Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [156]
These measures might be a prescription for identifying and eliminating mistakes, but they sound like something else: a prescription for democracy. That’s not an accident. Although we don’t normally think of it in these terms, democratic governance represents another method—this time a political rather than an industrial or personal one—for accepting the existence of error and trying to curtail its more dangerous incarnations.
We can see this relationship to error very clearly when we look at the emergence of the modern democracy. In medieval Europe, the power to govern was widely held to be bestowed by God—a belief that was enshrined in the political and religious doctrine known as the Divine Right of Kings. Explicit in this doctrine was the belief that political leaders weren’t subject to any earthly authority; implicit in it was the idea that, as God’s elect, they were infallible. (In a sense, these two beliefs are the same. As the French philosopher Joseph-Marie de Maistre pointed out, there is no practical difference between a leader who cannot err and a leader who cannot be accused of erring.) In the fifteenth century, as European politics started to secularize, the power of this doctrine began to wane. Over the next 300 years, the influence of the clergy declined significantly, religious faith was cordoned off into its own sphere instead of defining and absorbing all of public life, and political leaders came to be seen as mere mortals. On the plus side, this meant that corrupt or incompetent rulers could be legitimately deposed. On the downside, it meant that all leaders came to seem capable of making mistakes. So Enlightenment thinkers—who, as we’ve seen, were already obsessed with the problem of error—began to consider what to do about political fallibility.
The answers they came up with gradually converged on the idea of democracy. In his 1762 Social Contract, for instance, Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously argued that, although individual rulers were fallible, “the general will cannot err.” (Rousseau was greatly influenced by the then-nascent fields of probability and statistics, and the influence shows. His idea that an infallible politics could emerge from the aggregated will of the people owes a great deal to the theory of the distribution of errors.) Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Jefferson averred “that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate.” According to Rousseau, then, error could be combated by letting the people vote for their nation’s leaders and policies. According to Jefferson, it could be combated by letting them speak their minds. Direct election and freedom of speech—these are, respectively, the definition and the emblem of democracy.
As one of the founding fathers of the United States, Jefferson was articulating its founding ideal: that political leadership would not come from a single, supposedly infallible ruler, but from an openly fallible body politic, out of whose clamor and error would emerge a path to liberty and justice for all. Young as it was, the nation already had a precedent for tolerating even what were perceived as the gravest of mistakes. As the historian Richard Hofstadter observed in The Idea of a Party System, America’s political freedom stowed away on the ship of religious freedom. “If [in the colonies] error could be endured where profound matters of faith were concerned,” Hofstadter wrote, “a model had been created for the political game, in which also one might learn to endure error in the interest of social peace.”
In truth, error was more than endured