Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [15]
A similar sentiment was expressed a half-century later by Joseph Jastrow, an American psychologist who conceived and edited an anthology of folly across the ages that he titled The Story of Human Error. A story, it might be observed, traditionally has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and Jastrow clearly thought we were approaching the final chapter in the history of wrongness. Praising “the present peak of scientific achievement,” he predicted that “such advances in the uses of mind…mark the decisive stages in the elimination of error.” Jastrow was inspired to write his book by a visit to the 1933 World’s Fair, which was appropriate since such events are themselves often paeans to the perfectibility of the human race. At the 1939 fair in New York, for example, the literature at the “World of Tomorrow” exhibit reproved its visitors for “still grant[ing] to belief or opinion the loyalty which should go only to fact,” while prophesying that in the future, “we will behave as the trained scientist behaves today. We will welcome the new, test it thoroughly, and accept it joyously, in truly scientific fashion.”
Inevitably, from the present vantage point, these rosy predictions sound hopelessly dated and naïve. But the idea that we can eradicate error—through evolutionary advancement, technological innovation, establishing an ideal society, or spreading the word of God—has a timeless hold on the human imagination. Implicit in this idea is the belief that we should want to eradicate error. And, sometimes, we should: we’d all be happy to see mistakes permanently disappear from, say, the nuclear power industry. But eradicating the entirety of error is another matter. Practicality aside, such an objective presents three problems. The first is that, to believe we can eradicate error, we must also believe that we can consistently distinguish between it and the truth—a faith squarely at odds with remembering that we ourselves could be wrong. Thus the catch–22 of wrongology: in order to get rid of error, we would already need to be infallible.
The second problem with this goal is that virtually all efforts at eradication—even genuinely well-intentioned ones—succumb to the law of unintended consequences. Take the pests out of their ecological niche, and pretty soon you won’t have any hummingbirds or marmots or mountain lions, either. Even if you can’t be brought to believe that error itself is a good thing, I hope to convince you by the end of this book that it is inseparably linked to other good things, things we definitely do not want to eliminate—like, say, our intelligence.
The final problem with seeking to eradicate error is that many such efforts are not well intentioned—or if they are, they tend in the direction for which good intentions are infamous. Here, for instance, is Sully, averring that error’s “grosser forms manifest themselves most conspicuously in the undisciplined mind of the savage and the rustic.” And here is the anthropologist Ralph Linton, a contributor to Jastrow’s anthology, observing (critically) that at one time, “all heathen cultures were [regarded as] at best examples of human error, while at worst they were devices of Satan, devised to keep damned souls securely in his net. In either case it was the duty of Christians to destroy them.” As these quotations make clear, it is alarmingly easy to impute error to those whose beliefs and backgrounds differ from our own. And, as they also show, there is a slippery slope between advocating the elimination of putatively erroneous beliefs, and advocating the elimination of the institutions, cultures, and—most alarmingly—people who hold them.
The idea that error can be eradicated, then, contains within it a frighteningly reactionary impulse. And yet, at heart, it is an idea about progress: a belief that there is an apex of human achievement, and that the way to reach it is through the steady reduction and eventual elimination of mistakes. But we have another, competing idea of progress