2: Dropping the Bomb on Wrong

My research on being wrong is partly inspired by Kathryn Schulz’s presentation (also entitled “On being wrong”), which she gave at the TED2011 conference. As a self-proclaimed “wrongologist”, Schulz has spent years thinking about fallibility. Her talk, which serves as a rough introduction to her discipline, is one that I will be returning to as a springboard for introducing a variety of concerns that she has already identified.

Before I get too far ahead, however, it seems like a good time to address why such a topic is important. Because, for all the work she does convincing us that we are all “trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything,” Schulz fails to give anything beyond vague optimism for why we should step out of that bubble, and what the world would look like if we did.

One online viewer took issue with the way Schulz glossed over how mistake-making manifests in reality. “George Bush thought he was going to invade Iraq, find a bunch of weapons of mass destruction, liberate the people and bring democracy to the Middle East, and something else happened instead,” Schulz cites, with a shrug, as one example (Schulz). The viewer rebukes: “Well, yes we need the mistakes to learn. But what of it? What happens when there is no accountability? Do we just need to forgive and forget? What does that imply for our society?” (Liu). He likely understands that this is not Schulz’s intention, but says so to illustrate that Schulz tends to overemphasize the admissibility of our errors at the expense of suggesting practical methods for dealing with them.

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Let us, in fact, extrapolate Schulz’s ideas in the case of the Iraq War. This was the topic of a recent interview between television host Jon Stewart and former United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In the interview, Rice makes a strong case that Saddam Hussein had, by 2003, proven to be an imminent international security threat that needed to be removed. Yet Stewart is unsatisfied with how the administration chose to convey that threat to the public. “I think the complaint people have,” explains Stewart, “is that the administration was very efficient at selling us on the idea of the danger [Hussein] presented, with very specific thoughts of weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be not the case” (Rice).

Stewart doesn’t believe that the administration simply made a mistake, but rather that the “conversation they had with the American people was not necessarily an honest one” (Rice). His argument is that if we can, for the moment, take Rice’s statements in the interview at face value—that the administration had a real, justifiable case for taking action against Iraq which they could’ve presented to the public—then why did they concert a rhetoric based on unconfirmed WMDs instead?

The administration construed the WMDs as a material certainty; this certainty would’ve been impossible to establish with any subjective measurement of Hussein’s Iraq as a “threat”. That the Bush administration used a strategy favouring the assurance of certainty is telling: it suggests that political discourse is the way it is—distorted, disingenuous, and dishonest—because the speaker assumes that the listener is incapable of making judgments based on complex information. In essence, the speaker therefore fakes a false certainty. In turn, a public that is continually fed these neatly packaged statements of certainty loses their faculty for dealing with complexity, thus perpetuating a cycle that leads to a breakdown of meaningful discourse.

This is really about our expectations of rightness and wrongness. We expect the politician to tell us definitively, “we need to attack Iraq because they have the bombs to attack us,” rather than to say that an invasion of Iraq is a desirable strategy, given a weighing of the advantages and disadvantages using the information available. I am trying to imagine that, if we lived in a culture where we acknowledge fallibility as a norm, the latter statement is something that the politician could’ve presented and that the public could’ve processed. Deception on the one hand, and non-confidence on the other, could both have been avoided.

In the end, the outcome of the war might’ve been the same—except with a much better approval rating. “I’m very regretful about the intelligence [report on WMDs] and the fact that it was not correct,” says Rice. “I am nonetheless very glad that Saddam Hussein is gone, because you would not have the Middle East that you are seeing unfold now” (Rice). She is expressing that a good can result from a wrong decision—and that is something that no one can fully predict. If this is really the case, then why not dismantle the false pretence that we are in possession of perfect information that allows us to make perfect choices, and instead focus on how we can work with what we have, under the circumstances, to the best of our abilities?

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I think this is what Schulz is getting at. Of course, with only eighteen minutes to speak at the podium, she is understandably brief about it. Her first priority is to stress to the audience that fallibility is real, and she has me convinced. In fact, I’m starting to see it everywhere, and it becomes more amusing all the time. The television interview, for example, closes with Stewart appearing to, quite aptly, poke fun of the polarizing effect of wrongness:

Stewart: And you are with me in thinking that I’m also right?

Rice: Jon, both sides can’t be right… (laughs)

Stewart: Alright, well I really appreciate you coming by and talking, and I do feel like I have a better sense of why we did make that huge mistake.

Works Cited

Liu, Jeff. Comment on “On being wrong.” TED: Ideas worth spreading. TED Conferences. 16 May 2011. Web. 25 Nov. 2011. <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html>.

Rice, Condoleezza. Interview by Jon Stewart. The Daily Show. The Comedy Network. 1 Nov. 2011. Web. 23 Nov. 2011. <http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/#clip560829>.

Schulz, Kathryn. “On being wrong.” TED: Ideas worth spreading. TED Conferences. Apr. 2011. Web. 25 Nov. 2011. <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html>.