January 06, 2012

Always Right

When a fellow believer didn’t like the way I approached a particular situation she personally took me to task saying, “I am disappointed in what you have done…I decided that you were working against me.” Most opinionated people believe they are always right and if you don’t agree with them, then you are the one who must be wrong. Columnist Marilyn vos Savant had an interesting observation; “…people get freaked out by the notion of being wrong about anything. If you can be wrong about this or that, what about all the other stuff you think you know?” I think about Saul of Tarsus after he encountered the Lord on the road to Damascus and discovered he was wrong in persecuting those who belonged to the Way. No doubt it was humbling for Saul to be shown the error of his ways, but I can’t imagine how disconcerting it was for him to then question the other stuff he thought he knew.

1 comment:

Steve Corey said...

Gail;

-----I’ve pondered most all my life about why it is so important for a person to know he is right. I too have concluded that discovering you’re wrong tends to cast suspicion upon the rest of what you know. But why that suspicion should be a problem bothered me. It is obvious no one knows everything. And there are three ways of not knowing everything. One way is just flat not knowing anything at all about something. This is hard to grasp, because you won‘t even know what it is you don‘t know anything about, because not knowing a thing about it means your mind has not so much as had an introduction to it. So, if I were to say I knew nothing about rocket science I would be wrong. Simply knowing rocket science exists is knowing something about it. This presents the second way of not knowing everything: knowing something about some stuff, but not knowing everything about that stuff. I think we most relate to this form of not knowing everything because it has utility. It describes boundaries telling us to proceed less on the basis of practice and more on the basis of discovery. The third way of not knowing everything is what you wrote about: being wrong about something.
-----It doesn’t take much to realize that being wrong about something is indeed not knowing about it. If you actually did know, you would not be wrong, you would be right. So the third way of not knowing is just masking one or both of the first two ways. So actually, we’re right back where we started. Only this time we have been tricked into thinking we know. And that’s the problem. The boundary calling for precaution is missing because the mask has disguised the lack of knowledge. It is more dangerous to be wrong about something than it is to just not know about it.
-----Everyone will admit to not knowing stuff. It takes a dentist without Novocain to get people to admit being wrong. Pride has some to do with it. But I think the simple nature of what we are has more to do with it. The variety of a person’s thoughts, the variety of his feelings, and the variety of their meanings and implications are all enormous. Even the person knows he can easily get lost in them all, or at least profoundly confused by them. So it becomes enormously important to have systems of thoughts and feelings and meanings and implications which render the entire mass of it sortable, workable, and somewhat understandable. Abiding by these systems is what makes coherence possible, and coherence makes continuity possible, and continuity pleases the boss and puts eggs on the table. But being wrong about something? Oh, my! To be wrong about what we’ve thought through casts questions upon the thought process all the way through the implications, the meanings, the feelings, and right back to the thoughts themselves from where the whole sordid mistake came. After all, each of us has only our own mind upon which we must depend for that precious continuity.
-----So if that dependence is moved over to faith in the Lord, the lack of continuity issue goes away because getting to the Lord requires confessing we are wrong. Then knowing we are wrong starts a rebuilding process of the systems of thoughts and feelings and meanings and implications to now be based more upon stuff of forbearance and forgiveness rather than stuff of necessity and feat.

Love you all,
Steve Corey