Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [141]
The story of C. P. Ellis, unique in its details, is familiar in its broad contours. It is a classic conversion story, and conversion stories are one of the classic Western narratives about the self. Think of Saul (later Paul), the zealous Pharisee and tormenter of Christians, finding God in a bolt of lightning on the road to Damascus. Or think of Augustine, the one-time Manichean—the Gnostic religion that was, at the time, one of the world’s most important faiths—who committed himself to Christianity after hearing a voice in his garden commanding him to read the Bible. What makes conversion stories distinctive in the annals of wrongness is that they don’t just involve repudiating a past belief in order to believe something else. Instead, they involve a wholesale change in identity. In these stories, the experience of being wrong challenges and transforms our very sense of self.
I’ve argued throughout this book that error in general startles, troubles, and sometimes delights us by showing us that the world isn’t as we imagined it to be. But the errors featured in conversion stories show us that we aren’t always as we imagine ourselves to be, either. In the abstract, we all understand that this can happen—that the self, like the world, is perfectly capable of surprising us. But when it comes to our own notably non-abstract selves, we tend to operate under the assumption that we know who we are, and that we will be the same person tomorrow as we are today. One of the most formidable powers of wrongness is to challenge this assumption. Because it can entail renouncing central aspects of the person we always thought we were and becoming someone we never imagined we would be, the experience of error shows us our own self as both occluded and in flux. As we’ll see, sometimes we welcome this vision of selfhood and sometimes we reject it—but either way, much of error’s emotional force comes from its capacity to unsettle our idea of who we are.
That capacity is particularly evident in the story of C. P. Ellis, but to some extent all errors—even trifling ones—have the potential to disrupt our sense of self. For instance, in the course of working on this book, a stranger who had gotten word of its subject matter wrote to tell me about an exceedingly twenty-first-century bet he had lost. It concerned, of all things, the number of carbohydrates in a jar of pickles. Now, this bet is notable primarily for its triviality; I could have stared at my computer for a very long time before generating a comparably absurd and inconsequential instance of error. Nonetheless, the carbohydrate issue managed to become contentious—enough so that a debate ensued and a wager was placed; enough so that, years later, the loser of that wager vividly remembered his error.
The pickle-jar man is named Jonathan, and he turned out to have fairly keen insight into why such a silly quarrel stung at the time, and why that sting had so much staying power. “I wasn’t attached to the conclusion,” he explained, “only to the quality of being able to accurately recall information, and perhaps to the quality of being a person who knows information.” In other words, this entirely insignificant issue managed to implicate both Jonathan’s memory and his intelligence—two aspects of our identity we all prize. These, mind you, were the stakes in a confrontation over an unimportant matter of fact, not over a principle or a worldview. Jonathan didn’t spend weeks or months or years reasoning his way toward his erroneous belief about pickles. Nor did he learn it from his family and community, or derive it from any deep-seated convictions. He just read the label wrong. Nonetheless, his mistake sent a tremor—however slight and short-lived—through his sense of who he was.
This is the claim I made back in Chapter One: our errors represent a moment of alienation from ourselves. Obviously, though, some errors precipitate an alienation more extreme and enduring than others. To go from being