Being Wrong Is Being Alive

The distance you feel from those around you should trouble you no more than your distance from the farthest stars. RILKE Letters To A Young Poet

One last extract from Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margin Of Error by Kathryn Schulz. Here she quotes Philip Roth:

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be ... and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them: you get them wrong while you're with them and then you get home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misrepresentation. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we are alive: we're wrong. PHILIP ROTH American Pastoral

That's how we know we are alive: we're wrong. I wonder if anyone feels the same surge of recognition on reading this as I do? The number of times I have 'got people wrong', and have had to revise my opinion because of a particular bias, prejudice or prejudgement. Sometimes it's hard to read another's mind, hard to come to a properly informed and meditated opinion about someone: so we rely on snap judgements and gut instincts which may be way off the mark (though not always).

And, conversely, no wonder we ourselves often feel unappreciated, misrepresented and misunderstood: for other people have the same problem with us. How easy is it for them to divine our innermost thoughts and feelings, to plunge into our souls? No, not very easy. It's amazing we ever manage to communicate at all. But communicate we do - maybe haphazardly, maybe inadequately, maybe in trial and error: yet always with fresh hope in making that human, empathic connection.   

Positive Negative

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand. PICASSO

One perverse pleasure of art is the pleasure of being lost, in the sense of being confused or in the dark. KATHRYN SCHULZ

Art is an invitation to enjoy ourselves in the land of wrongness. KATHRYN SCHULZ

In the last chapter of her book Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margin Of Error Kathryn Schulz riffs fascinatingly on the close productive relationship betwen error and art. Victorian art and literature focused on recreating the world with as much verisimilitude as possible. But the aftermath of World War I and the arrival of modernism changed all that. At its most extreme, culture had become anarchy, and anarchy culture. Tristan Tzara, the Romanian poet who founded Dadaism, urged his fellow artists: Let us try for once not to be right.

If error is a kind of accidental stumbling into the gap between representation and reality, art is an intentional journey to the same place, Schulz writes. The idea is not new. One hundred years prior to World War I the Romantic poet John Keats embraced the positive value of the irrational, and of error, doubt and uncertainty, in a letter to his brothers which contained this famous passage: ... and it at once struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

I remember the excitement and sense of personal and literary freedom I felt when first reading this momentous remark by Keats about the importance of Negative Capability, this ringing endorsement of subjectivity. Hey, yes - it was OK to experiment, to be unsure, to get things plain wrong from time to time! In other words, to be a human individual, myopic and fallible. Indeed, only out of doubt, questioning and open-mindedness, out of wrongness, does great art emerge, I firmly believe. If an artist knows the right answer from the start, what need of the artistic quest? Keats's idea led me directly to cubism, expressionism, existentialism; to Picasso, Eliot, Virginia Woolf; to the twentieth century, in short.

Schulz goes on to quote the Candian poet Anne Carson - What we engage in when we do poetry is error - and infers from this that Carson means these things: The first is that poetry is made of words, and, as we've seen, words have error built into them from the get-go. Every syllable is a stepping stone across the gap, an effort to explain something (train tracks, thunder, happiness) by recourse to something it is not (a word). The second is that writing, whether of poetry or of anything else, involves a certain amount of getting it wrong, - an awareness that truth is always on the lam, that the instant you think you've got it pinned down on the page, it shimmers, distorts, wiggles away. Last, but possibly most important, I take her to mean that poetry, like error, startles, unsettles, and defies; it urges us towards new theories about old things.

The Transformative Potential Of Being Wrong

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. GANDHI

Some more observations from Kathryn Schulz's terrific book Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margin Of Error - a book in which she defends the freedom to make mistakes and explores the positive side of wrongness. Here she writes that being wrong, if we learn from that state, can transform our life ...

It takes courage to leave our past selves behind. But it takes even more to take some token of them with us as we go: to accept that we have erred, recognize that we have changed, remember with compassion our caterpillar past. As difficult as this can be, the dividends are worth it. 'The main interest in life and work,' said Foucault, 'is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.' Such transformations don't only come about through wrongness, of course - but wrongness is always an opportunity for such transformations.

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning ...

