RADICAL UNCERTAINTY: Decision-making for an unknowable future
(Mervyn King and John Kay)
We are now in the beginning phase of a pandemic and world-wide crisis. As it fastens its grip on our imagination of the future, I find it worthwhile scanning the Internet for voices that are offering a perspective or story different from the dominant paranoid discourse of statistics, probability, fear and control, coupled with military metaphors (the invisible enemy). I have found many such voices, none of which can join public discourse with any hope of making a contribution to the outcome. How can, for example, an astrological reading of the transits at this time have any hope of influencing political decisions or social action? No, acceptable public discourse is all about the numbers: statistics, probabilities graphs, “flattening the curve”, etc. This way of addressing the unknown future is now a monopoly! No other story can get a hold on the public imagination. We anxiously watch the exponential curve for any sign of flattening even though we “know” that this shift would only mean that hospitals will not get overwhelmed, at present.
To my surprise I came a cross a “mainstream” book that was published on March 10, this year (2020). This date would presuppose the actual writing of the book during previous years. The authors, Mervyn King and John Kay, are seasoned economists, one a former governor of the Bank of England and the other a Fellow at Oxford. The book is described this way:
It is a book about how real people make choices in a radically uncertain world, in which probabilities cannot meaningfully be attached to alternative futures…. The title of this book, and its central concept, is radical uncertainty. Uncertainty is the result of our incomplete knowledge of the world, or about the connection between between our present actions and their future outcomes…. Radical uncertainty has many dimensions: obscurity; ignorance; vagueness; ambiguity; ill-defined problems; and a lack of information that in some cases but not all we might hope to rectify at a future date. These aspects of uncertainty are the stuff of everyday experience.
I’ll move into more detail in a moment but I was drawn up sharply by this passage on p 40:
But we must expect to be hit by an epidemic of an infectious disease resulting from a virus which does not yet exist. To describe catastrophic pandemics, or environmental disasters, or nuclear annihilation, or our subjection to robots, in terms of probabilities is to mislead ourselves and others. We can talk only in terms of stories. And when our world ends, it will likely be the result not of some ‘long tail’ event arising from a low-probability outcome from a known frequency distribution … but as a result of some contingency we have failed even to imagine.
Keep in mind that this book was written prior to 2020. I have read quite a few reviews now (April) and yet none so far have placed our present pandemic crisis and the thesis of the book together as constituting a major contribution to navigating the crisis. It’s not hard to see why, really. The authors, although very mainstream, directly challenge the dominant discourse of probability and statistics as having any relevance to our radical uncertainty today: “To describe catastrophic pandemics… in terms of probabilities is to mislead ourselves and others.” They are inviting us to think/imagine in a radically different, even alien manner, when faced with such an uncertainty in the face of an unknowable future, as they say.
To argue their thesis these two seasoned economists invoke a few concepts usually unfamiliar to mainstream decision-making: story/narrative, mystery, and imagination/creativity! How do you engage these three concepts, or as I would say, soul capacities, in a real-world life and death situation such that you may navigate to an alternative future to the one everybody is panicking about right now? King and Kay are totally serious about their novel approach and back it up with previous real-world examples by generously using the first of these three concepts—story/narrative. They tell stories of past crises and how people failed or succeeded in their approach, with reference to story/narrative, mystery, and imagination/creativity! Oh, and they also invoke reflexivity, which is a concept pointing to the inherent fluidity of a crisis situation in which input affects the expected output and changes the conditions even as you just get going. A trivial example I can think of is my losing a ball in a pond. I come up with an idea to retrieve it with a stick but placing the stick in the water creates ripples and pushes the ball further away. Finally I figure out to throw rocks to the far side, driving the ball towards me. It works! I engaged with the fluid situation to achieve a good, unexpected outcome, not by imposing a fixed idea based on some abstract theory of probability but by staying flexible and adapting to the fluid situation. This is the point the authors are making here with reflexivity.
There is, however, much I diverge from in this book as the authors discuss story/narrative, mystery, and imagination/creativity but let’s first listen to a few passages from the book extolling these qualities:
1. We are storytellers, operating much of the time in worlds of make believe. We do not find that the realm of imagination and ideas is an alternative to, or retreat from, practical reality. On the contrary, it is the only way we have found to think seriously about reality. In a way, there is nothing more to this method than maintaining the conviction . . . that imagination and ideas matter . . . there is no practical alternative.
2. Good decisions often result from leaps of the imagination. Creativity was the quality exhibited by that unknown Sumerian who invented the wheel, by Einstein, and by Steve Jobs. And, as Knight and Keynes emphasised, creativity is inseparable from uncertainty. By its nature, creativity cannot be formalised, only described after the event, with or without the help of equations.
3. A mystery cannot be solved as a puzzle can. [Narrative] reasoning through mysteries requires us to acknowledge ambiguities and to resolve them sufficiently to clarify our thinking. But even to frame a problem requires skill and judgement. That is one of the most important contributions that economists can make. A mystery must first be framed, well or badly, to aid people in reaching the decisions they have to make in conditions of radical uncertainty.
4. The collapse of a narrative is a more rapid process than its transmission. And as we write, the financial press is full of perhaps the thinnest story since tulips to give rise to a bubble – the imagined future takeover of the world monetary system by crypto-currencies. Like other popular fictions, the Bitcoin phenomenon combines several perennial narratives – in this case, a libertarian vision of a world free of state intervention, the power of a magic technology, and the mystery of ‘money creation’.
In these quotes we can easily see that the authors think that story/narrative, mystery, and imagination/creativity are the most appropriate tools to be used in the service of the human being while faced with radical uncertainty. The authors give real-world examples from their experience to show us how these tools can be utilised to navigate uncertain times. There would not be much argument in the real world today regarding these capacities as useful tools for human beings and their purposes. Yet, to do so is to deepen the fall into Heidegger’s (and our) technological world, in which everything is understood pre-reflectively as a measurable resource, including us, and including story/narrative, mystery, and imagination/creativity! The book is rife with this technological understanding of these privileged soul capacities. All appearances exist in our technological world only as they are understood as belonging to the current world picture (our technological civilisation)—i.e. as resources to be calculated or measured! Otherwise they simply have no being, and thus do not exist, including you and me. Have you, like Sandra Bullock, ever disappeared from view when you have lost your identifying documentation which tells the system who you are? Saying who you are simply does not work!
Our technological world IS the existential crisis we are facing and its dominant story, or understanding of the appearances as mere resources, to be used and then rendered obsolete, is destroying us, or at least our civilisation. The best story I have read that addresses our crisis in these terms is Hubert Dreyfus’ essay on The Matrix. I urge you to read it.
Whether we get through the pandemic or not is a secondary issue to the existential crisis we are inhabiting right now. And dealing with that crisis requires a complete re-working of our relationship to story/narrative, mystery, and imagination/creativity, so that they no longer appear as resources to be used for human ends but as precious gifts originating in an unknown source that is other than human. This source, once discovered as a new locus of these soul qualities, will generate a new definition of the human being, away from our present definition as the sole agents of our destiny (how we cannot stand not knowing!) This new definition of the human being as humble receiver of the gifts of these and other soul capacities can be forged through initiation i.e. an experience that convinces us that we human subjects are not the origin of creativity, mystery, story, or imagination, but simply are receivers of those gifts whose origin lies elsewhere yet generates in the human receiver a humble task of “saying”, through some art form, one small aspect of this source into existence.
