Screwing Up (review)

[an interesting reflection on a fundamental truth of theological anthropology and epistemology, apophaticism, modesty.... -

Raymond Tallis
Screwing Up
a review of

Kathryn Schulz
BEING WRONG Adventures in the margin of error
405pp. Portobello. Paperback, £15. 978 1 84627 073 4
US: Ecco. $14.99. 978 0 06 117605 0

Screwing up

From 1987 until 2006 when I retired, I was Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester. Since about 1948 or thereabouts (when I was a tot in a cot) I have occupied another post: I have been Professor of Data-Lean Generalizations at the University of Me. There seems little chance that I shall retire from this post, which brings me great satisfaction, though I have several billion colleagues, most of whom are equally well qualified for the title. The key qualification is to be able to punch above one’s cognitive weight, making assertions that are either ill-founded or entirely unfounded, usually in the belief that they are, or are probably, true “just because I think so”. The beliefs promulgated by a Professor of Data-Lean Generalizations encompass huge swathes of that boundless nexus of rumours called “The World Out There”; but, unfazed by the mismatch between the size of the universe and that of the human mind, I am prepared to defend some of them with considerable vigour.

If anything is likely to persuade me to retire, or at least partially retire, from this self-appointed post it is Kathryn Schulz’s luminously intelligent investigation of our propensity to error. In Being Wrong she ranges widely and digs deep. Her inquiry is “built around stories of people screwing up” and involves “illusions, magicians, comedians, drug trips, love affairs, misadventures on the high seas, bizarre neurological phenomena, medical catastrophes, legal fiascos, some possible consequences of marrying a prostitute, the lamentable failure of the world to end, and Alan Greenspan”. Her central thesis is that the propensity to error goes through our psyche like “Brighton Rock” through a stick of Brighton Rock. It is not “a hallmark of the lawless mind” but “our native condition”, because the mind is not an unfoxed looking glass in which the intrinsic reality of things is replicated. We peer into the world through a succession of distorting lenses.
The first and most important is our body.

While we are all familiar with visual illusions, mirages and the hallucinations that hover round the borders of sleep, we are unaware of the extent to which we may be deceived at this very basic level. “There is no form of knowledge, however central or unassailable it may seem, that cannot, under certain circumstances, fail us.” Schulz recounts the case of Hannah, a woman who had had a stroke. Asked by her doctor to describe his face, she reported that he had short hair, was clean-shaven, had a bit of a tan and was not wearing glasses. Unfortunately, his face was concealed behind a screen.

Hannah was in fact blind but, being unaware of her blindness, she confabulated. She was suffering from Anton’s syndrome, one of a group of similar neurological problems known as anosognosia, or the denial of disease. And such conditions are emblematic of the human condition: “To be blind without realising our blindness is, figuratively, the situation of all of us when we are in error”.

We are most likely to be in error where we are most confident, as is dramatically illustrated by a study of those so-called “flashbulb” memories we have of surprising and traumatic events. We all know exactly where we were and what we were doing when President Kennedy was assassinated or when we learned of the death of Princess Diana. No we don’t. Careful studies by psychologists such as Ulric Neisser have shown that an individual’s successive accounts of such memories correlate very poorly with one another, though the memories remain just as “vivid”. We find it difficult to set aside the notion that our experiences of the events have been “burned” into our brains. And it is easy to get healthy people to confabulate, as was demonstrated in a study in which two psychologists set up shop in a department store in Michigan.

They asked people to compare what they claimed were four different varieties of pantyhose. In fact, the hose were all the same. Even so, shoppers not only declared a preference for one or the other but gave solid reasons for their preferences.

