Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [144]
Most of us are at peace with the fact that some elements of our identities aren’t constant, that things like our skills and priorities (to say nothing of our bodies) inevitably change over time. But not so when it comes to other aspects of the self. These include our personality (“I am conscientious,” “I have a temper,” “I am shy”), our basic talents and deficits (“I’m good with numbers,” “I have a short attention span”), and certain core beliefs, both about ourselves (“I’m someone my friends can rely on”) and about the universe at large (“there is a God,” “education is important,” “it’s a dog-eat-dog world”). The essential elements of our character, our native aptitudes and shortcomings, our grounding moral and intellectual principles, our ways of relating to ourselves, to others, and to the world: these are the things that give each of us our “I.” And, like Augustine, we by and large believe that this central “I” should remain fixed, a kind of ground floor to support the integrity of the entire structure.
But then along comes error and challenges all of this—the idea that we know who we are, as well as the idea that we are who we are. We’ve already seen that the category of knowledge can’t accommodate the possibility of being wrong, and it turns out that this is true of self-knowledge, too. If we conceive of the self as a consistent and knowable entity, it is hard to imagine how we could ever get ourselves wrong. In fact, hewing too closely to this model of the self can force us to dismiss both the possibility of error and the possibility of change—even in cases where, to an outside observer, both seem blatantly evident.
Consider the case of Whittaker Chambers. In 1925, Chambers, then a promising young undergraduate at Columbia University, dropped out of college and joined the Communist Party. For the remainder of his twenties and most of his thirties, Chambers was a committed atheist, an impassioned Communist—and, for five years, a Soviet spy. Then, in 1938, he broke with the party, found God, and turned virulently anti-Communist. Ten years later, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and, subsequently, in one of the most famous trials of the twentieth century: the federal case against Alger Hiss, Chambers’s former friend and alleged fellow spy.
If Chambers’s faith in Communism was so profound that it led him to betray his country and risk his life, his break with it was equally absolute. He didn’t turn away from the Party so much as turn on it, denouncing it as “evil, absolute evil.” Here was a man whose deepest ideological and theological convictions, whose very actions and identity had changed perhaps as drastically as anyone’s can in one lifetime. And yet, he would write in his autobiography, Witness, “I cannot say I changed.” Instead, he continued: “There tore through me a transformation with the force of a river which, dammed up and diverted for a lifetime, bursts its way back to its true channel. I became what I was. I ceased to be what I was not.”
Instead of changing, Chambers felt, he had simply resumed his true identity. This claim is a common feature of conversion narratives. Indeed, the very word “conversion” comes from a Latin verb that means not to change but to return. Thus, converts to Islam are sometimes called “reverts,” and many other religious traditions describe new members of the faith as “coming home” or “returning to the flock.” One of Chambers’s fellow Communists, the French writer André Gide, captured this idea of returning to a fixed if hidden self nicely when he “declared that he had always been a Communist at heart, without knowing it, even when he had been most Christian.” (Gide, too, would eventually grow disillusioned with Communism.)
The implausibility of this claim