Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [90]
The beliefs held by Keech and her cohort were unusual. But their behavior when those beliefs were disproved was not. Whether you believe in flying saucers or the free market or just about anything else, you are (if you are human) prone to using certainty to avoid facing up to the fact that you could be wrong. That’s why, when we feel ourselves losing ground in a fight, we often grow more rather than less adamant about our claims—not because we are so sure that we are right, but because we fear that we are not. Remember the Warner Brothers coyote, the one who runs off the cliff but doesn’t fall until he looks down? Certainty is our way of not looking down.
All of which begs the question: What’s so scary down there, anyway? Like most fears, our fear of wrongness is half real, half spectral. It’s not exactly true that there is nothing to fear but fear itself, since wrongness really can have clifflike consequences for our lives. But it is true that the fear of wrongness does nothing but hurt us. It makes it harder to avoid errors (you can’t skirt a cliff you can’t see), and harder to forgive ourselves and others for making them. For everyone involved, then, looking closely at the experience of wrongness is far better than refusing to look at all. So this is where we are headed now: over the cliff, if you will—to find out how it feels to fall, and what awaits us at the bottom.
PART III
THE EXPERIENCE OF ERROR
9.
Being Wrong
Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
—W. B. YEATS,
“THE CIRCUS ANIMALS’ DESERTION”
So far, this book has been about how we get things wrong—about how our senses, our minds, and our allegiances can all lead us into error. The chapters to come are about what happens once we recognize those errors: about how we react when our convictions collapse out from under us, and how we are changed by that experience. These sections of the book describe, respectively, the “before” and “after” stages of wrongness.
This chapter is about something different. It is about what happens during wrongness—about the moment when the feeling of being right seroconverts to the feeling of being wrong. Psychologically as well as structurally, this moment forms the central experience of error. It is here that some part of our past self gives up the ghost, and some part of the person we will become begins to stir. As that suggests, this moment is crucial to our moral and intellectual development. It is crucial to why we fear and despise error. It is crucial to helping us understand and move beyond those emotions. And it is almost impossible to describe.
I gestured toward this difficulty in Chapter One, when I noted that we can’t talk about error in the first person present tense. The moment in which we can logically say “I am wrong” simply doesn’t exist; in becoming aware that a belief is false, we simultaneously cease to believe it. Still, something has to transpire between thinking that we are right and knowing that we were wrong. Yet the nature of that “something” is remarkably elusive. For the most part, our beliefs change either too quickly or too slowly to isolate the actual encounter with error.
Consider slow belief change first. Many of our beliefs simply erode over time, eventually vanishing altogether or reconfiguring beyond recognition without ever passing through an obvious crisis. A broad range of beliefs can succumb to this kind of tectonic drift, from the trivial (belief that you look great in bellbottoms) to the momentous (belief in God). By its very nature, this kind of long, gradual change is extremely difficult to track. Who can say when mountains become meadows, or glaciers become grassland? The comparable human changes happen on a far smaller time scale, but they can be almost as hard to perceive. A friend says: “It’s like I skip from the part where