Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [107]
It’s hard to know what to make of this defense, since it is always simultaneously reasonable and unreasonable. The situation of the rank-and-file Millerites makes this clear. Inevitably, after the Great Disappointment, many of them blamed Miller for leading them astray. But whatever other forces the Millerite masses might have been subject to, they were not coerced. (In fact, they could not have been, since profound faith is, in the end, a necessarily private commitment.) Nor could they fairly claim to have been kept in the dark, either. Millerism wasn’t one of those religious sects based on secret arcana known only unto high priests; broad dissemination of its tenets and the calculations used to justify them was both the means and the message of the movement. Nor, finally, had the Millerites been defrauded. William Miller was no Bernie Madoff, and his followers, unlike Madoff’s clients, hadn’t been intentionally deceived. They had simply placed their faith in an expert who turned out to be wrong. In that respect, they deserve our sympathy, at least up to a point. As we’ve seen, all societies function on the basis of distributed expertise, and all of us rely on others in areas where our own knowledge falls short. Still, those of us in free countries choose our leaders, and we have the obligation to do so with care. Our own and our society’s fortunes stand or fall on our ability to do so. Witness Millerism: it became a giant, history-making debacle not because Miller himself was wrong, but because so many others were wrong to trust him.
That said, Miller was wrong. And he admitted it, too—in some ways, as we’ll soon see, more thoroughly and gracefully than most of his followers. Still, he couldn’t resist availing himself of a fifth and final Wrong But, one I call the “better safe than sorry” defense. When we employ the near-miss and out-of-left-field defenses, we claim that we were wrong but almost right. When we employ the time-frame defense, we claim that we seem wrong but will be proved right eventually. Miller, for his part, claimed that he had been wrong but that he had made the right mistake. Better to cry wolf and be wrong, he argued, than to remain silent and eaten. “I feel even now more satisfaction in having warned my fellow men than I should feel, were I conscious that I had believed them in danger, and not raised my voice,” Miller wrote. “How keen would have been my regret, had I refrained to present what in my soul I believed to be truth, and the result had proved that souls must perish through my neglect!” Having done his level best to spare his fellow believers from mortal danger, Miller declined to express any regret over his error. “I therefore cannot censure myself,” he concluded “for having conscientiously performed what I believed to be my duty.”*
Sometimes, of course, we do choose the right mistake. Sometimes other people lead us astray. Sometimes our predictions almost come to pass, sometimes they are derailed by unforeseeable circumstances, and sometimes they really are vindicated by history. In short, none of the excuses we use to account for our errors is intrinsically unfounded. The trouble is, we almost never use these excuses—or rather, their opposite number, the all-but-unheard-of Right Buts—when things go our way. We don’t protest that we were right but only by the slimmest of margins, we don’t chalk up our rightness to a flukish outside event, and we don’t earnestly explain that, however right we look now, we will inevitably be proved wrong in the future. Nor do we accept the Wrong Buts as valid when our adversaries use them. As is so often the case when it comes to error, we wield these defenses in woefully lopsided