Are Americans Finally Ready for Uncertainty? Or Already Over it?

Photo by Austin Hervias on Unsplash

UNCERTAINTY FEELS like the order of the day right now. More than anything, the uncertainty we’re facing feels economic (are we on the verge of a recession? Will our jobs exist in a year?) But the uncertainty runs deep. We’re wondering if the institutions that have supported us (however badly) are on the verge of collapse, including the shape and form of democracy itself. Uncertainty feels real, close, and present. And for many of us, it feels like a bad thing.

It was with this unpleasant sense of uncertainty nagging at me that I recently listened to Sean Illing interview Frances Lee—a Princeton professor, and co-author of a new book called In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. It is, in essence, a critique of what went wrong (socially and politically) in the pandemic response. The authors have been making the rounds, on the podcast circuit. And I’ve seen people arguing about the merits and demerits of the book in my social media circles. So, I’ve heard quite a bit about it. But I thought that Illing pushed back on Lee’s arguments in places where I haven’t heard other interviewers push. And for some reason (maybe because Illing’s podcast is called The Gray Area?), I was really struck by Lee’s emphasis on the power of uncertainty. It made me finally pick up the book.

More than anything, I was struck by what seemed to me a faith in uncertainty—the sense that uncertainty is something to abide by, cultivate, and perhaps even something that we have a deep need for. It felt, oddly, like a message from another time. Was it a message from the past, from a liberalism that no longer exists? Or was it a message from the future?

TYING THINGS UP, at the end of his interview, Illing asks Lee to articulate the most important lesson learned from her study of what went wrong during the pandemic. “What lesson must we absolutely learn, for the next storm?” he asks. “The acknowledgement of uncertainty,” Lee replies. “The willingness to keep learning, and then resist that impulse towards moralized antagonism.” To resist, that is, the impulse to believe—with impulsive conviction—that the person on the opposite side of a debate is not only wrong, but bad. Uncertainty, it would seem, makes us either less moral or less antagonistic.

The power of uncertainty is important to the book. The authors open the first chapter with a 2023 quote from Francis Collins, former director of the NIH. “We failed to say every time there was a recommendation, guys, this is the best we can do right now. It’s a good chance this is wrong. We didn’t say that,” Collins laments. “We did not admit our ignorance and that was a profound mistake.” Subsequently, “we lost a lot of credibility along the way.”

The authors of In Covid’s Wake seem to view this admission as a kind of mantra: it seems to represent precisely what went wrong. And it seems to hold the key to resolving some of the dramatic political polarizations that Covid both exposed and amplified. It seems to explain why no one trusts scientists, academics, and journalists anymore: these people didn’t acknowledge their own uncertainty.

It’s made me ponder the alternative timeline: the one where policy makers facing life and death decisions as the pandemic spread were much more forthcoming and transparent about their own sense of uncertainty—the sense of uncertainty that is foundational to scientific research. Could we be living in a less antagonistic world? Could we be living in a world where we were genuinely coping—together, as Americans—with the unsettling realities of uncertainty? Or is that world just a pipe dream of the fading liberal imagination?

I FOUND THESE COMMENTS on uncertainty interesting because I find uncertainty interesting. I suppose you could say that uncertainty and ambiguity have been the most enduring themes of my academic interests, from my early undergraduate curiosity about existentialism and deconstruction to my graduate work in theology. Uncertainty is why I wrote a book about death. Uncertainty has been the great spiritual challenge I’ve forced myself to contend with, conceptually at least. Has this made me stronger, braver, or more resilient? I’m not sure. I suppose the jury is still out.

But uncertainty has been a topic of interest for people in other academic fields as well—especially in political science and psychology. There seems to be evidence that economic uncertainty is a key driver of negative mental health outcomes. But uncertainty also seems to illuminate something about our politics. A 2021 study, from a team of researchers at Brown University, suggests that people who are averse to uncertainty tend to harbor deeply ideological views: they end up on one extreme, or another, in a polarized political climate. A 2019 study seems to indicate that it’s actually American conservatives who are most intolerant of uncertainty.

Is uncertainty avoidance a bipartisan issue? Or just a conservative problem? It’s difficult to imagine that an affective response like that would restrict itself to one side of the political spectrum. What researchers do seem to indicate, or argue, is that an intolerance of uncertainty is a bad thing. One should be able to at least acknowledge uncertainty, is the message I get from the research. It’s better for everyone. We are all better off, in the end, if we can cope with the enduring reality of uncertainty.

Whatever sort of meaning uncertainty might have in other fields, it’s difficult for me not to understand it as a something with ultimately religious and theological stakes. And, honestly, I think that when we can see what’s at stake—religiously and theologically—in uncertainty, we can better understand its social, political, and psychological functions. Because, while uncertainty might—for many academic fields—be a simple problem to analyze, in religious studies and theology it’s clear that for many people uncertainty is a kind of regulatory ideal. It’s not simply a power to make your peace with, but the power of possibility as such. For others, of course, uncertainty is the critical problem: the work of the devil. It’s the thing that religion resolves—religion makes uncertainty disappear.

