Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [80]
Who were the members of this “fourth philosophic sect,” in all their unphilosophical brutality? These were the original, capital-Z Zealots. History doesn’t record the fate of Judas, but most of the other Zealots perished in the first Jewish-Roman war, which began in AD 66 and ended four years later, with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the defeat of the Jews. A small band of survivors retreated to a fort at Masada, near the Dead Sea, where they held off a Roman siege for three years. When the Romans finally breached the fort, they discovered that its 960 inhabitants had organized a mass self-slaughter, murdering one another (suicide being forbidden in Hebrew law) rather than letting themselves be captured or killed by the Romans.†
As the generic use of their name suggests, the legacy of the Zealots was not ideological but methodological. Murdering in the name of faith, religious or otherwise, was hardly unheard of before they came along, but they clarified and epitomized it as a practice. In the two millennia since the last of Judas of Galilee’s Zealots perished, a thousand lowercase zealots have kept that legacy alive—meaning, they have killed in its name. These latter-day zealots have hailed from many different backgrounds and held many different beliefs. At heart, though, and paradoxically, they have all shared a single conviction: that they and they alone are in possession of the truth. (The very word “zealot” comes from a Greek root meaning to be jealous of the truth—to guard it as your own.) What zealots have in common, then, is the absolute conviction that they are right. In fact, of all the symbolic ones and zeros that extremists use to write their ideological binary codes—us/them, same/different, good/evil—the fundamental one is right/wrong. Zealotry demands a complete rejection of the possibility of error.
The conviction that we cannot possibly be wrong: this is certainty. We’ve seen a lot of this conviction already, in the form of people who are sure they can see, or sure of what they do see (mountain chains, pregnant women), or sure of what they believe or predict or recall. Most of the time, this garden-variety certainty seems far removed from zealotry—and in a sense, it is. There’s a very big difference between, say, insisting that you are right about Orion and, say, murdering the Protestants, Muslims, Jews, bigamists, blasphemers, sodomites, and witches who are defiling your country. Not everyone who is filled with passionate certitude is Torquemada.
In another sense, though, certainty and zealotry are not far removed from each other at all. We got a glimpse of the close association between them, briefly, in the form of the Evil Assumption. If I believe unshakably in the rightness of my own convictions, it follows that those who hold opposing views are denying the truth and luring others into falsehood. From there, it is a short step to thinking that I am morally entitled—or even morally obliged—to silence such people any way I can, including through conversion, coercion, and, if necessary, murder. It is such a short step, in fact, that history is rife with instances where absolute convictions fomented and rationalized violence. We typically associate these spasms of ideologically motivated bloodshed with certain institutions: extremist religions (the Crusades, the Inquisition), superiority-minded racial or ethnic clans (the Rwandan genocide, the Third Reich), and totalitarian states (Stalinism, the Khmer Rouge).* But institutions are not suprahuman entities, manipulating people to serve their own ends. Institutions have no ends. Top to bottom, they are conceived, created, and maintained by human beings. The certainty they exploit is the certainty—or the longing for it—already present inside each of us.
Zealotry, in other words, begins at home. The certainty that we sometimes see channeled toward malevolent ends