0: Proposal

I have spent a great deal of this semester wrestling with the notion of fallibility—that is, our human tendency to be wrong, and what we, individually and collectively, should be doing about it.

I am made increasingly aware of my own capacity for being incorrect with every successive school assignment. Whatever the class, it’s usually the same drill: take a topic and, with a two-week turnaround, produce five to eight pages of lucidly articulated arguments. That’s two weeks to pick out the question, absorb the literature, boil it all down, and finally, choose a side and speak for it.

What ensues is a tumble down the rabbit hole into the chaotic realm of critical research. Given any starting point, one answer leads to another question; one perspective is invalidated by the next; one isolated concern points to a variety of complex causes. I am so often overwhelmed by the realization that whatever I can absorb is only a sliver of the pie. What if I’m missing something important in the equation? What if I’m misinformed? What if I’m wrong?

Yet it would be false idealism to assume that, free from the constraints of the school assignment, I could somehow procure every piece of information I need to come up with the correct conclusion. A research thesis is, after all, merely a microcosm of the decisions we must continually make in real-time. When word broke recently of the Howard Windsor appointment and the NSCAD union negotiations, for example, students, faculty and the public alike scrambled to understand the situation, sorting through a torrent of partisan announcements, media reports, hearsay and rumours. Each of these channels of information was biased, incomplete, imperfect. With only such resources to draw from, it follows that our own perspectives must be equally imperfect.

It would be impossible to put the world on pause while we analyze all the pieces in some clinical fashion that arms us for a perfect discourse. Most problems are volatile and evolving—they evade our best attempts at pinning them down. And, even if we could, would it really allow us to make infallible decisions?

The proposed body of research will examine the problem of fallibility and its place in our society. More than just the notion that we are often wrong, I am interested in our culture’s tendency to deny or avoid such a perspective. This tendency, as a result, shapes the ways we present ourselves and engage with others. My research will attempt to uncover where this ideology comes from, how it affects us, and how we can solve the difficulties it poses.

Clearly, my attempt at answering these questions is in itself a struggle against being wrong about them. Underlying this project are the difficulties I face in confronting my own fallibility, and my desire to find the means to overcome it.

My methodology for writing this report is informed by my very resistance to committing to words out of a fear of being wrong. In blog form, I will be publishing bite-sized portions of research and analysis as I proceed. Each entry will respond to only one or two research sources, and thereby necessarily present in-progress arguments, made without the luxury of the full picture, subject to continuous amendment. I see this as a mechanism that forces me to not so much negotiate the perils of imperfect information, as to accept them. It is, at the same time, a mechanism that grants me permission to be wrong—the potential for mistakes is laid bare by the process. After all, this methodology already exists in our minds—it is only out of our anxiety for correctness in the public sphere that, usually, the formative process of arriving at our ideas is banished to obscurity.

It is my hope that this project, through both content and process, achieves the dismantling of the ideology of wrong that binds us to an overriding concern for being right; and in its place, presents new approaches for confronting the questions that we encounter in our lives.