Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [67]
Whether because of the momentum created by the Human Rights Convention kerfuffle, because of the increasingly untenable disparity between cantonal and federal voting rights, or simply because of the times—even famously neutral, isolationist Switzerland wasn’t immune to the social revolutions taking place around the world in the 1960s and ’70s—the days of an all-male Swiss electorate were numbered. On February 7, 1971, the matter was put to vote again, and this time, the men of Switzerland decided that their female compatriots deserved the ballot. The final tally was 66 percent in favor to 34 percent against—a near-exact reversal of the outcome in 1959.
But the story doesn’t end there. Communities come in all sizes, and if the collective national community of Switzerland decided in 1971 that it was wrong to exclude women from the vote, the same could not be said of all the smaller communities that together comprise the nation. After the federal referendum passed, most of the cantons that still barred women from voting at the local and cantonal levels amended their laws as well. But two cantons held out. One of these was Appenzell Ausserrhoden, whose male citizens didn’t extend the vote to women until 1989. The other was Appenzell Innerrhoden, whose male citizens never did so. Women there gained the right to vote only when the Swiss Supreme Court finally forced the issue—ironically, to comply with a federal Equal Rights Amendment that was by then on the books. That was in 1990. On average across the globe, the women of any given nation have had to wait forty-seven years longer for the right to vote than their male compatriots. In Switzerland, where male citizens began gathering in town squares for public balloting in 1291, universal suffrage took exactly seven centuries.*
A 1968 poster opposing women’s right to vote in Switzerland. The text above the image reads “Leave us out of it!” The text below says “Women’s Suffrage No.”
Today in the developed world, the idea that women should be allowed to vote is about as uncontroversial a political claim as you can make. The fact that resistance to it lingered for so long anywhere in the West—let alone in prosperous, educated, democratic Switzerland—serves as a striking reminder that even those beliefs we take to be self-evident can vary astonishingly from one community to the next. That, in turn, raises a troubling question about the very nature of belief. All of us like to think that our ideas about the world are, if not necessarily right, at least fundamentally striving toward rightness. What does it mean, then, that those ideas so often shift not with the available evidence but, like language or currency or speed limits, with the mere crossing of a border?
In 1267, a quarter-century before those first members of the Swiss confederacy began casting their ballots, the English philosopher and friar Roger Bacon sent Pope Clement IV a book about error. Actually, the book was about nearly everything (appropriately titled Opus Majus, its subject matter ranged from theology and philosophy to linguistics, optics, and the manufacture of gunpowder), but it opened with a discussion about why people get things wrong. To Bacon’s mind, all error could be chalked up to just four problems, which he called (rather charmingly, to English speakers) offendicula: impediments or obstacles to truth. One of those obstacles was a kind of thirteenth-century version of Modern Jackass: the tendency to cover up one’s own ignorance with the pretense of knowledge. Another was the persuasive power of authority. A third was blind adherence to custom, and the last was the influence of popular opinion.
I have been writing, up until now, as if both our beliefs and our errors were the products of individual minds interacting independently with the external world—through perception, inductive reasoning, and so forth. But of Roger Bacon’s four offendicula, three pertain unambiguously not to cognitive processes but