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As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say “I was wrong.” Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.
As these quotations make clear, it is alarmingly easy to impute error to those whose beliefs and backgrounds differ from our own. And, as they also show, there is a slippery slope between advocating the elimination of putatively erroneous beliefs, and advocating the elimination of the institutions, cultures, and—most alarmingly—people who hold them.
In sum: we love to know things, but ultimately we can’t know for sure that we know them; we are bad at recognizing when we don’t know something; and we are very, very good at making stuff up.
Remembering to attend to counterevidence isn’t difficult; it is simply a habit of mind. But, like all habits of mind, it requires conscious cultivation. Without that, the first evidence we encounter will remain the last word on the truth.
The idol of the Tribe roughly corresponds to the terrain I covered in the last three chapters: universal, species-wide cognitive habits that can lead us into error. The idol of the Cave refers to chauvinism—the tendency to distrust or dismiss all peoples and beliefs foreign to our own clan. The idol of the Marketplace is analogous to what the earlier Bacon called the influence of public opinion, and includes the potentially misleading effects of language and rhetoric. The last idol, that of the Theater, concerns false doctrine that are propagated by religious, scientific, or philosophical
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On voting days, every eligible male citizen gathered in an appointed town square, bearing either a sword or a bayonet. These weapons, often handed down from father to son for generations on end, served as a kind of voter-registration card; no other proof of citizenship was necessary—or, for that matter, admissible. (To this day in Innerrhoden, where the practice persists, women must present official voting cards, while men need only bring their swords.)
