Commentary Faced with a war, a pandemic, or a spiritual crisis, it’s easy to fall either into a kind of complacency or into despair and despondency. Or first one and then the other, as with a war that elicits initial enthusiasm—cheering on the troops as they march off to war—and, a few years or military reverses later, falling into despair and defeatism. In both our complacency and our despair, we presume to know more than we do. In both responses, we tend to be passive when we need to act. Both avoid the reality that life requires us to make decisions in conditions of incomplete and imperfect knowledge. A panic in which we insist on a number of ill-supported measures as if they were the “settled science” of the matter is also a denial of reality. We fall then into a level of certitude and assertion that the evidence doesn’t …