For This Is Action: Uncertainty as Action

Against Roosevelt I place John Ashbery, whose poem “Soonest Mended” is the greatest summation I know of the way uncertainty and revelation can mingle, without dissolving together, in the human mind. It’s a more complex and accurate portrait of life’s enterprise than Roosevelt’s hard-charging man’s man, sore and broken but never doubting his direction. Ashbery’s sad-comic vision of citizenship might almost be a reply to Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic”:

And you see, both of us were right, though nothing Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars Of our conforming to the rules and living Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us, Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out, For this is action, this not being sure, this careless Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow, Making ready to forget, and always coming back To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

For this is action, this not being sure! It is a sentence I often repeat to myself like a mantra. Theodore Roosevelt would surely have denied that “not being sure” was a kind of action. He would have called it cowardly fence sitting. The Housemartins—the greatest Marxist pop band ever to pick up guitars—took Roosevelt’s side in their 1986 song “Sitting on a Fence,” a withering portrait of a wishy-washy political moderate:

Sitting on a fence is a man who swings from poll to poll Sitting on a fence is a man who sees both sides of both sides. . . . But the real problem with this man Is he says he can’t when he can . . .

But Roosevelt and the Housemartins are wrong, and Ashbery is right. For him, not being sure is the move of a strong person, not a weakling: it is, elsewhere in the poem, “a kind of fence-sitting / Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal.”

And math is part of it. People usually think of mathematics as the realm of certainty and absolute truth. In some ways that’s right. We traffic in necessary facts: 2 + 3= 5 and all that.

But mathematics is also a means by which we can reason about the uncertain, taming if not altogether domesticating it. It’s been that way since the time of Pascal, who started by helping gamblers understand the whims of chance and ended up figuring the betting odds on the most cosmic uncertainty of all.* Math gives us a way of being unsure in a principled way: not just throwing up our hands and saying “huh,” but rather making a firm assertion: “I’m not sure, this is why I’m not sure, and this is roughly how not-sure I am.” Or even more: “I’m unsure, and you should be too.”