Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [78]
Small wonder that such revelations are so unwelcome within communities of believers, and bring down so much trouble on the individual member who abandons his or her faith. When we realize that we were wrong about a private belief, the chief thing we stand to lose is our pride. But when we share a belief with others, the stakes of rejecting it escalate astronomically. They include, as we’ve seen, the practical and emotional advantages of conforming with a community. But they also include the community itself—the trust, esteem, companionship, and love of the people we know best. Even more gravely, they include the stability and familiarity of our identities (for instance, as a devout Muslim), and our faith in the very existence of truth. Short of life and limb (which are occasionally on the line as well), the price of being wrong could scarcely be higher, and the experience could scarcely be more destabilizing.
Given these stakes, it makes sense that we are inclined to keep faith with those around us, to insist on the accuracy of our shared convictions, and to condemn those who reject or betray them. Left unchecked, however, this kind of rigid community loyalty is not benign. As the examples in this chapter and the course of history both show, blind adherence to our communities can produce results so appalling that it’s easy to respond with undiluted moral revulsion. And yet, while I don’t want to discourage anyone from being appalled by injustice, moral revulsion takes us only so far. No one plans to wind up on the wrong side of history, after all—yet very few of us ever pause to ask ourselves whether, this time, we might not be the good guys. So the question, for my purposes, isn’t whether the communities in these examples perpetrated moral wrongs. They did. The question is how they managed, while doing so, to feel so unshakably right. And it is also this: Can you and I be certain that we would have acted differently?
All of us would like to think so, of course. But then, 100 percent of us would also like to think we would have been among the 25 percent of Asch subjects who kept on giving the right answers even in the face of a group consensus to the contrary. I think of this as the French Resistance fantasy. We would all like to believe that, had we lived in France during World War II, we would have been among those heroic souls fighting the Nazi occupation and helping ferry the persecuted to safety. The reality, though, is that only about 2 percent of French citizens actively participated in the Resistance. Maybe you and I would have been among them, but the odds are not on our side. None of us can say for sure that we would have acted differently from the silent masses of occupied France. For that matter, none of us can say for sure how we would have acted if we had been a German citizen of the same era—or a male citizen of the Appenzells in 1971, or a devout Muslim in the Afghanistan of today. Just as disturbing, and more important, we also can’t be sure that some of the beliefs we hold today won’t appear grievously unjust in the future. This is error-blindness as a moral problem: we can’t always know, today, which of our current beliefs will someday come to seem ethically indefensible—to us, or to history. As we’ve seen, the bonds of a community are just too powerful, and the aperture of its lens too narrow, for any of us to know with certainty that we are acting more freely and seeing more clearly than those whom history has now condemned as wrong.
That isn’t to say that a certain stubborn liberty of mind is beyond us. None of us are automatons,