A few months ago, I stumbled upon (or more likely was the advertising target of) a service called BookBub, a self-described “book discovery service.” Basically, you tell it the types of books you like to read, and it sends you an email every day listing bargain eBooks in your preferred genres. Most are only $1.99. True to its claims, BookBub has expanded my literary horizons by appealing to my thriftiness.
It was in this way that I ended up reading And Then? And Then? What Else?, a memoir by Daniel Handler, a.k.a Lemony Snicket. I remembered Lemony Snicket as the author of the quirky, dark, unusual children’s novels that made up A Series of Unfortunate Events, some of which I read with my children in the early 2000s. Curious about the life and brain behind such stories, categorized variously as gothic, absurdist, and metafictional, I clicked the “Read Now” button.
And Then? And Then? What Else? is a memoir about the entanglements between life and literature that are the substance of many writers’ lives. The book is, not surprisingly, as quirky as Handler’s children’s books, but it’s also intelligent, unconventional, and shot through with truths about the common human experience, as all good books are. But what piqued my interest most was Chapter 3, entitled “Wrong.”
The chapter begins by discussing the ways children are often wrong about the world they are new to, usually through misperception (for example, his son’s conflation of two meanings of the word “ticket”—a ticket for entry into an event and a citation or parking ticket—and his own childhood confusion about the spelling and pronunciation of the word “subtle”). He then goes on to recount his more adult misperceptions, both humorous and somewhat more serious, and how he’s incorporated this theme about how we can be wrong about people and things into some of his books.
Handler says, “There’s a strange vertigo when you realize you’re wrong about something. You float in space for a moment, the landscape seesawing or vanishing into the distance.” In other words, realizing you are wrong disorients you, and then you become reoriented. It changes how you view the world. An epiphany, he says, is when “something clicks into place—where you think you’ve figured something out,” but it’s also when you realize you were wrong about something before the epiphany occurred. Your perceptions have changed and you move on, but you’ve grown.
We’re letting ideas espoused by our opponents—good ideas, right ideas, ideas that could make a positive difference for people—slip away in a tide of dismissal as we tenaciously cling to the shore of our rightness, screaming our outrage.
It’s refreshingly countercultural how Handler explores the benefits of being wrong, even writing that he “tries to cherish this idea of being wrong.” I was taken aback by the chapter, mostly because these days so few people in public spaces ever admit to being wrong about anything. In our culture, it has become a force of habit, when faced with the possibility of being wrong about the least little thing, to put an extra layer of shellac around the shell that protects our egos and either dodge or dig in. “The earth is round, you say? Well, that photo from space must have been doctored! How can it be round? Look around you . . . it looks pretty flat to me!”
It seems as though more and more in conversation, when confronted with the possibility of being wrong, people say things like, “Consider the source” or “Yeah, I think that’s fake news.” They never seem to say, “That’s interesting, I guess I was (or could be) wrong.” Of course, ironically, the more than sixty-four zetabytes of information floating around on the internet have made it harder than ever to determine what is actually factually correct, so dodging and deflecting may be easier than in the days of the Encyclopedia Britannica, when one just pointed to the page and said, “Yup, looks like the earth is really round.”
A lot of this clinginess to being right seeps over from the social media milieu, where more and more of us lead “public” lives, even if only in front of our own handful—or few hundred—of “followers” and “friends.” The show-off culture of Facebook, Instagram, and X (“Look at what I’m doing, saying, or feeling enraged about today”) has made being wrong verboten. Because if you’re wrong, you’re wrong in front of everyone you’ve ever known since elementary school, not just your spouse, neighbors, or friends. The stakes are higher, so the shell around the ego has to be that much more impenetrable.
Because it has become so unacceptable to be publicly wrong (you’ll be derided, shamed, laughed at, or even canceled by the mob), it has become harder and harder for people to admit—even in small, private conversations—that they may have been wrong about even the minutest fact, never mind about more consequential issues, such as public policies, underlying scientific principles, or religious ideas.
To my mind, there are large and small ways of being wrong, and we can be factually wrong or morally wrong. Being factually wrong can be as innocuous as confusing two meanings of the word “ticket” or the spelling of the word “subtle,” or as dangerous as a medical misdiagnosis. When we refuse to admit we are factually wrong, even when we know deep down that we are, then we’ve jumped across the line to being morally wrong. We are lying, and we’re protecting our egos and reputations to the possible detriment of others.
Then there are all the other ways of being morally wrong—the Ten Commandments provide a pretty complete list. Moral wrongs have grave consequences for human relationships and, in worst-case scenarios, can destroy our own lives and the lives of others. Not understanding or admitting we have been morally wrong may protect or even feed our own egos. But the moral denial, dodging, and deflecting will always catch up with us eventually, tearing us up inside and deteriorating our relationships.
In Catholicism, we’re fortunate to have a process for dealing with our moral wrongs. It’s called the sacrament of reconciliation. By confessing the things we’ve been wrong about, we reconcile ourselves to the community of the Church and restore our relationship with God. We can then continue to develop our faith and spiritual lives, growing in love for God and one another.
But, unfortunately, in the broader society, we seem to have lost this ability to admit our wrongs, reconcile with one another, and move on. As we’ve become a more secular society, we’ve become a less forgiving society. Because we can’t reestablish our right relationships with the people we share our country or community with, we remain fractured. Unable to admit a wrong or forgive a wrong, we build up walls and hunker down.
Moreover, we begin to believe that if the other side is wrong about one thing, they are wrong about everything. If Republicans or Democrats are wrong about one public policy issue, they must be wrong about every issue. If we deem Muslims or even fundamentalist Christians to be wrong about a particular belief, they must be wrong about every tenet of faith.
By stubbornly clinging to our “rightness” and never admitting any wrongs, we block the epiphanies that Handler talks about. That means as a society as a whole we can’t progress. We’re stuck in a standoff that nobody wins. We’re letting ideas espoused by our opponents—good ideas, right ideas, ideas that could make a positive difference for people—slip away in a tide of dismissal as we tenaciously cling to the shore of our rightness, screaming our outrage.
I’m not sure how we’re going to get beyond this—how to make being wrong acceptable again in the public space. Perhaps someone needs to set up a social media platform called “Mea Culpa” where people post all the ways they’ve slipped up or misjudged, factually and morally. No lurid details. No comments allowed. Or on a more practical level, perhaps we can all just start re-introducing into conversation phrases like “After reviewing the arguments, I’ve reconsidered my opinion on . . .,” or “Please forgive me, I seem to have been wrong about . . .,” or “I’m seeing that in a new light, and I’ve changed my mind.”
Handler concludes his wonderful chapter with an ingenious comparison between his son’s confusion over the two meanings of the word “ticket” and the two sides of being wrong. On the one hand, he says being wrong is a citation, or what one might call a correction. But on the other hand, the realization you’ve been wrong is your ticket into a new space, where you can enter into “something more marvelous and exciting.” In Catholicism, we believe confessing a wrong leads to metanoia, a change of mind and heart—something definitely more marvelous and exciting than being stuck in “rightness.” Perhaps, having had millennia of practice confessing wrongs and then moving forward, it is now up to us as Catholics to reintroduce this concept into the public space.