Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [21]
Together, these two conflicting models form the backbone of our understanding of error. Even if we’ve never contemplated them before, they account for the contradictions in how we think about being wrong, and for the varying ways we experience it. Before we turn to those experiences, I want to introduce two figures who vividly embody these different models of wrongness. Unlike the various error-stricken individuals we’ll meet in the rest of this book, these figures do not actually exist. They are creatures of mythology, and they do not so much err as animate—and illuminate—the ways we think about error.
In ancient Indo-European, the ancestral language of nearly half of today’s global population, the word er meant “to move,” “to set in motion,” or simply “to go.” (Spanish speakers will recognize it as ir.) That root gave rise to the Latin verb errare, meaning to wander or, more rakishly, to roam. The Latin, in turn, gave us the English word “erratic,” used to describe movement that is unpredictable or aimless. And, of course, it gave us “error.” From the beginning, then, the idea of error has contained a sense of motion: of wandering, seeking, going astray. Implicitly, what we are seeking—and what we have strayed from—is the truth.*
In the two archetypal wanderers of Western culture, we see clearly the contrasting ideas that shape our understanding of error. One of these is the knight errant and the other is the juif errant—the wandering Jew. The latter figure, a staple of anti-Semitic propaganda, derives from a medieval Christian legend in which a Jew, encountering Jesus on the road to the crucifixion, taunts him for moving so slowly under the weight of the cross. In response, Jesus condemns the man to roam the earth until the end of time. As the historian David Bates has observed, the wandering Jew “literally embodied, for Christian Europeans, the individual separated from the truth.” In this model, erring is inextricably linked to both sin and exile. To err is to experience estrangement from God and alienation among men.
The knight errant is also a staple of medieval legend, but otherwise he could scarcely be more different. Where the wandering Jew is defined by his sin, the knight errant is distinguished by his virtue; he is explicitly and unfailingly on the side of good. His most famous representatives include Galahad, Gawain, and Lancelot, those most burnished of knights in shining armor. (A bit further afield, they also include Don Quixote, who, as both knight errant and utter lunatic, deserves his own special place in the pantheon of wrongology.) Although far from home, the knight is hardly in exile, and still less in disgrace. Unlike the juif errant, who is commanded to wander and does so aimlessly and in misery, the knight errant is on a quest: he wanders on purpose and with purpose, as well as with pleasure. He is driven, like all travelers, by curiosity, by the desire to experience something more of the world.
It will be clear, I hope, that I am not invoking these archetypes to endorse their obvious prejudices. Instead, I’m interested in the way those prejudices lend meaning to our two main models of wrongness. As embodied by the wandering Jew, erring is both loathsome and agonizing—a deviation from the true and the good, a public spectacle, and a private misery. This image of wrongness is disturbing, especially given