Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [77]
Rahman’s case is extreme by any standards. But being criticized, ostracized, and threatened, suffering the loss of family, friends, property, and opportunity—these are all-too-common consequences of breaking with the prevailing beliefs of our communities. Even Rahman’s exile, while particularly explicit, isn’t particularly unusual. Given that each of our beliefs represents a kind of membership card to a group of believers, it’s not surprising that relinquishing the belief often involves relinquishing access to the group—or, at the very least, severely diminishing our status and welcome within it. (Reducing the sting slightly is the fact that the feeling is often mutual. Once a belief ceases to be attractive to us, those who hold it sometimes become notably less appealing as well.)
Rahman’s case also illustrates another important point about the relationship between beliefs and communities. What really gets you into trouble with a community isn’t holding a belief it scorns; it is abandoning a belief it cherishes. However difficult life might be for non-Muslims living in Afghanistan, the Afghan judiciary is not in the habit of sentencing born-and-bred Christians to death. It was Abdul Rahman’s rejection of Islam, not his embrace of Christianity per se, that landed him in so much hot water.
Given everything we’ve seen so far about how communities work, this makes sense. While insular groups are relatively immune to outside opinion, they are highly dependent on reinforcement of their belief system from within. As a result, internal dissent, unlike outside opposition, can be deeply destabilizing. Consider one of the striking findings of the Asch line studies: if just one of the fake subjects begins giving the right answers, all the real subjects start doing so as well. Seen from one angle, this finding is heartening, since it suggests that a single person speaking freely suffices to break the stranglehold of conformity—like the little boy pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Seen from a different angle, however, it suggests that a lone dissident can destroy the cohesiveness of an entire community. From this latter perspective, doubt and dissent represent a kind of contagion, capable of spreading and destroying the health of the communal body. Accordingly, many communities act quickly to cure, quarantine, or expel (or, in extreme cases, eliminate) any nonconformists among them.
If a single person breaking ranks on a single belief can threaten the cohesion of an entire community, it can also—and perhaps even more alarmingly—threaten the entire nature of believing. This is the point I gestured toward at the beginning of this chapter: if our beliefs can change when we cross a border (or meet a Catholic aid worker), then truth comes to seem like nothing more than a local perspective. That’s disturbing, because the whole point of truth is that it is supposed to be universal. Shahnawaz Farooqui, a Muslim journalist and commentator who supported the death penalty for Abdul Rahman, put the matter plainly. “He will have to be executed,” Farooqui said, because “if somebody at one point affirms the truth and then rejects it or denies it, it would jeopardize the whole paradigm of truth.”
Farooqui was right—not about Rahman and the death penalty, but about the fact that affirming and later rejecting a belief jeopardizes the whole paradigm of truth. As I argue throughout this book, our mistakes disturb us in part because they call into question not just our confidence in a single belief, but our confidence in the entire act of believing. When we come to see one of