How To Not-Know Things
And the Opposite of Doubt
It’s easy, I think, to misremember the specifics of Twelve Angry Men. I certainly did. I had a vague notion of the plot, of one dissenting jury member convinced he was right, aggressively arguing the case, determined to prove the others wrong. But that’s not really what happens, and in fact such a recollection arguably misses the whole point. While eleven jury members are certain the man on trial is guilty, the lone dissenter, Juror #8, has doubt. The only thing that sets him apart from the others is that he’s just not sure. Juror #8’s superpower is uncertainty in the face of conviction.
Well, I say ‘superpower.’ While it’s an admirable quality in the context of the movie, in real life this trait can be infuriating to those who know you (so I hear, so I hear). If a friend preaches the life-changing benefits of a new vitamin supplement, say, there is no way to be sceptical without also being offensive. If I question the legitimacy of the wonder-pill, then I also question the belief and intelligence of the person who takes it, and the clear implication is that I think I know better. Horrible. But I’m Juror #8, you see. It’s not that I know better, it’s that I know less. Is there a difference between disagreeing and expressing doubt? I feel like there should be. In practice, it’s less clear cut.
TLC’s 1999 hit single, No Scrubs, opens with the lyric: A scrub is a guy that thinks he’s fly / And is also known as a busta. I like that. It’s academic. The term is defined before it’s explored, and so later in the song when TLC tell us they don’t, in fact, want any scrubs, we know exactly what they mean. In the same spirit, and before we go any further, I feel we should define the term we’re exploring in this post: doubt.
But alas, we cannot be quite so succinct as TLC, for doubt is something of a chameleon, changing in accordance with its surroundings. If I doubt in my own ability, then I lack confidence. If I doubt my favoured outcome will happen, I’m anxious. If I doubt which course of action to take, I’m stagnant. All of which sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Well, yes and no. Hold that thought for me – or pop it in a pocket – and we’ll return to it later. Juror #8’s doubt, however, is none of those things – it is not insecure or troubled, rather we could say it’s synonymous with scepticism, since doubt can also be rigorous and investigatory. It can concern itself with specifics and pay attention to detail. Juror #8 is also – and this is significant, I think – content with not knowing the truth. He never reaches a point where he has certainty, rather he remains dogged in his insistence that there is none. While this aspect of the film is more a commentary on the American justice system, I think we can broaden it out a little. After all, to ask a jury ‘guilty or not guilty’ is essentially to ask whether they are ‘certain or uncertain’ – and that’s a useful question for us all.
Most of us – including me, of course – don’t want much to do with uncertainty. We prefer to either understand something or dismiss it altogether. Spending too much time between yes and no is uncomfortable to contemplate, like an invitation you can’t decline to an event you won’t attend. We don’t like sitting in that space – the in between, the not-knowing of things – and so parents speculate where you picked up that nasty cold, sports pundits weave stories around natural variance in athletes’ performances, and the population at large more readily reaches for conspiracy theories at times of greatest uncertainty. When faced with events too nuanced, complex or outright random to fully grasp, we’ll make up whatever stories we must to give ourselves a feeling of control. You picked up that cold at the pub, the football team simply lacks belief, and 5G masts caused the pandemic. So let’s explore for a while what it means to neither accept nor dismiss, to embrace the not-knowing, to ‘live the questions,’ as Rilke once wrote.
I’m hesitant to offer any additional commentary on the topic of A.I, but it makes for a good example here. Depending on who you pay attention to, you may hear that A.I progression is already levelling off and the technology is about as good as it’s going to get, at least for the foreseeable future. Or, pay attention elsewhere, and you’ll hear that A.I is on track to become an alien-like super-intelligence that threatens humanity’s very existence by 2027. Spend enough time down the A.I rabbit hole and it’s impossible not to get swept away in the tsunami of endless hypotheses. The best way to remain sane, I’ve found, is to remember what we’re doing when we talk about the future of A.I: we are guessing. I don’t say that to quash sensible, evidence-based analysis, nor do I wish to undermine how impressive many of the people are who engage in these discussions. I call it ‘guessing’ because, for me, that’s the healthiest way to think about it. We don’t know, and so we are guessing. It’s a statement so obvious that I’m reluctant to even point it out, and yet somehow it feels easy to lose sight of among the commotion. For our purposes, A.I is comparable to 9/11 or COVID-19, insofar as it represents a deep global uncertainty. We know this technology seems hugely significant, but we don’t know how it will evolve, or the consequences of its evolution. This uncertainty is precisely why there’s such a furore. We cannot sit comfortably in our not-knowing. We are uneasy.
I don’t know. In a world where even the thumbnails shout at us, it can be difficult to reach this realisation, but we can learn to develop an awareness for it, and we can get better in time. Note that not-knowing is not the same thing as not caring, nor does it prevent us from having an opinion or making decisions, but rather it’s developing a keener eye for our self-deceptions, and recognising that voices – both inside and outside our heads – have a tendency to get louder in the face of uncertainty. If we can acknowledge our own not-knowing, maybe we can greet those voices with more clarity.
