Whether it is the uncertainities of the economy or the swine flu or the 9/11 attacks, we are shocked at the unpredictability of it all.
Pause and consider for a moment what we can now do in America.
We can: predict the weather and track hurricanes. Home in on a missing person from the signal on her cell phone.
Talk, live via video, with people in Bolivia and Uzbekistan and Botswana. Snap pictures, or simply type out thoughts, and beam them to the world. Conquer polio. Put a man — several of them — on the moon.
We expect: that after a thunderstorm, the lights will go back on. That Jon Stewart will be on weeknights at 11. That if we pay our life insurance premiums, our loved ones will receive money upon our deaths. That no matter the hour, no matter the product, operators are indeed standing by.
We have, at our 24/7 beck and call, an ever-present “infrastructure of reassurance” that’s continuously buzzing in the background. Government systems, entrenched technological advances, physical and social networks all tell us implicitly, by their very existences, that everything’s going to be OK.
Then, suddenly, it isn’t. Every so often, a meltdown or a swine flu, a Katrina or a 9/11 comes along. And instantly, on the round-the-clock data stream, we marvel at the unpredictability of it all.
The economy — wasn’t that supposed to be regulated? — tanks on us. A potential pandemic — doesn’t that belong in 1918 or even further back in a hazy past? — sidles up to our doorstep to offer an unwelcome hello. And abruptly, everywhere, emerges something Americans hate more than most anything else: an uncertain future.
How dare it?
This is, after all, the nation that settled the wilderness, tamed the frontier, motorized the continent, turned the remote control into a fetish object and gave terrorism a color code.
Democracy is our ideal, sure, but operationally we are about command and control. Always have been. Got a problem? America has a solution. Barack Obama rolled to the presidency on this premise: “Yes, we can.”
The recurring theeme of all’s well is a staple of government, which exists partially to reassure us that chaos and anarchy aren’t around every corner.
“We insulate ourselves by thinking that we’re protected all the time by insurance, by medications, by airbags. And then we get surprised when the world gives us some other challenge,” says Emily Godbey, a scholar at Albright College in Pennsylvania who studies how Americans process catastrophe.
“The rhetoric is often that we have this baby under control,” Godbey says. “In reality, nature comes up with something new.”
With all our tools and all our ability to forestall or at least control bad things, have we actually become more unable than ever to handle real uncertainty? Have we delegated so much fretting to governments and institutions and technology that when we have to worry on our own, we’re crippled?
“Is it different here in the rest of the world? I think it is. Why? Because I think we may believe that we can change our lives more than other people,” says Robert A. Burton, a California neurologist and writer who studies the notion of certainty. “Fatalism,” he says, “is a European concept.”
Most Americans, Burton notes, were schooled on multiple-choice exams: Pick the correct answer from a list.
But that outlook presumes the correct answer is on the list, and that the questions themselves are answerable. Unanswerable questions — Will Wall Street bounce back? Can swine flu be stopped? — don’t sit well here.
“The very nature of the American continent was really about whenever there was a new problem, you could throw space at it,” says Robert Thompson, the Syracuse University scholar of American popular culture. “Then,” he says, “it was technology. Too hot? You air-condition it. Too cold? You central-heat it. Not enough food? You invent canned food. There really is a sense that our entire history was really about solutions.”
Here’s a possibility, then: Certainty about our ability to shape our destinies, built into the cultural DNA and reinforced by national myths, makes us unwilling to consider lack of control as an option.
From the earliest American voices like John Winthrop and Cotton Mather, the seeds of what would become Manifest Destiny were being scattered. That’s a difficult tradition to abandon. Nor would many want to, particularly after the nation spent an entire epoch reinforcing it.
“The 20th century … was a time when all these systems were built, supposedly to give us a sense of quantifiable security about our fabricated environment,” says Neil Baldwin, author of “Edison: Inventing the Century,” a biography. “It was a century of building an infrastructure of reassurance.”
There’s the argument, too, that certainty and its regular dance partner, optimism, are useful cultural outlooks. After all, this is a complicated, jumbled world. How could we even get through our lives if we’re paralyzed by what might happen? We have, indeed, much to fear from fear itself.
“If people had a vivid enough imagination of the threats they really face, the reactions that might occur could be almost as severe as the threats that we’re anticipating,” says Edward Tenner, author of “Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity.”
But this long-ascendant trust in systems — adults in charge, in effect — exhibits signs of eroding. Mainstream media are scorned and distrusted, as, increasingly, are many institutions and experts.
Grass-roots campaigns and information dissemination fueled by the Facebooks, Twitters and Wikipedias of the world offer a competing, compelling new take. It’s certainty by consensus.
How far that shift will go remains to be seen. Comfort levels are at play, after all. “On the one hand, we want to control things. On the other hand, we want to know that things are in control by more powerful forces beyond us,” says Paul Levinson, a Fordham University professor who is writing a history of what he terms the “new new media.”
And so we sit in the middle, wondering what might happen next, vexed by the lack of quick answers and the surge of bad tidings.
“How come you only print the bad news?” disgruntled Americans often ask reporters. The common response is that news is, by definition, what’s out of the ordinary, and bad news remains the anomaly — even in today’s complicated landscape.
Perhaps these swine-flu moments of uncertainty in 21st-century America are exceptions that prove the rule — the vivid examples to show us in scary, unwanted ways that hey, maybe things aren’t so bad after all. That though the thunder may be rumbling, you can pretty much bet on the lights coming back on.
Hard to be sure, though. At least for the time being.
Ted Anthony covers American culture for The Associated Press.