Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [12]
That said, it should be clear by now that this book isn’t intended as a self-help guide for the chronically wrong—How To Error-Proof Your Life, say, or Thirty Days to a Righter You. On the contrary, it is far more a defense of wrongness than a defense against it. This book takes seriously Augustine’s suggestion that error is somehow essential to who we are, and sets out to explore just how this is so. In Part One, I trace the history of how we think about wrongness and the emergence of two opposing models of error—models that also reflect our ideas about what kind of creatures we are and what kind of universe we live in. In Part Two, I explore the many factors that can cause us to screw up, from our senses to our higher cognitive processes to our social conventions. In Part Three, I move from why we get things wrong to how we feel when we do so. This part of the book traces the emotional arc of erring, from the experience of realizing we went astray to how that experience can transform our worldviews, our relationships, and—most profoundly—ourselves.
The last part of this book turns from the origins and experience of error to its avoidable hazards and unexpected pleasures. Here, I look at how embracing our fallibility not only lessens our likelihood of erring, but also helps us think more creatively, treat each other more thoughtfully, and construct freer and fairer societies. In the final chapter, I encourage us to see error as a gift in itself—a rich and irreplaceable source of humor, art, illumination, individuality, and change. This book opened with the pleasure of being right, but it will conclude with the more complicated, more interesting, and ultimately more revelatory pleasure of being wrong.
2.
Two Models of Wrongness
Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
—WILLIAM JAMES, “THE WILL TO BELIEVE”
Ross Gelbspan is a colleague of mine, a fellow journalist who has been writing about environmental issues for forty-odd years. Back in 1972, when he was working for the Village Voice, he covered a press conference about The Limits to Growth, a study of the impact of economic development and population pressures on natural resources. The Limits to Growth made headlines all over the world when it was published, and is still the best-selling environmental book of all time.
“It was very interesting, very frightening stuff,” Ross recalled. “The press conference was about how all these various factors—increasing population, increasing pollution, diminishing resources—were going to hit a point of exponential takeoff.” One of the speakers at the conference was Donella Meadows, a coauthor of the book and a pioneering environmental scientist. Sitting in the audience during her presentation, Ross was struck by the contrast between the grim predictions she was describing and the fact that she was pregnant—that, as he put it, “she had somehow found personal hopefulness in the midst of this really massive gloom and doom.” He saw it as a small grace note, a reminder about the possibility of optimism and renewal in even the hardest of times, and he used it as the kicker to his story. The Voice printed the article on the front page. That would have been nice for Ross—except that Donella Meadows wasn’t pregnant.
Certain mistakes can actually kill us, but many, many more of them just make us want to die. That’s why the word “mortify” comes up so often when people talk about their errors. Here is Ross, verbatim: “I was mortified. I mean, mortified mortified. I was not a rookie. I’d been a reporter since 1961. I’d worked for the Philadelphia Bulletin, I’d worked for the Washington Post. But I’d never made an error like