The Grace of Not
Knowing
Team A will win the Super Bowl. Team B will win the
collegiate championship. Player C will win the Heisman. Politician T will win
the presidency. (Lord how I hope this one isn’t true!) Politician D will become
our state’s governor. The economy will crash next year. The economy will thrive
next year. I will win the lottery. I will get that job I want. I won’t get that
job I want. We hear it again and again. We say it to ourselves again and again.
Sportscasters and news anchorpersons make a living at it. Americans, it seems,
have to know what is going to happen before it happens. We don’t like not
knowing the future. We don’t like it in our national life. We don’t like it in
our personal lives. We’re desperate for someone to tell us what will happen. We
Americans are, it seems, fixated on knowing that which cannot be known.
Actually, we Americans aren’t alone in that fixation. Disliking
not knowing is one of the foundation pieces of western culture. I once heard
Isaiah Berlin, the great Russian/British historian/philosopher, put it this
way. Western culture is founded upon three defining beliefs. They are:
1.
Every question has an answer.
2.
Every question has only one correct answer.
3.
It is possible for us to know that answer.
Berlin said our culture rests upon those assumptions, and I
think he was right. It’s not true of every single American individual of
course, but it is true of most of us. We think we can know the one correct
answer to every question, and we’re very uncomfortable with not knowing that
answer.
Berlin’s three foundational pieces of western culture may
indeed be foundational pieces of our culture. I believe that they are. There
is, however, a big problem with all of them. They all rest upon a false
assumption, as I am sure Berlin knew. They all deny fundamental facts about
what it is to be human. The truth is that there are questions that don’t have
an answer. There are questions that have more than one correct answer. There
are questions that have one or more than one correct answers, but we simply can’t
know those answers. We don’t much like these truths. They are truths
nonetheless.[1]
Our mania for knowing what will happen that hasn’t happened
yet contradicts those truths. It is a truth of the human condition that we
cannot know what will happen in the future. Albert Einstein famously said that
the only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once. Everything
doesn’t happen at once of course. It is an unavoidable truth of being human
that we live only in the present. We can remember past events more or less
accurately, but we are not living those events as we remember them. We can
remember them because they happened once, but they are not happening now. We
couldn’t remember them if they hadn’t happened.
Therein lies the problem with knowing the future. It hasn’t
happened yet. We live only in the present, and what will happen in the future
is not part of our present. Seeking to know the future is like seeking to
remember a past event that never happened. You can’t remember anything that
didn’t take place. What will take place is as much nothing to know as is
something in the past that never occurred. We can only know what has happened.
We can’t know anything that hasn’t happened, and the future hasn’t happened. It
will, or at least we trust that it will happen; but it hasn’t happened yet.
Therefore, we simply cannot know what it will be.
Though few Americas recognize it, there is a grace in not
knowing the future. Or at least there’s a grace in giving up our passion for
knowing the unknowable future. The truth is that the present is all we have. We
had things in the past, but we all live our whole lives only in the present
moment. When we realize that the present moment is all we have or ever will
have, we can focus exclusively on living that moment as fully as we can. We can
be present to the present. We can give up being sidetracked from the present into
fretting about the future or seeking to live in our past. Some Asian spiritual
traditions understand the value of living only in the present better than most
of us in the West do. The Buddhist practice of meditation brings the practitioner
fully into the present. Being present to the present improves living in the
present. Being mindful of one’s present enriches one’s life. It makes living in
the present more peaceful and often more productive. Living only in the present
is a great gift we can give ourselves.
I don’t mean to say don’t plan for your future. Some
planning for the future is essential for all of us. Preparing for an adequate
income in retirement is a good example of the need for some future planning.
But even as we prepare for the future, we do it in the present. We cannot know
if we will ever use whatever it is have planned for the future. Will I in fact
live long enough to need a retirement income? Personally, I already have; but
as I did whatever little bit of planning for retirement I did during my working
years, I did not and could not know if that would be the case. Our need to plan
for the future does not contradict the truth that we cannot know the future.
I know, of course, that I have no significant way to
influence the course of western civilization. It is what it is. Yet each of us
can become more aware than we usually are of how that culture conditions our
thinking and our lives. We can recognize our culture’s shortcomings. Our mania
for knowing the future is one of those shortcomings. It’s way past time for us
to get over it.
[1] I
will concede that there is at least one thing that we know will happen in the
future. We’ll all die. Dying is part of being human, and none of us avoids it.
For most of our lives anyway we don’t know when or how we will die. We just
know that we will.
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