Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [55]
This is the grim flip side of our passion for inventing theories. Like toddlers and tyrants, we are quick to take our own stories for the infallible truth, and to dismiss as wrongheaded or wicked anyone who disagrees. These tendencies are most troubling for the way they fuel animosity and conflict. But they are also troubling because they make it extremely difficult to accept our own fallibility. If we assume that people who are wrong are ignorant, or idiotic, or evil—well, small wonder that we prefer not to confront the possibility of error in ourselves.
6.
Our Minds, Part Three: Evidence
ROSENCRANTZ: That must be east, then. I think we can assume that.
GUILDENSTERN: I’m assuming nothing.
ROSENCRANTZ: No, it’s all right. That’s the sun. East.
GUILDENSTERN (looks up): Where?
ROSENCRANTZ: I watched it come up.
GUILDENSTERN: No…it was light all the time, you see, and you opened your eyes very, very slowly. If you’d been facing back there, you’d be swearing that was east.
—TOM STOPPARD, ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD
In 1692, Judge William Stoughton, one of the most venerable lawmakers in Colonial America, found himself facing an unusual procedural question: Should visitations by evil spirits be admitted as evidence in a court of law? Stoughton was presiding over the Salem witch trials and—unfortunately for the 150 people who were imprisoned and the nineteen who were hanged by the end of the ordeal—he determined that such evidence was permissible. If you had been alive at the time, and dreamed one night that the ill-fated Goody Proctor was in your bedroom attempting to throttle you, you could have presented your dream as evidence before the court—“as though there was no real difference between G. Proctor and the shape of G. Proctor,” in the disapproving words of a contemporary observer.
It is a testament to how far the legal profession has come that few things seem more antithetical to the spirit of justice today than the admission of so-called spectral evidence. Yet the questions Stoughton faced remain central to the practice of law. What counts as evidence? How must it be gathered? Under what circumstances is it admissible? How do certain kinds of evidence compare to other kinds? How much weight should be given to each? How we answer these questions goes a long way toward determining whether justice will be served. Indeed, the fair and consistent practice of law hinges, to a huge degree, on developing a fair and consistent relationship to evidence. (We have names for situations where that relationship doesn’t exist or is disregarded, and one of them is “witch trial.”)
What is true within the law is also true far beyond it. Although we seldom think of it this way, evidence is immensely central to our lives. We rely on it in science to expand our technological capacity and advance our understanding of the world. We rely on it in journalism to keep us accurately informed and to hold individuals and institutions accountable for their actions. We rely on it in politics to determine which laws to pass, which policies to implement, and which wars to fight. And we rely on it in medicine to sustain our health and save our lives.
These are all public institutions, and, like the law, they have all developed specific and formal ideas about evidence—what kind of information qualifies, how to gather it, how to evaluate it. But evidence is also central to the private, non-institutional entity that is each of us. We know from the last chapter that we can’t function without our beliefs,