And here she argues that accepting our own fallibility can bring about a greater compassion for ourselves and for others ...

We venture inward, then, for the same reasons we venture out: to fill in the unknown places on the map and correct our misperceptions about what's going on there. In the process, we get to know ourselves better - but, ideally, we also get better selves. The goal of therapy, after all, isn't just to help us understand why we feel and act as we do. It's also to help us change the way we feel and act: to foster a set of beliefs that is less rigid, more functional, and more forgiving, towards ourselves as well as those around us. The same could be said of all the other practices, from prayer to twelve-step programs to Buddhist meditation, that push us to accept our fallibility.Like therapy, and for that matter like travel, these practices help us weather challenges to our worldview with patience, curiosity, and understanding.

This is one of the most powerful ways being wrong can transform us: it can help us become more compassionate people. Being right might be fun but, as we've seen, it has a tendency to bring out the worst in us. By contrast, being wrong is often the farthest thing in the world from fun - and yet, in the end, it has the potential to bring out the best in us. Or rather: to change us for the better.

... a set of beliefs that is less rigid, more functional, and more forgiving, towards ourselves as well as those around us ...

To Err Is To Wander

I err therefore I am. AUGUSTINE The City Of God

In her brilliant and thought-provoking book Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margin Of Error (2010) Kathryn Schulz claims that it's an inherent part of the human condition to err, to make mistakes, to get things wrong much of the time; and she explains - physiologically, psychologically and philosophically - why this is so. We have only to reflect a little to realise that we seem to get things wrong far more often than we get them right.

Consider the unreliable evidence of our senses, the compensatory mechanisms of the brain, the subjective nature of memory (there's a lot of scientific evidence showing how we embellish and grossly distort our memories, even making them up completely - yet we still manage to convince ourselves that they are absolutely true).

Scientists are wrong rather than right in their hypotheses most of the time - indeed, that's the nature of the scientific method. When a theory is apparently 'proved' to be 'true' and beyond all reasonable doubt, it's often overturned and superseded at some later date: look, for instance, at all the various historical conjectures about the creation and makeup of the universe.

And just dwell for a moment on all our great religions, philosophies, ideologies and belief systems. They can't all be right, can they? Indeed, are any of them right? (And what about Iraq's WMD? Were Bush and Blair right about them? Absolutely - and catastrophically - not.) The list of our mistakes and errors, false beliefs and failures of perception, is endless, and will carry on being added to forever.

The more we think about it, the more we realise there's not much we can point to as an example of pure, objective, certain knowledge; pretty much all we think we know we actually only feel we know. We live according to all-too-fallible constructs of trust and belief, and these beliefs are often misguided and shakily rooted. Yet we cling to these beliefs in unwavering certainty of their rectitude.

However, paradoxically, our constant falling into error can also bring insight, illumination and understanding. Rather than error being a shaming, embarrassing, negative thing, Schulz argues that it's both necessary and inevitable, that it can be salutory, even noble. In this extract from her book she writes fascinatingly about the origin of the word 'error':

In ancient Indo-European, the ancestral language of nearly half of today's global population, the word er meant 'to move', 'to set in motion', or simply 'to go'. (Spanish speakers will recognize it as ir.) That root gave rise to the Latin verb errare, meaning to wander or, more rakishly, to roam. The Latin, in turn, gave us the English word 'erratic', used to describe movement that is unpredictable or aimless. And, of course, it gave us 'error'. From the beginning, then, the idea of error has contained a sense of motion: of wandering, seeking, going astray. Implicitly, what we are seeking - and what we have strayed from - is the truth.

Schulz goes on to consider the idea of the knight errant - Galahad, Gawain, Lancelot, Don Quixote - then concludes Part One of her book with this inspiring paragraph:

To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling, and sometimes even dangerous, but in the end it is a journey, and a story. Who really wants to stay home and be right when you can don your armor, spring up on your steed and go forth to explore the world? True, you might get lost along the way, get stranded in a swamp, have a scare at the edge of a cliff; thieves might steal your gold, brigands might imprison you in a cave, sorcerers might turn you into a toad - but what of that? To fuck up is to find adventure: it is in that spirit that this book is written.