Ok, so while that may be a healthy approach when dealing with the noise of social media, it seems problematic in the workplace. As a freelance writer, often in the world of video games and TV, people don’t pay me to be uncertain, and if my answer to every question was, ‘I don’t know,’ I’d pretty soon be out of work. Like most people, I do need to know things to earn money. My job tends to be collaborative and frequently involves generating new ideas or expressing opinions on existing ones. The Juror #8 approach, in this context, is unthinkable. I cannot helpfully contribute to a discussion by expressing doubt about every new idea. If everyone else is building a tower, I can’t keep knocking it down. Over the years, I’ve developed instincts and taste, and I’ve learned how to verbalise what’s in my head (more or less), which are necessary skills in my line of work. On the face of it, it would seem like there’s little room here for not-knowing, and yet it is vital, because another necessary skill is to recognise when I’m wrong. To create is to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time: your ideas are worthwhile, and your ideas might be bad. If you don’t think they’re worthwhile, you’ve no reason to pursue them. If you don’t know when they’re bad, you’ve no way of improving them. The nuance here, the true skill, is knowing when to shift between these states – when to believe the idea is good, when to suspect it’s bad – or when to kill it altogether. Underlying the creative process, at least in the early stages, is often a queasy uncertainty, a fear the whole thing might be terrible. But that feeling, that not-knowing, doesn’t obstruct the creative act, rather it is a by-product of it. It is evidence you are creating.
Not-knowing is not always easy, and it’s proportionate to the severity of the situation that faces us. Health concerns can mean waiting first for an appointment, then the referral, scan, and results, the prognosis and the treatment, likely followed by ongoing monitoring – more appointments, scans, results. Every step of the process requires us to wait while contemplating questions to which there are no answers yet. That’s a lot of doubt to live with, and when it’s you or someone you love, that weighs heavy. Even when there’s less at stake, it’s hard to have no answers. What will they think of your presentation? Why has nobody replied to your email yet? We fill in the blanks with a world we’ve made up, fighting an endless tug-of-war between the world as it is and the world as it might be. This tug-of-war is an exhausting battle we will never win, and if we ever get too tired of pulling on that rope, it might be helpful to remember: it’s you at both ends, and you can put down the rope whenever you want.
‘The universe is wider than our views of it,’ said Thoreau. The world and all its futures need not fit inside our heads, and the same is true of its people. You can, if you choose, if you practise it, let the people in your life be where they are, outside your head, in all their unknowable complexity, without needing to suspect motivations you will never have confirmed. You can meet events as they unfold and on their own terms. You can, as
has written, let the future be the future. You don’t have to carry the burden of constant understanding. You can live a little lighter.A contronym is a word that is its own opposite. To ‘dust’ something can mean to apply dust or to remove it – I can dust a cake (apply) or dust my shelves (remove). ‘Left’ can refer to those who departed or those who remain – ‘many left the party, so only a few were left.’ My favourite contronym is ‘off,’ which bizarrely can also mean ‘on’ – if your alarm goes off, you turn it off. Ridiculous. The most controversial contronym is ‘literally,’ which – in spite of the public outcry – most dictionaries now take to mean ‘figuratively’ too, since dictionaries don’t police word usage, they merely record it. So the next time someone tells you the story of how they ‘literally died’ of embarrassment, you can, I hope, take comfort in the fact they no longer need correcting. Contronyms. These words are shapeshifters, becoming their own opposites depending on the context.
With that in mind, it’s time for you to give back the thought I asked you to hold for me, all the way back in paragraph four. Remember? Ah yes, here we are. It was doubt in its negative forms: to be lacking in confidence (if we doubt our ability), or anxious (if we’re uncertain about the future), or stagnant (if we cannot make a decision). None of these are pleasant states in which to live. And yet... and yet. Trapped as we are inside our own heads, stuck as we are in this present moment, only the most infinitesimal fraction of the world can ever be truly known to us. All the rest is doubt. Doubt is, for the most part, the only state in which we can live. It’s everywhere. It inhibits action, yet can also be a result of having acted. It may prevent us from trying something in the first place, but be felt all the more acutely when we eventually do. Doubt is its own kind of contronym. It gets in the way of life, and yet, in some sense, it is the inevitable consequence of what it means to live.
Alright. So where does all that leave us? Well, in keeping with the spirit of the piece, I’m not exactly sure. Certainly, if we have decisions to make, our doubts are often worth paying attention to – don’t buy the house if it’s not quite right, nor marry the man if he’s not for you – and our doubts might be equally useful if they encourage us to question the status quo, to form our own opinions. It’s when our doubts start making up stories that we need to be mindful of them, when they fill in unknowns with imagined scenarios: what other people will think, or how they might respond, or exactly how the future will come to pass. That’s when our doubts become unwanted background noise, fictions for us to fret over. And in those cases, maybe we should recognise them as little more than the exhaust fumes of an overactive mind. Maybe seeing them in this way diminishes their importance, prevents us from mistaking them for the truth, and allows us to appreciate the tiny sliver of true certainty available to us, in the place we should have been all along – the here and the now.