Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [103]
Consider what happened when the Millerites found themselves confronting this question. After their Adventist predictions failed to materialize, they floated countless competing theories for what had gone wrong. If, as we saw in the last chapter, Anita Wilson found herself adrift in a sea of wrongness without a single theory to her name, the Millerites had the opposite problem. They were positively inundated with theories—too many to fully evaluate, too many even to track.* A year and a half after the Great Disappointment, one former believer, Enoch Jacobs, exclaimed, “O what an ocean of contradictory theories is that upon which the multitudes have been floating for the last eighteen months. Do you not long for rest from these conflicting elements?”
This manic proliferation of new theories in the aftermath of major error is common. In fact, Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science, argued that the periods between the breakdown of one belief system and the entrenchment of a new one are always characterized by an explosion of competing hypotheses. Each of those hypotheses represents a different answer to the “how wrong?” question: we construct our new theories based largely on what we think was wrong with the old ones. By determining where we went astray in the past, in other words, we also determine where we will wind up in the future.
As that suggests, the way we answer the “how wrong?” question also dictates which of our beliefs we must discard and which ones we can continue to endorse. Beliefs, after all, do not exist in isolation from one another. Sometimes they are bound together by logic: if you believe that God created the world and all its contents in seven days, you must also believe that evolutionary biology is wrong. Alternatively, sometimes they have no necessary relationship to each other but are experienced (and enforced) as interrelated within a given community. Either way, the point is that our beliefs come in bundles. That makes it hard to remove or replace one without affecting the others—and it gets harder as the belief in question gets more central. In this respect, beliefs are like the beams in a building or the words in a sentence: you can’t eliminate one and expect the fundamental soundness or fundamental meaning of the overall system to remain unchanged. As a result, being wrong sometimes triggers a cascade of transformations so extensive that the belief system that emerges afterward bears almost no resemblance to its predecessor.
My friend Mark experienced a common version of this ideological domino effect when he realized that he was gay. “In order to come out,” he explained, “I needed to reject a lot of what I had believed up till then”—what he had believed about gay people, that is. Because Mark had been raised Catholic, a lot of those beliefs came from the Church. Questioning its teachings on homosexuality led him to question (and in many cases reject) other Catholic teachings as well. “I was surprised,” he told me, “to find that in the process [of coming out], I needed to toss out a lot of other beliefs, beliefs about things that had nothing to do with being gay.”
But of course—and here’s where things get interesting—Mark didn’t need to toss out all those beliefs. For every person like him, there is someone else who rejected the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality but continued to embrace its other teachings. Mark answered the “how wrong?” question one way (pretty far toward the direction of “totally wrong,” as it happens), but other people in virtually the same boat have answered it differently. That’s the thing