Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [108]
And we also wield them far too often. As I said at the beginning of this book, we are exceptionally bad at saying “I was wrong”—or at least, we are bad at leaving it at that. For most of us, it’s tough not to tack that “but” onto every admission of error. (Try saying an unadorned “I was wrong”—the full stop at the end, the silence afterward—and you’ll see how unfamiliar and uncomfortable it feels.) In part, this reflects our dislike of sitting with our wrongness any longer than necessary, since the “but” helps hasten us away from our errors. But it also reflects our urge to explain everything in the world—an urge that extends, emphatically, to our own mistakes. This desire to account for why we were wrong is not a bad thing. In fact, the frenetic theorizing that occurs in the aftermath of error represents one of the better things about being wrong: proof positive that our fallibility drives us to think and rethink, to be creative and to create.
Still, there’s a fine line between explaining our mistakes and explaining them away. Not infrequently, we start out trying to answer the “how wrong?” question in all sincerity and end up taking refuge in the Wrong Buts. Upon retracing our steps to discover where we erred, we find that the path we took still feels both sensible and defensible, and we start making excuses almost despite ourselves. (We’ve all had the experience of saying, “Look, I’m not trying to justify what happened, I just want to explain it”—only to realize, in very short order, that we are justifying left and right.) Here, too, wrongness reveals its fugitive nature: it’s as if, once we can explain a mistake, it ceases to feel like one. Even when we know that we were wrong, we can sometimes go on feeling—and insisting—that we were almost right, or that we were wrong for good reasons, or simply, wishfully, that we weren’t actually so wrong after all.
There may be no better demonstration of this conflict between feeling our wrongness and feeling our rightness than William Miller’s own response to the Great Disappointment. We know about this response in some detail, because Miller left behind An Apology and Defense. The title alone reflects the two impulses I just described, and the contents blend near-complete accountability with wonderfully resolute faith in his faith. “As all men are responsible to the community for the sentiments they may promulgate,” Miller wrote, “the public has a right to expect from me, a candid statement in reference to my disappointment in not realizing the Advent of Christ in AD 1843–4, which I had confidently believed.” That candid statement is swiftly forthcoming: “For we were certainly disappointed,” he continued. “We expected the personal coming of Christ at that time; and now to contend that we were not mistaken, is dishonest. We should never be ashamed to frankly confess all our errors.”
True to his word, Miller declined to paper over those errors with any of the elaborate explanations that were so fashionable among some of his followers. “I have no confidence,” he confessed, “in any of the new theories that have grown out of that movement, viz., that Christ then came as the Bridegroom, that the door of mercy was closed, that there is no salvation for sinners, that the seventh trumpet then sounded, or that it was a fulfillment of prophecy in any sense.” Few other popular leaders—whether political or religious, in our time, in Miller’s time, or in any time—have been so thoroughgoing and unvarnished in acknowledging their mistakes.
The most striking part of Miller’s Apology, however, is not the admission of error but the persistence of belief. In contrast to the grieving and soul-searching recorded by other Millerites, there is no weeping here, no wondering, no dark nights of doubting and despair. For good or ill, William Miller had that rare faith that runs so deep that no amount of adversity—and no amount of counterevidence—could dislodge it. Although he declined to side with those of his former acolytes who immediately began recalculating the date of the Apocalypse, he