Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [105]
The morning after the Great Disappointment, Hiram Edson had a vision. Edson is the man I quoted earlier as saying that the events of October 22, 1844, were a harder blow than the loss of all earthly friends, so you can imagine how he was feeling on October 23. Contemplating the potential scale of the previous day’s mistake, he wrote, “My advent experience has been the richest and brightest of all my Christian experience. If this had proved a failure, what was the rest of my Christian experience worth? Has the Bible proved a failure? Is there no God—no heaven—no golden home city—no paradise? Is all this but a cunningly devised fable? Is there no reality to our fondest hopes and expectations of these things?”
In an effort to shake these grim thoughts, or at least do some good in the world, Edson set out from his home to try to comfort his fellow Millerites. But no sooner had he started on his way than (as he later reported) “Heaven seemed open to my view, and I saw distinctly, and clearly, that instead of our High Priest coming out of the Most Holy of the heavenly sanctuary to come to this earth…that he for the first time entered on that day the second apartment of that sanctuary; and that he had a work to perform in the Most Holy before coming to this earth.” Rather than signaling the Second Coming, Edson concluded, October 22 marked the day that Christ had assumed his place in the holiest compartment of the heavens, from whence he would begin judging conditions on earth in preparation for his return.
This doctrine, formulated by Edson more or less on the spot, is known as Investigative Judgment. It was formalized by two other Millerites, Ellen White and her husband James White, who together founded the Seventh-Day Adventists on its basis. In effect, the Adventists substituted an unfalsifiable celestial event for a falsifiable (and falsified) earthly one—a bit of theological legerdemain that allowed the new sect to flourish. Today, Seventh-Day Adventists claim 15 million members in some 200 countries. The orthodox among them continue to believe that Christ has been engaged in judging the souls on earth since 1844, and that when that work is done, Armageddon will be upon us.
To those devout Seventh-Day Adventists, Hiram Edson’s vision was a message from God. Other readers, though, might have a different interpretation. Those who are inclined toward generosity might think that Edson’s vision was much like the kind of vision blind Hannah had. Just as she “saw” a notebook and a nicely tanned doctor, he “saw” his Savior in the second compartment of heaven. For those with this turn of mind, Edson was essentially confabulating: like Hannah, he generated a sincere but ungrounded explanation for his error. Less generous-minded readers, meanwhile, might question that sincerity, and see Edson’s vision as simply an elaborate—and, as fate would have it, world-altering—way of saving face.
Few of us change the course of history when we make excuses for being wrong. But all of us occasionally seek to save face when our beliefs turn out to have been “cunningly devised fables.” Instead of simply acknowledging our mistakes, we point fingers, append caveats, call attention to mitigating factors, protest that there were extenuating circumstances, and so on. And like Edson, we are remarkably creative—visionary, you might even say—in how we accomplish this. In a sense, though, “creative” is exactly the wrong word for this kind of behavior—since, in the end, such tactics are largely destructive. True, these defensive maneuvers protect us from experiencing the uncomfortable emotions we associate with wrongness. But, like all acts of defensiveness, they also produce friction between people, stymie collaboration and creativity, make us seem rigid and insecure, and (as I suggested above) prevent us from engaging in the kind of clear-eyed assessment of our mistakes that can help us make different and better decisions in the future. In other words, these strategies for deflecting responsibility for our errors stand in the way