Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [173]
“The genius of statistics.” Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 182.
For more on the potential insidiousness of this innovation (FN). Many observers have been troubled by the application of the bell curve to the social sciences, since plotting people on a curve like so many data points tends to create an idea of an average or optimal version of a given human characteristic—with correspondingly unwelcome consequences for those who find themselves on the tail end of the curve. In the worst-case scenario, those consequences include stigmatizing variation, equating difference with deviance, and seeking to eradicate anything that diverges from the ideal: in short, all the classic signs of fascism. That’s why dystopian literature is full of societies consisting entirely of “average men,” clonelike copies of eerily bland, interchangeable people. Nor is this problem limited to literature; history bears tragic witness to the urge to bring these ostensibly ideal societies into being.
This capacity to treat human beings as potentially erroneous data points is why some thinkers blame the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment for the genocidal horrors of the twentieth century. In more conventional historical accounts, the Enlightenment represents the high-water mark of Western culture, and all subsequent outbreaks of barbarism stem from the abdication of its central values. But other thinkers hold that Enlightenment values are the source of that barbarism. They argue that, by elevating cold rationality above all other virtues, esteeming abstract and supposedly universal truths over individual lives, and imposing the values and methods of science on all of human activity, the Enlightenment created the motive, the means, and the justification for systemic violence. This criticism was first articulated during the French Revolution, whose stunning brutality was justified as necessary to the establishment of a perfect government. Since there can be no rational objection to a perfect government (the argument went), all political opposition was dangerously wrong and could—indeed must—be eliminated. This criticism of the Enlightenment was revived (most famously by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno and the associated Frankfurt School of philosophers) in the wake of the twentieth century’s spasms of ideologically motivated, mechanically enabled, perfection-minded violence. Incidentally, David Bates, whom I cite above, locates the intellectual roots of such violence later, with the rise of positivism in the nineteenth century.
“baseless chimeras.” Translations of al-Ghazali vary widely, down to the titles of his works and the spelling of his name. I have used two different translations in this book: Abu Hamid Muhammad Al Ghazzali, The Confessions of Al Ghazzali, Claud Field, trans. (Cosimo, Inc., 2007) and Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazali, Al-Ghazali’s Path to Sufism: His Deliverance from Error, R. J. McCarthy, trans. (Fons Vitae, 2006). This quotation is from the first one and appears on p. 17. For comparison’s sake, the same passage in the other translation is rendered as follows: “Don’t you see that when you are asleep you believe certain things and imagine certain circumstances and believe that they are fixed and lasting and entertain no doubts about that being their status? Then you wake up and know that all your imaginings and beliefs were groundless and unsubstantial. So…what assurance have you that you may not suddenly experience a state which would have the same relation to your waking state as the latter has to your dreaming, and your waking state would be dreaming in relation to that new and further state?” (p. 22)
“in the firm conviction that one is following it.” Both this definition and the quotation from François Boissier de Sauvages in the next paragraph appear in Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard, trans.