Every Tuesday night I go to a dive bar in downtown Boston and watch an exquisite psychological drama play out.
The scene: a trivia game. The characters: four to six teammates and myself, each of us absolutely convinced of our own rightness (and everyone else’s wrongness) as we bicker over such minutiae as who won best director in 1974, or which current Red Sox player has hit the most career home runs.
The denouement: finding out the answers. (Francis Ford Coppola and David Ortiz, if you’re wondering.) Entire friendships have flourished or died on these Tuesday nights, on the basis of little more than a single, passionately argued trivia answer that has ultimately turned out to be incorrect.
So what is it about being right—and, more germanely, being wrong—that we find so riveting? That’s one question among many that journalist Kathryn Schulz sets out to answer in her comprehensive new book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (Ecco, $26.99), a compelling romp through the wilderness of our failings.
Schulz approaches her task with a zealous attention to organization and detail that must be characteristic, I imagine, of the sort of person who spends a lot of time worrying about wrongness. First, she devotes two whole chapters to the deceptively simply task of setting out exactly what she means by wrongness. (To oversimplify: a failure of belief rather than a failure of fact.)
Then, after her introductory definitions are out of the way, she holds off looking at the consequences of that wrongness in favor of first spending six further chapters establishing its various potential sources: our senses, our brains, our existing beliefs, our available evidence, the people around us, and—most significant of all—our overwhelming desire to feel right, regardless of any of the above.
Only then does she begin to look at how wrongness actually expresses itself in our everyday lives, and only after that does she get to the real nitty-gritty, and what can most accurately be called her manifesto: being wrong can be great, she concludes, and everyone should try it sometime.
Essentially that exhortation is an argument for liberalism and democracy—a connection that Schulz rightly draws herself—because enlightened, secular society can only function properly if we’re willing to admit the possibility and the significance of our own errors. (Can we really be “right” about healthcare, for instance? Can we really be “wrong?” What does it even mean to be either?)
But for Schulz to get to this argument by way of such a rigidly structured book is in a very large way, I think, to miss her own point.
It’s not that Being Wrong is bad, or boring, or undetailed, or lacking an argument worth making. It’s just that that Schulz’s dogged attention to detail feels counterproductive, especially in the face of her self-professed wrongness worship; there’s such a wonderful polymathy to her material—because wrongness does, indeed, pervade every aspect of our lives—that to shoehorn it into the framework she does is to do it an injustice.
Why not let the chips fall, I say, and write the most meandering, unstructured, “wrongest” book she could have? How can we ever understand the importance of wrongness fully, when the means to that understanding is trying so laboriously to be right?
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One of Schulz’s more interesting observations is that wrongness is endemic to the way we experience the world; because of the way our major sensory organs function, there are certain situations in which we are wrong nearly 100 percent of the time.
Nobody likes to think of themselves as fundamentally fallible like that, but this pill is easier to swallow for some senses than for others: most people will admit that their eyes can be tricked by optical illusions, and misheard song lyrics are an art form in themselves.
But when was the last time you can remember smelling something incorrectly? Okay, so if you’re considering the bouquet of a delicate Riesling, you might not get the same notes as a trained sommelier, but most people would dismiss that as a matter of subjective opinion; have you ever smelled a rose and thought it was peanut butter?
But disorders of the sense of smell, in fact, are not as uncommon as you might think—and they provide the fascinating starting point for Bonnie Blodgett’s Remembering Smell: A Memoir of Losing—and Discovering—the Primal Sense (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: $24).
Blodgett, a gardening writer from St Paul, lost her sense of smell in 2005—I won’t be ruining anything if I tell you it was only temporary—after using a homeopathic nasal spray to treat a cold. Despite the title of her book, though, Blodgett doesn’t write a memoir of that experience so much as a hybrid memoir and science book, interweaving the tale of her ordeal with a wide-ranging review of the scientific literature on the topic.
Or at least, that’s what she attempts. By her own admission, though, she’s no scientist, and as a result it falls a little flat on both counts.
The memoir sections, for example, are potentially very moving, like Blodgett’s first Christmas without a sense of smell—no scent of roasting turkey wafting through the house, no evergreen bouquet coming off the tree—and her self-destructive internet-scouring hypochondria, kicked into overdrive by her bizarre symptoms and growing depression.
But rather than spend much time in the self-aware, emotionally reflective mode that marks the best literary memoirs, she tends to present these things as a matter of fact—as plot points, essentially—moving swiftly to the next topic without pause, and always leaving the reader wanting slightly more.
As for the science sections, Blodgett mostly uses those to provide an instructive gallery of what Schulz calls Modern Jackass moments: those moments where, confronted with something we don’t quite understand, we do our darnedest to bullshit our way to an explanation, anyway.
Blodgett does just that throughout, cherry-picking out-of-context factoids from scientific studies and drawing plausible-sounding but nonetheless wild and unlikely inferences between them about language, cognition, memory, biology, sex, and pretty much anything else you can think of.
That there’s no word for the smell of an old sock, for example, is evidence to Blodgett of several different things, among them the structure of the brain and evolutionary selection pressures towards a reduced sense of smell—but there’s no single word for the sound of videogames being played in a tunnel, either, or of the sight of a tidal wave at sunset, and all any of this really proves is that it would be linguistically very inefficient to have a distinct word for every experience a person could ever have.
In a way Blodgett’s Modern Jackass moments aren’t really a problem, since I doubt many people will be turning to her book for authoritative scientific insight. And yet her soothing, folksy writing style can be so disarming that I worry people might end up mistaking her book for precisely that.
Remember death panels? As with the debates over healthcare and immigration, a compelling package can convince people of the most tenuous of messages, and once false information is out there there’s no telling what sort of life of its own it will take on.
(Incidentally, Blodgett also reproduces the incorrect “taste map” theory of the tongue, which was debunked in the scientific literature almost four decades ago, and which scientists are still struggling to purge from high school textbooks.)
So although Blodgett’s book is very readable, and full of memorable observations, when she starts talking about science I can’t help feeling we ought to hold her—along with all self-professed science books—to a higher standard of accuracy. Wrongness might, as Schulz reminds us, be unavoidable. That doesn’t mean it should be excusable.
This post has been republished to Medium.
Photo credit: iStock
