Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [143]
In many ways, we do accept that there are things the mind doesn’t know about itself. Thanks to Freud, we now call this domain of obscurity the unconscious, but we’ve known about it since long before his time. Augustine (who, as the subject of his own conversion experience, had reason to wonder how it is possible to get ourselves wrong) grappled with the problem of imperfect self-knowledge with characteristic insight. The mind, he wrote, “is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths?” Not him, he admitted—but, he realized, that suggested a strange paradox. “Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be part of it, if it is not contained in it?”
The brain is wider than the sky, wrote Emily Dickinson, that other great philosopher-saint of selfhood. But, as Augustine observed, it is also wider than itself. We exceed our own boundaries; we are more and other than we know ourselves to be. This abundance and mysteriousness, this overflowing potential for who-knows-what—these are some of the most thrilling and necessary qualities of the self. Still, there’s no question that they can also be frightening. If it is hard to accept inexplicability and unpredictability in the world around us, it can be even harder to accept those elements within us. Identifying and understanding the causes of our own behavior, knowing and accounting for who we are, and predicting how we will think, feel, and act in the future are matters of real urgency to us. We want to be right about ourselves for the same reason we want to be right about the world: because it enables us to feel grounded, confident, safe—even sane.
This need to be right about ourselves—past, present, and future—is what drives our yearning for perfect self-knowledge. And it also drives our yearning for something else: perfect self-consistency. As with complete self-knowledge, we know, in theory, that an unchanging self is not part of the bargain of being human. In fact, sometimes we enthusiastically embrace our mutability. Witness the self-help section of any bookstore, where positive change is promised in glorious abundance. Or head to a different aisle and check out the memoirs, many of which are, in essence, contemporary conversion narratives—accounts of sweeping, identity-altering wrongness. The gang member turned youth pastor, the druggy turned yogi, the captain of industry turned stay-at-home dad: these are the literary descendents (albeit in some cases very distant ones) of Augustine’s Confessions. Similarly, if you leave the bookstore and turn on the TV, you can watch just about any facet of someone’s life—physique, fashion, family dynamics—undergo a dramatic conversion courtesy of a reality series. It’s no accident that these shows and self-help books and transformation memoirs often achieve soaring popularity, just as it’s no accident that the stories of Paul and Augustine are central to the Western canon—and that the men themselves were canonized. We thrill to stories of life-altering change, we long to believe that such change is possible, and we do believe that it can redeem us.*
What is strange about this enthusiasm for radical transformation is that it coexists with a deep resistance to surrendering any part of our current self, and an equally deep suspicion of substantive change in other people. However much we might admire those who are able to reassess their beliefs, admit to errors, and transform their lives, we are also wary of those who change too much (recall John Kerry), dubious about whether real change is even possible (a leopard doesn’t change its spots, we say; and you can’t teach an old dog