Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [99]
All of us know people like this—people whose rigidity serves to protect a certain inner fragility, who cannot bend precisely because they are at risk of breaking. For that matter, all of us are people like this sometimes. No matter how psychologically resilient we may be, facing up to our own errors time and again is tough. And sometimes we just can’t. Sometimes we are too exhausted or too sad or too far out of our element to risk feeling worse (or even just feeling more), and so instead we wax stubborn, or defensive, or downright mean. The irony, of course, is that none of these feelings are all that great, either—and nor do they engender particularly comforting interactions with others. True, we will have succeeded in pulling up the drawbridge, manning the battlements, and skirting a confrontation with our fallibility. But we will also have succeeded (if that is the word) at creating conflict with another person—not infrequently, with someone we love. And, too, we will have succeeded in stranding ourselves inside the particular and unpleasant kind of loneliness occasioned by one’s own poor behavior.
Then there is the other, less obvious problem with failing to face up to wrongness: we miss out on the wrongness itself. If the ability to admit that we are wrong depends on the ability to tolerate emotion, it is because being wrong, like grieving or falling in love, is fundamentally an emotional experience. Such experiences can be agonizing, but the corny truism about them is true: if you haven’t experienced them, you haven’t fully lived. As with love and loss, so too with error. Sure, it can hurt you, but the only way to protect yourself from that potential is by closing yourself off to new experiences and other people. And to do that is to throw your life out with the bathwater.
Happily, we don’t need to do this. If our ability to accept error is mercurial and mysterious, we do know this much: it is also mutable. Like all abilities, it comes from inside us, and as such it is ours to cultivate or neglect. For the most part, we opt for neglect, which is why the typical relationship to error is characterized by distance and defensiveness. But if you have ever tried those out in a real relationship (meaning, with a human being), you know that they are the short road to disaster. The only way to counter them is to act counter to them: to substitute openness for defensiveness and intimacy for distance. I said earlier that this is not a self-help book, since (for reasons both practical and philosophical) my primary goal isn’t to help us avoid error. But when it comes to the opposite task—not avoiding error—we can use all the help we can get. The aim of the rest of this book, then, is to get closer to error: close enough to examine other people’s real-life experiences of it, and, in the end, close enough to live with our own.
10.
How Wrong?
Once you have missed the first buttonhole you’ll never manage to button up.
—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
On the morning of October 22, 1844, a group of people gathered to await the end of the world. They met in homes, in churches, and in outdoor revival meetings, primarily in New York and New England but also throughout the United States and Canada, and as far away as England, Australia, and South America. Nobody knows how numerous they were. Some scholars put the number at 25,000 and some put it at over a million, while most believe it was in the hundreds of thousands. Whatever the figure, the assembled group was too large to be dismissed as a cult and too diverse to be described as a sect. The believers included Baptists,