These are benign errors. Schulz’s “Wrongology”, however, visits some very dark places. Not long ago, Alan Greenspan was described as “the greatest banker in history”. But his opposition to regulating the market for derivatives – to the point where he persuaded Congress to pass legislation actually forbidding the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from taking any action – was crucial in bringing about the crash that resulted in 40-45 per cent of global wealth evaporating in just over a year. Appalling miscarriages of justice, driven by the rock-like certainties of prosecuting authorities, may be impossible to overturn even in the face of new evidence, as reputations have been invested in being right – illustrating Nietzsche’s observation that “convictions are greater enemies of truth than lies”. Medical errors result in an annual death rate in the US equivalent to a full Boeing 747 crashing every three days, killing everyone on board. And Thabo Mbeki’s confidence that he knew the cause of AIDS killed 300,000 of his fellow countrymen. The assumption that one is right can be very costly for others.
Many mistakes we readily admit to and we take steps to avoid in future. But some mistaken beliefs we cleave to with a passion. As Schulz says, with characteristic wit, once you are contradicted (particularly by your mother), a belief “can move from noncommittal to evangelical in milliseconds”. And this can be as true of beliefs about the recipe for crumb cake as about the origin of the universe.

We take pride in being right; indeed the best way to be insufferable is always to be explicitly right about bloody everything. Being wrong is a source of embarrassment and shame, especially if our interlocutor treats it as a matter of life and death. Being insulted can turn us into sophists for whom victory is more important than truth. It will exacerbate our tendency to embrace “the Evil Assumption” – “that people who disagree with us are not ignorant of the truth and not unable to comprehend it, but have wilfully turned their backs on it”.

Our beliefs, as Schulz observes, “are inseparable from identities”. Our sense of our identity is itself bound up with the community to which, voluntarily or involuntarily, we belong. The pressure to have the same beliefs as those with whom we identify can be irresistible, if only because dissent seems like betrayal. This is evident not only within religious communities where apostasy is punished by vilification, excommunication or death but in the kind of “groupthink” that gripped the Kennedy administration during the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Johnson administration in Vietnam and the Bush-Blair axis seeing non-existent WMD in Iraq.

The existential investment is particularly profound in the case of beliefs about those with whom we are in love. The pain of discovering that there is more to the other person than was evident in the shared dream of the initial romance – even if it is just a matter of their having their own ideas about things – is a poignant reminder of something that all error tells us: that we are to some extent on our own; that we have world pictures that cannot be directly shared; that we are to a greater or lesser degree sealed up “each in his prison”. Our resentment that the beloved should have a different take on reality is “in no small part, a resistance to being left alone with too few certainties and too many emotions”. At any rate, there is nothing to compare with falling in love for drawing “swift and sweeping conclusions based on scanty evidence”.

“Wrongology” threatens to be a dismal science, telling us unwelcome truths, but Schulz’s sparkling introduction greatly mitigates the pain of the message with the pleasure-giving manner of its presentation. And, notwithstanding all that has gone before, Schulz ends on a rather cheerful note. There are, after all, many ways in which we can limit the damage caused by our inescapable tendency to err. And while there are individuals who continue to defend beliefs that have been refuted with increasingly wild rationalizations, there are others who, at huge personal cost, recant their earlier creeds. One unlikely hero in Being Wrong is C. P. Ellis, an ex-Klansman (he was the chief of the Durham, North Carolina, Klavern) who devoted the latter part of his life to furthering the cause of justice for black people.
And while error itself is not a good thing, it is linked to other things that are good, such as our intelligence and our imagination. Without the inductive capacity that takes us beyond what the evidence truly delivers, we would not be able to find our way round the world; we would not enjoy the surprises, the defeated expectations, that comedy exploits; we would not have that hunger for knowledge and understanding, based on our sense of our cognitive limitations, that drives us to the creation of art and the theorizing that underpins science. It is because we live in a domain of possibilities that we can imagine new realities and we are able to transform actuality as no other creature has. Mistakes, Schulz says, “enable not only our biological evolution but our social, emotional and intellectual evolution as well”. So, perhaps I shouldn’t require the Professor of Data-Lean Generalizations to retire yet. But, somewhat late in his career, he is on probation.

Being Wrong may be one of the most important books published for many years. It may seem paradoxical to try to see aright our universal, inveterate tendency to be wrong, but Schulz succeeds brilliantly. This sobering and yet liberating inquiry could make a major dent on the stupidity of the world, including even mine. But, having read this book, I know I may well be mistaken. I hope I am not.