We live in uncertain times. Sure, people have always lived in uncertain times, but our times are more uncertain than other people’s times. Humanity survived all previous times, but we don’t know yet whether we’ll survive ours--which means our times are not only more uncertain, but more momentous as well.
We knew that already, of course, based on the fact that this is the year 2000, and is either the end of one millennium or the beginning of the next—nobody’s sure which, but in any case it’s momentous on account of all those zeros. However, it had better start living up to its momentousness pretty darn soon, because so far we aren’t seeing Armageddon, World War III, or anything else worthy of 24-hour coverage on CNN. The best we can do is complain about uncertainty--in the election process, oil prices, or the stock market.
Uncertainty does not go down well. Take, for example, the recent election, which resulted in what statisticians assure us is a tie, at least as to the Florida segment. Now, we don’t mind a tie in a sporting event, where it’s part of the rules, but they don’t belong in winner-take-all competitions like elections. It’s true that we treat the campaigns as sporting events, but that’s only for the sake of whipping up the fans on either side. The election itself is a serious business, and we prefer to think that the candidate who wins by even a slim margin has earned a mandate from the nation as a whole. This is why both sides had the nation’s interest at heart when they claimed that there was a winner and it was their guy, and if the other guy got the prize instead it’s because he cheated. (And the other guy ought to have conceded defeat right away quick, so the nation wouldn’t be mired in uncertainty, which is the worst thing that can happen aside from the other guy winning.)
When we complain of these uncertain times, we don’t mean the cosmic uncertainties: whether the universe will expand forever or collapse in a big crunch, whether the earth may be sucked into a black hole a billion years from now, or whether a rogue comet might hit Washington in the next century. Rather, we mean that people and institutions are not behaving exactly as they did in the past, and that we suspect they are deliberately misbehaving, probably out of pure spite.
Indeed, the major hurdle to achieving certainty in human affairs is that it requires other people to act according to our expectations. This is a problem not only in politics, but in life in general, and there are only two solutions. One is to gauge other people’s desires accurately; the other is to force them to act the way we want, regardless of their desires.
Whole societies choose the latter, for example by confining women to the home or maintaining a class system based on race or inheritance. It’s not a bad recipe for stability, assuming you don’t mind a little forced servitude and don’t happen to be a member of the oppressed group yourself.
On the other hand, there’s a pretty good argument that freedom and opportunity not only increase the universal store of happiness, but also fuel our own society’s economic and cultural wealth, and are therefore worth something even to those who have to do their own laundry. (Then again, maybe not; certain members of the laundry-phobic assure us they can tolerate a good deal of poverty---at least, in other people.)
We Americans love freedom and opportunity; it’s only when people make use of them that we get nervous. It’s not pleasant to find that the only way we can get people to act in accordance with our expectations is to form our expectations around what they intend to do. Not only that, but we can’t know their intentions until we know their viewpoints—preferably the ones they really have, rather than the ones we expect them to have.
It turns out that the most accurate way of finding out what people want is to ask them, and then listen to the answers. In private life this is known as good manners; in politics, it is called democracy. And whether we’re talking about national elections or who does the laundry, an ongoing dialogue helps us feel that neither our country nor our Constitution is in any real danger of blowing apart.
Dialogue doesn’t mean everybody likes all the answers, or that competing answers can be reconciled. Sometimes dialogue only tells us how we got to an impasse. But at least in moments of uncertainty, we don’t have to feel like a rogue comet just smacked us upside the head. Yes, these are uncertain times, possibly momentous times; but we’ll survive.