“I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence—which declares that all men are equal upon principle and then making exceptions to it—I wonder where will it stop.” Abraham Lincoln
My older daughter has always had a deep interest in religion. She was a religious studies major in college and is now completing a master’s in divinity. Her primary focus has always been on origin stories and how they impact equality, community, culture, and individual behavior. The primary conclusion she has drawn from all of her years of inquiry is, “I don’t know.”
She is not in bad company. Elaine Pagels, one of the most respected academic scholars in the world, who has authored several best-selling books on religion (Christianity and Gnosticism in particular) reached the same conclusion: “I just don’t know.” In addition to holding a Ph.D. from Harvard and serving as a professor of religion at Princeton, she is also the recipient of the “MacArthur Genius Grant” and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2015. Her research fundamentally shifted how historians understand that early Christianity was not a single, unified movement, but rather a diverse collection of competing groups before orthodox dogma solidified. Her work encourages us to embrace uncertainty.
Elaine is not alone. I recently read a terrific book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, addressing the origins of social inequality. After exhaustive research on the subject, they concluded, “We just don’t know!”
I don’t know about you, but I do know there’s a lot I don’t know. And my credentials pale in comparison to all of those scholars.
What all of this incredible work (or should I say credible work) made me ask was, “Why is it so important for people to cling to certainty in their lives and in their beliefs?” And why has the need for certainty created so much uncertainty about the future of the world.
In this post, I would like to pose three possible answers to the certainty problem: 1) life is so much easier if we believe our assumptions about the world are accurate; 2) asking hard questions may yield answers that shake the foundations of our beliefs; and 3) leaders in hierarchical societies benefit from clearly defined roles and rules that entrench their power.
Let’s apply those three answers to the “certainty problem” by starting with the key themes from the Dawn of Everything.
Graeber and Wengrow suggest there are several insufficiently challenged assumptions about the origins of social inequality:
- There has never been a community in which social inequality has not existed.
- The price of complex civilizations is social inequality.
- Social equality is impossible in large communities.
The truth is that we really don’t know if those assumptions are accurate or not. We do know that humans have been living in one sort of community or another for about 300,000 years. There is very little written documentation, however, of what actually happened in the first 295,000 years of our existence. While archaeologists and anthropologists have been able to use sophisticated technologies to discover how humans lived, learned, worked, and survived during those early years, we don’t really know how hunter-gatherer communities structured relationships during that period. It may be that some communities were built on egalitarian principles. We just don’t know.
Second, there are hard questions that need to be asked about how we arrived at this point in our history. When societies are built on hierarchy, patriarchy, and dominance the only predictable results of those structures are exploitation, enslavement, oppression, and war. We need to ask: why does equality continue to elude us? What roles do greed, ego, and identity play in this situation? How have we managed to stray so far from the founding principles of generosity, humility, liberty, and equality articulated by our founders?
While we don’t know the definitive answers to those questions, we have a fairly good idea. The real question we need to ask is, “Why are we not asking these questions—what are we trying to avoid?”
Third, new conditions need to be established that make it possible to have any hope of solving the existential dilemmas we are facing now. For example, real equality requires that people in any relationship are free to:
- Walk away, i.e., leave the relationship.
- Disobey, i.e., choose not to follow convention, tradition, or demands.
- Disrupt arbitrary conventions of ordinary life.
- Create new social relationships outside the boundaries of tradition, religion, mythology, an idealized past (“the good old days”) or the dictates of an imagined God.
There is no freedom if we are trapped in a relationship at home or at work. There is no freedom if I can’t speak up without fear of retribution. (There is a reason the First Amendment was about free speech.) There is no freedom if I am confined to convention and tradition. There is no freedom if I can’t imagine new possibilities outside normalized boundaries, ideologies, or orthodoxies.
Creating the right conditions for freedom of inquiry and dissent has always been a real challenge for those in control (predominantly men) who are in positions of power and authority—whether the arena is religious, political, tribal or familial. After all, if you are large and in charge, why would you want to give that up. Rules and roles based on certain beliefs cement authority making the status quo so much easier to maintain and justify.
So, that’s my brief summary of a 692-page book based on decades of rigorous research. I do know with certainty that the authors would say I did not do justice to their work. In any event, I am thankful for their contributions. AND I want to suggest that their perspectives have profound implications for leadership and culture—something I do know a little about.
In my experience, great leaders challenge assumptions, welcome hard questions, and create the conditions in which people feel free to disagree. In my work over a 50+ year career, I have found few leaders who have been able to do all three. Fortunately, I have had the privilege of working with several who excel in all areas. What I find really strange about that observation is that it is so simple to make progress on these three fronts—the fundamental requirement is to just say, “I don’t know.” That simple response is a reflection of humility, generosity, openness, and respect.
There are other examples to which these “answers” may apply. It seems to me that two of the most existential questions of our time are 1) what to do with AI and 2) how to reverse the trend of authoritarian rule that exacerbates inequality. Both questions require bold leadership and a culture of possibility.
Fears about the unregulated explosion of AI, AGI, and ASI are based on the assumption that humans are more capable of ensuring liberty, equality, and compassionate communities than AI could possibly be. Our track record doesn’t give me a lot of confidence, however, that we are making progress on any of those fronts. Indeed, people may feel more enslaved by technology and industry now than at any point in history. And humans have not exactly been exemplars of promoting equality. One question we might ask is, “What if AI agency, generativity, and super-intelligence transcends us and renders our ways of understanding irrelevant? And what if AI capabilities and capacities might be required to create adequate tools to address the safety issues it presents? How might we imagine a new relationship with AI that requires partnering instead of controlling? Clearly, I don’t know. What I do suspect, however, is that the strength of our beliefs in our own agency and intelligence may be an indication of the weakness of our willingness and ability to imagine what might be possible in a new relationship.
On a more pragmatic, but perhaps more existential question, we need to collectively apply these three “answers” to our current predicament with the lunatic in the White House. A president who wears a red hat with “Trump is Always Right” to his meetings with foreign heads of states declares in screaming letters that his most fundamental assumption is not only ludicrous but insulting as well. I have never heard him say, “I don’t know.” He tolerates no questions that might make him think twice (or even once) about impulsive and impetuous decisions that lead to disaster. And the only thing he creates is chaos with his executive orders. What I don’t know is how he managed to get himself elected and why he hasn’t been impeached. Well, I have some ideas, but ….
Trump is also not alone in the confidence of his assumptions, his intolerance for questions, and his refusal to consider new possibilities. Napoleon embodied all those characteristics in France, as did Nicholas and the Bolsheviks in Russia and Hitler in Germany. All of these leaders suffered from the curse of “let’s pretend.” And all of them were eventually overthrown.
Abraham Lincoln asked the right question when he asked: “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle—and then making exceptions to iit—Iwonder where will it stop”. Personally, I don’t know where it will stop or how this will end, but I do know we need to collectively challenge assumptions, ask hard questions, and open our imaginations wide enough to create new possibilities. In short, we need to embrace uncertainty. I hope we can stop pretending we have all the answers and start welcoming unwelcome questions. May it be so.
