A second wave of uncertainty
The US election: first we looked forward, now we look back
[Previously: the first wave of uncertainty.]
It has been three weeks since my last Substack article, and an entire month since the last piece of fiction.
What caused this long silence?
Was it shock after the US election? Have I been quivering under the bed? Or rejected all contact with the outside world and, Voltaire-like, occupied myself with tending my garden? It's true that the lawn is a concern. If it is to make it through the winter, I need to be more diligent about raking away the daily carpeting of leaves from our largest trees. Is that perhaps the best thing I can now do with my life? Sit at the back door, weary yet alert, rake in hand, ready to whisk away each new leaf the moment it lands? Sure. That feels like a noble and responsible aspiration: to have no goal but to be the steward of a healthy lawn, so that one day I may be buried beneath it.
Are these the maudlin thoughts that have suppressed my art?
No, of course not. I'm just lazy.
That's not to say that I'm not reeling.
I could write about the election – why it happened, what it means, and how it feels – and I have no doubt I could perform the most rigorous and clearest analysis, make the most robust and reliable of forecasts, and render the psychological tsunami that has accompanied these times in words that would bring the miracle of catharsis to millions. I could certainly do a hell of a lot better than all of the other attempts I've read.
But that would be boring. Such efforts are the province of pedestrian minds. We are above those flailing attempts to make sense of the whirling sandstorm of contemporary history.
Let us content ourselves with a meta-analysis of the ludicrous folly of analysis.
Just prior to the election I wrote about uncertainty, and how hard it is to accept. It is fantastically difficult to absorb that there are things we do not know, and cannot know. Top of the list is the future. Our lives are awash with analyses, forecasts, data, polls, simulations, and expert predictions, all to concoct the illusion that we can know the future. But we simply cannot.
And so it was, days before the US election, that both the data and the pundits were unanimous: we do not know what will happen. The outcome is 50-50. Everyone could find anecdotal evidence that hinted at the outcome they most wished for, or most feared, depending on their temperament. But no-one knew what would happen.
I wrote at the time that within a week of the election, “Commentators will already have decided on the reasons for the outcome. They will have decided that those reasons were obvious, and for anyone who watched the campaign with a dispassionate eye, the outcome should also have been obvious.”
That was easy for me to write, as an experienced, level-headed, brilliant scientist. But as a living, feeling human it was not so easy. It sounded ridiculous. From the “before” side of the big event, no-one had a clue what was going to happen. It wasn't just in the numbers. It's what everyone said. Every pundit qualified every “analysis” with the admission that the polls were neck and neck; it could go either way. It was inconceivable that they could spend the last months, and then weeks, and then days, saying that everything was on a knife edge, and then suddenly switch to, “The signs were there for everyone to see.”
But they did! That's exactly what they did!
Suddenly it was obvious the incumbent party could not win in the face of a bad economy. It was obvious that the Democrats would lose running a candidate who was not selected in a primary. It was obvious that the Trump team ran a brilliant campaign, even though the commentators had been able to talk about little else for the last five months besides what a screw-up Trump was on the campaign trail.
They rapidly locked in to their final analysis. Before the data were conclusive – what a surprise! – they had an “obvious” story to tell: the country had transformed! Trump had not only swept the battleground states, he also won the popular vote. It was a landslide! The people had spoken! They had turned in an entirely new direction. There was a new reality we all had to face.
Really? Has a US presidential election been a definitive illustration of the mood of the nation any time this century? Take a look at the outcomes, either in electoral votes or vote share. It doesn't require training in advanced statistical analysis to see that they were all stupidly close. If you want to see a proper landslide you need to go all the way back to Reagan.
This is the second lesson about uncertainty. We hate being uncertain about the future, but we absolutely refuse to be uncertain about the past.
Our brain concocts an extrapolation of today into tomorrow, and it's a mere matter of self-delusion to ignore that it almost always gets it wrong. Our brain also fashions a pleasing story about yesterday, and this story is even better, because there are no surprises to mess it up.
You might say: so what? It's fine that people comfort themselves with a convenient story about the past. Sure, all those political pundits did some post-fact rewiring. Fine. It made them feel better. Does it really matter?
You probably won't be surprised by my stock level-headed-scientist answer to that question: of course it fucking matters! You idiots!
Underneath all of the predictions and polling and punditry there is a reality. The people who make up a country each have lives, and heads full of the stories about what happened in the past and what they hope and fear and expect to happen in the future. The lives are in flux, and so are the stories. It is impossible to know all those lives and thoughts and opinions completely, or even more than slightly. But it is possible to know them somewhat, and it is possible to hold in our minds those swirling uncertainties of what we do not know.
It is the job of politicians to face that reality when they make their policies and campaigns – and when they try to foist new stories on their voters. It is the job of journalists and pundits to face that reality when they report to us. And it is our job, as we go about our humble lives, to absorb whatever of that reality we can – just as open to all the little flashes and glimpses of truth as we are sceptical of the vast onrush of bullshit.
It is hard to hover above certainty and conviction. Yet everything else, comforting and fortifying as it may be, is a lie.
There is nothing else to be done.
All the leaves have fallen and I have raked them away. It is time to move on.
Semi-arbitrary Addendum
I have tried to maintain a lofty distance from all the “AI” gibberish, but I gave in when I read here about notebookLM – it can produce a summary of input material in various forms, including as a podcast – and I had to give it a try. I fed it my piece on uncertainty, and it produced a “deep dive” discussion of the article. The result was hilarious, at least for the first two minutes. (The article “dropped just a few days before the 2024 election.” “Huh. Interesting timing.”) I felt an involuntary rush of pride that my little article was being discussed, on a podcast, like I was a bona fide thought leader. But it quickly became utterly dull, and morphed into platitudes about how uncertainty is part of the adventure and wonder of life. Without it, “where would the opportunities for growth and change come from?” Jesus. I hope to never use such a vomitous phrase. I listened to the end, just so I could hear how the machine rendered the final point that I quoted in this latest article. Sadly that was skipped. In the end the machine was of course incredibly impressive – there was nothing garbled or nonsensical or even strictly speaking “wrong” in its output – but at the same time, it was little more than a party trick. After all, the “podcast” was thirteen minutes long, and the article takes five minutes to read.