Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [2]
This idea is not new. Paradoxically, we live in a culture that simultaneously despises error and insists that it is central to our lives. We acknowledge that centrality in the very way we talk about ourselves—which is why, when we make mistakes, we shrug and say that we are human. As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up. This built-in propensity to err is also recognized within virtually every religious, philosophical, and scientific account of personhood. Nor are errors, in these accounts, just surface features or passing oddities, like hiccups or fingernails or déjà vu. Twelve hundred years before René Descartes penned his famous “I think, therefore I am,” the philosopher and theologian (and eventual saint) Augustine wrote “fallor ergo sum”: I err, therefore I am. In this formulation, the capacity to get things wrong is not only part of being alive, but in some sense proof of it. For Augustine as for Franklin, being wrong is not just what we do. In some deep sense, it is who we are.
And yet, if fallibility is built into our very name and nature, it is in much the same way the puppet is built into the jack-in-the-box: in theory wholly predictable, in practice always a jarring surprise. In this respect, fallibility is something like mortality, another trait that is implicit in the word “human.” As with dying, we recognize erring as something that happens to everyone, without feeling that it is either plausible or desirable that it will happen to us. Accordingly, when mistakes happen anyway, we typically respond as if they hadn’t, or as if they shouldn’t have: we deny them, wax defensive about them, ignore them, downplay them, or blame them on somebody else.
Our reluctance to admit that we are wrong is not just an individual failing. With the exception of those error-prevention initiatives employed in high-risk fields like aviation and medicine, our culture has developed remarkably few tools for addressing our propensity to err. If you commit a moral transgression, you can turn to at least a handful of established options to help you cope with it. Virtually every religious tradition includes a ritual for penitence and purification, along the lines of confession in Catholicism and Yom Kippur in Judaism. Twelve-step programs advise their participants to admit “to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” Even the criminal justice system, although far from reform-minded these days, has one foot rooted in a tradition of repentance and transformation. By contrast, if you commit an error—whether a minor one, such as realizing halfway through an argument that you are mistaken, or a major one, such as realizing halfway through a lifetime that you were wrong about your faith, your politics, yourself, your loved one, or your life’s work—you will not find any obvious, ready-to-hand resources to help you deal with it.
How could you? As a culture, we haven’t even mastered the basic skill of saying “I was wrong.” This is a startling deficiency, given the simplicity of the phrase, the ubiquity of error, and the tremendous public service that acknowledging it can provide. Instead, what we have mastered are two alternatives to admitting our mistakes that serve to highlight exactly how bad we are at doing so. The first involves a small but strategic addendum: “I was wrong, but…”—a blank we then fill in with wonderfully imaginative explanations for why we weren’t so wrong after all. (More on this in Part Three.) The second (infamously deployed by, among others, Richard Nixon regarding Watergate and Ronald Reagan regarding the Iran-Contra affair) is even more telling: we say, “mistakes were made.” As that evergreen locution so concisely demonstrates, all we really know how to do with our errors is not acknowledge them as our own.*
By contrast, we positively excel at acknowledging other people’s errors. In fact, if it is sweet to be right, then—let