unreflectively, by a few simple mantras: “We’re all in this together,” “Trust the experts,” “Follow the science.”

In our culture of certainty, outliers are discouraged, dissenting views are fact-checked into oblivion, and those who question what has been deemed certain are made to run the gauntlet of shame for daring to swim outside of the mainstream.

Rather than acknowledge what we don’t know, we vilify those who try to penetrate the fortress around our well-guarded beliefs and we even fashion legislation—such as Bill C-11 that may regulate user-generated online content or the soon to be reintroduced “hate speech” Bill C-36, for example—that penalize those who stray too far from what is deemed certain.

When was the last time you heard someone say, “I don’t know,” “I wonder?” When was the last time you were asked a non-rhetorical question?

Is our certainty obsession a new development or have we always been this way? How does certainty serve us? What does uncertainty cost us?

These are the questions that keep me up at night. These are the kinds of questions that got me fired and publicly shamed, and that keep me at the periphery of a narrative trying to barrel ahead without me. But they are also the questions that feel very human to me, that bring me into conversation with the most interesting people, and that, at the end of the day, allow me to live comfortably in the land of uncertainty.

Below are my thoughts on our certainty obsession, where it came from, and what it is costing us.

The Certainty Epidemic

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing former Global News control room newscast director Anita Krishna. Our conversation was wide-ranging, but we kept circling back to the theme of uncertainty. In the newsroom in the early days of 2020, she started asking questions about COVID. What happened in Wuhan? Why aren’t we exploring treatment options? Was there an increase in stillbirths at North Vancouver’s Lions Gate Hospital? She said the only response she ever got—which felt more like a recording than a human response—was to be ignored and shut down. The message was that these questions were simply off the table.