PAUL TILLCH, a prominent voice in liberal theology (the kind of theology that embraced modernism, that happily historicized the Bible, that developed theistic evolution) saw faith and uncertainty as deeply entangled. In his Dynamics of Faith, for instance, Tillich describes faith itself as a form of (or a mode of relating to) uncertainty. To have faith, he argues, is an uncertain act because it’s always the act of a finite being attempting to relate to the infinite. Faith is always shadowed by doubt, because we know the limits of our knowledge and perception. We know that we can’t really know the infinite. To accept this uncertainty, Tillich says, is an act of courage: it’s what makes faith courageous. “In this courageous standing of uncertainty,” he writes, “faith shows most visibly its dynamic character.”

Here, I think, we can see uncertainty functioning almost like a form of spiritual fuel: it allows us to take the risk of reshaping ourselves around something bigger, and better, than ourselves. It pushes us, challenges us, expands us. If we can tune into it, uncertainty feeds us a new sense of what’s possible.

I’m sure it wasn’t lost on Tillich that the view he was articulating about uncertainty would have been counter-intuitive for most American Christians. It remains true today that, for many people, religion is where you go for certainty in an uncertain world. My undergraduate students are often confused by Tillich’s ideas: they turn to religion for confidence, and for certainty, not to be challenged or unsettled. Honestly, I think that this sort of perspective remains ascendant and in the mainstream, in the forms of American Christianity that are still growing.

There was a moment, perhaps, when the evangelical pastor Rob Bell’s star was on the rise, when it seemed as if things could be headed in a different direction, and uncertainty might earn a different place in mainstream American Christianity. But it didn’t. I don’t mean to reduce the complexity of a massive tradition like American Christianity. But I do think that, in the mainstream, religion is what people turn to in order to mitigate the damage done by uncertainty. Religion is a certainty source, and uncertainty is an enemy.

But the fate of uncertainty in more secular contexts—the contexts where liberalism has grown its deepest roots—has been radically different. Perhaps Tillich and liberal theology influenced secularism, or perhaps secularism shaped liberal theology. I’m not sure it’s so easy to untangle that knot. Tillich’s ideas have maintained some degree of influence over academic theology. But, in part because I think Tillich intended his theology to work this way, the power of uncertainty has become more of a secular than a religious value in America today. I think many people assume that uncertainty is a bad word, in religion. And we often associate the ability to tolerate, or even embrace, uncertainty with the capacities most often exhibited by scientists.

Despite that, I would argue that uncertainty is part of the theology of liberalism. I don’t mean to suggest that it makes liberalism religious (rather than secular) but instead that it’s a key part of what gives even the secular dimensions of liberalism its power. Theology, after all, is most fundamentally a theory about power. Uncertainty is part of what made liberalism feel powerful.

Uncertainty is a powerful factor of reality that can (like a god) stir up both fear and awe within us. But its work and power must, in the end, be acknowledged. A good liberal will always be able to keep a measure of faith in uncertainty, or to find some flicker of hope within it. Uncertainty is the space of possibility in liberalism: it’s the space where things come undone and then reshape themselves in the form of the new. The mystery and ambiguity of uncertainty comes from its relationship to both change and pluralism. And both of these things, on balance, are positive forces in liberalism. They make positive contributions to a liberal society, and so does uncertainty.

So, when I heard Lee express her lament about the loss of uncertainty in the wake of Covid—and her argument that prioritizing uncertainty is what we need to do next time—what it belied, to me, was a faith in uncertainty that is also a faith in liberalism.

IN COVID’S WAKE is a book written by elites, for elites. The co-authors claim as much in their description of the book’s audience as “the central truth-seeking departments of liberal democracy: journalism, science, and the universities.” Their biggest questions seem to be about where this truth-telling triumvirate went wrong, in the recommendations they made about policies and behavior. Did they live up to their call to tell the truth? Did they admit the limits of their knowledge? Were they open to criticism? Or did they tell “noble lies”? The co-authors wrote this book because they believe that elites like them (scientists, journalists, and academics) could have done better. But they also exhibit a belief that a better, truer, liberalism could have saved us from the polarization, and perhaps even the destruction of the institutions that support these elites, that we now face.

I suppose that this is where I’m not sure I share their same sense of faith. I’m more uncertain about the power, or the future, of liberalism. I’m not convinced that liberalism is dead. But it’s certainly clear to me that it’s collapsing under the weight of both critique and attack. I don’t know that I have the creativity to truly imagine the speculative fiction of another Covid timeline. And I won’t defend any specific policy choices, here. But I find myself wondering if we would have gotten a Covid vaccine, if more people would have died, if more of our social and political institutions would have collapsed, in that alternate timeline.

We’ll never know. But I do wonder if a majority of Americans would have gotten on board with any message that didn’t have—as its core message—the assurance (spoken in a voice of certainty) that translates roughly as “it’s going to be OK.” In the end, perhaps, this is the most powerful of all American ideologies, or theologies, or speculative fictions: the idea that it’s going to be OK. It’s where that famous old American optimism comes from, for better and for worse.

Perhaps the majority of Americans will only listen to someone who can say it’s going to be OK in a believable way. Maybe this is what liberalism has stopped producing: people who can say it’s going to be OK, and actually mean it. If only we had someone on the biggest stage of American politics who could tell us this the way that a loving, but mortal, parent can say it (through tears, and in the midst of doubt) instead of, well, what we’ve got.