Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [47]
Convictions like these organize our idea of who we are, as well as how we relate to our environment. As that suggests, and as we’ll see throughout this book, our beliefs are inextricable from our identities. That’s one reason why being wrong can so easily wound our sense of self. And it’s also why psychotherapy often focuses on helping people to examine—and, when necessary, change—their beliefs about themselves and others. Regardless of whether those beliefs are conscious or unconscious, regardless of whether they are right or wrong, they determine how we feel and how we behave every day of our lives.
Here is what we have learned so far in our quest to understand beliefs: they are models of the world; they help us take action; and accordingly, they incur consequences. Good enough—except why, then, do we have so many beliefs that we will never be able to act on? This is sometimes known as the problem of distal beliefs. “Distal,” in this case, means far from the self; a distal belief is one that pertains to things remote from us in time or space or relevance. If we believe in the soundness of markets, the solidity of mattresses, or the existence of God, those beliefs will guide our actions in the world. But what about the belief that string theory is right, that South Africa’s AIDS policy is wrong, and that Alpha Centauri C is the closest star to the earth? As we’ll see in Chapter Seven, merely espousing such beliefs might be socially prudent or advantageous, regardless of whether they are relevant, or even right. But unless you are a physicist or a public health expert or an interstellar traveler, they will not enable you to take any action in the world.
Why, then, do we bother having distal beliefs? One way to answer this question—certainly the most fun way—is to think about sex. The reason we have a sex drive is to ensure that we reproduce, but the vast majority of our sexual activity does not result in offspring. We simply have an instinct to copulate, with the consequence that we have enough babies and (evolutionarily speaking) way more than enough sex. For at least a century, psychologists and philosophers have suggested that our urge to explain the world is analogous to our urge to populate it. Like making babies, they argue, making theories is so crucial to our survival that we have a natural drive to do so—what William James called a “theoretic instinct.”* This is the impulse I gestured toward in the last chapter: the one that compels us to generate stories and explanations all the time, even at the risk of being featured in a magazine called Modern Jackass.
It’s easy to see why a theory drive would be evolutionarily advantageous. Imagine that you are your own earliest ancestor, trying to make your way in the world some 200,000 years ago. Somehow, you have to figure out that shaking a certain kind of tree will make edible fruit fall to the ground. You have to learn that berries of specific shapes and colors are nourishing, while other very similar berries can kill you. Upon hearing a rustling in the bushes, you have to be able to infer—pretty damn quickly—the presence of a predator, or of dinner. In other words, you must be extraordinarily adept at guessing what’s going on in your environment and why. This is precisely the skill set covered by theorizing, and its utility has not diminished over time. While my concerns about predators might be greatly diminished these days, I now need to be able to determine whether