“Reviews of the Year” for 2001 are bound to focus on 11 September. “How life has changed!” they will say. “New uncertainties have come to plague our lives”, they will declare. Margaret Drabble countered all that, in a very sane piece, on Christmas Eve. She suggests that our lives had not really changed, although some Americans might think they had. Uncertainties are always with us, she said. She argued that the disaster of 11 September quickly became “just one more of those things to worry about”. She was writing in The Guardian.
I stand with Margaret Drabble. Indeed, I go further: I propound a general theory of human behaviour, closely related to the theory of evolution. That is MDU, Multiple Differential Uncertainty, my very own “universal theory of life”. I say that the distinctive feature of man, as a sentient and intelligent being, is precisely the capacity to manage uncertainty.
Every individual is characterised by a distinctive bundle of uncertainties – about war and peace, eternity, the Big Bang and the End of the Universe, about global warming, sporting performance, personal affections, our children, social status, employment, work promotion, future impoverishment, personal ambition, loss of potency – the possibilities are endless. We are all beset by uncertainties, all the time, and our success in managing them determines our “confidence” about
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the future. And in a consumer society, they chart our propensity to consume.
Each mind, each person, has to confront the personal demons of uncertainty on a daily basis, and work out a personal solution. Certain “natural” propensities seem to assist that process: young children are cocooned from the full effects of uncertainty, although much disruptive teenage behaviour is surely to be explained by the need to confront the uncertainties of adult perceptions. Young lovers and young parents also enjoy some kind of temporary cocooning, helping them to resist worries during and after pregnancy and the birth of a child.
Each individual solution has to be constructed painfully, in the light of lifelong experience, and may include multiple components, romantic love, wealth accumulation, insurance, religion, intoxication, collecting things. Failure to find a solution can be serious for the individual, resulting in illness or even early death – schizophrenia, depression, compulsive behaviour, drug-addiction, perhaps even forms of cancer and other “psychosomatic”
conditions.
Multiple Differential Uncertainty (MDU) is my universal theory, which is published here for the first time (although written in 1992). For those with fortitude, and tenacity, the full text is at Multiple Differential Uncertainty.
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Diary Note 261201-02