TOLERATING UNCERTAINTY
(To be published in the March 2009 edition of the East Bay Psychiatric Association Newsletter)
I recently went to a talk on nutrition that described a significant population of Americans as “overfed but undernourished.” Too many “empty calories” of fast food and junk food has led to an epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes in this country. It is predicted that eventually our health care system will be overwhelmed by the medical needs of this generation of improperly nourished individuals. I would posit that another epidemic is sweeping America: people are becoming “over-schooled but undereducated,” and this epidemic is also likely to overwhelm the wellbeing of our society.
Students today are being force-fed all sorts of information to memorize in order to pass standardized tests, but they are not learning how to think critically or to enjoy the process of learning. Even at the college level, students are primarily focused on getting educated in order to be able to make money at a job, and they eschew a liberal arts education. The accumulation of this forced feeding of information has led to the false belief that there are absolute answers for complex problems, like on a multiple-choice test. Rather than understanding the complexities and nuances of problems, and being able to intelligently discuss them or write about them, students are simply learning to seek right or wrong answers.
The profession of psychiatry is an example of an occupation where simple right and wrong answers do not often apply. There are very few blood tests or procedures to determine what ails people with problems of the mind. This makes psychiatry open to criticism, but also makes it intellectually challenging. Psychiatrists cannot tell you with any certainty which factors are affecting a patients’ mood, anxiety level, or cognitive functioning. There is always ambiguity around the delicate interplay of biology, psychology and environmental factors as they impact a patient.
The ability to tolerate uncertainty is not just relevant to psychiatry. The modern world faces complicated problems that cannot be solved by doing the equivalent of an algebra problem. Religious fundamentalism, for instance, represents the extreme of being intolerant of uncertainty. Religious fundamentalists believe that a single god, one of their own choosing, can provide all the answers about life, and that these answers are found in their bible, which they interpret literally. Apparently, people who elect this form of concrete thinking find it too unsettling not to have absolute answers to questions that other people are willing to ponder and discuss.
It is important for people in modern societies to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, because so much of human inquiry leads to answers that are not absolute. The search for definitive answers within the framework of science is what defines science itself, and science provides answers for us in many areas. But since science cannot respond to the entire breadth of human inquiry, the capacity to accept other than absolute answers to human concerns is an essential component of the human intellect. While it might be comforting if everything was either all black or all white, the truth usually is cast in some shade of grey.
Our educational system’s shift to more memorization of facts so that students can test well has contributed to a reduction of the study of the humanities, of the arts and culture, and of a liberal arts education itself. This means that even highly educated people may poorly understand the world they live in, have little historical context to interpret what is happening in the here and now, and not be able to think critically about problems outside their narrow area of expertise.
An epidemic of over-schooled but undereducated people lies on the horizon. There is simply no substitute for an education that develops the capacity to think critically. Without that we might as well just use computers with artificial intelligence to do all of our thinking, because what makes us think and feel like human beings will be eliminated.
