Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [81]
This unshakable conviction of rightness represents the logical outcome of everything we’ve read about so far. Our sense of certainty is kindled by the feeling of knowing—that inner sensation that something just is, with all of the solidity and self-evidence suggested by that most basic of verbs. Viewed in some lights, in fact, the idea of knowledge and the idea of certainty seem indistinguishable. But to most of us, certainty suggests something bigger and more forceful than knowledge. The great American satirist Ambrose Bierce defined it as “being mistaken at the top of one’s voice,” and it is this shouted-from-the-rooftops quality that makes certainty distinctive. Compared to the feeling of knowing (which is, by definition, a feeling, an inner state), certainty seems both amped up and externalized. It is, we might say, a more public, action-oriented analogue to knowledge.
The feeling of knowing, then, is less a synonym for certainty than a precondition for it. And we have encountered other preconditions as well. There are our sensory perceptions, so immediate and convincing that they seem beyond dispute. There is the logical necessity, captured by the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint, of thinking that our beliefs are grounded in the facts. There are the biases we bring to bear when we assess the evidence for and against those beliefs. And there is the fact that our convictions and our communities are mutually reinforcing, so that we can’t question our beliefs without running the risk of losing the support, status, and sense of identity that comes with belonging to a particular society.
All of these factors conduce to the condition of certainty—even as they should caution us against it. We have seen, after all, that knowledge is a bankrupt category and that the feeling of knowing is not a reliable indicator of accuracy. We have seen that our senses can fail us, our minds mislead us, our communities blind us. And we have seen, too, that certainty can be a moral catastrophe waiting to happen. Moreover, we often recoil from the certainty of others even when they aren’t using it to excuse injustice or violence. The certainty of those with whom we disagree—whether the disagreement concerns who should run the country or who should run the dishwasher—never looks justified to us, and frequently looks odious. As often as not, we regard it as a sign of excessive emotional attachment to an idea, or an indicator of a narrow, fearful, or stubborn frame of mind. By contrast, we experience our own certainty as simply a side-effect of our rightness, justifiable because our cause is just. And, remarkably, despite our generally supple, imaginative, extrapolation-happy minds, we cannot transpose this scene. We cannot imagine, or do not care, that our own certainty, when seen from the outside, must look just as unbecoming and ill-grounded as the certainty we abhor in others.
This is one of the most defining and dangerous characteristics of certainty: it is toxic to a shift in a perspective. If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other people’s stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. When we are caught up in our own convictions, other people’s stories—which is to say, other people—cease to matter to us. This happens on the scale of history (a specific person’s story is always irrelevant to zealots, unless it serves the ends of the group), but it also happens to each of us as individuals. If you doubt it, listen to yourself the next time you argue with a family member. Leaving behind our more thoughtful and generous selves, we become smug, or patronizing,