Not like Mr Darcy
Greta C has a piece in The Humanist about starting with the assumption that one is wrong as a way to test out a new idea.
A more recent example is the “Ableism Challenge.” On the blog Alex and Ania ‘Splain You a Thing, Ania Onion Cebulla asks people to go for one month without using ableist language, which for those not aware, are words for physical or mental disabilities used as insults—including “lame,” “dumb,” “crazy,” “retard,” and more. The problem with a lot of this language is very clear to me; it’s obvious that using “lame” to suggest something is ineffectual or unenjoyable stigmatizes disability, and using “crazy” in place of, say, “preposterous” stigmatizes mental illness.
Making changes is hard. Trying them out for awhile can help us see why they’re worth it (or not). It’s good to find ways around our self-admiring biases.
But then there’s an illustration at the end:
Like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, we love to think that our investigations and decisions are not usually influenced by our hopes or fears. We love to think that we don’t reach conclusions because we wish it, but that we believe on impartial conviction. And like Mr. Darcy, we are full of it. Our thinking is always weighted towards the conclusion that the things we want to be true really are true.
Oh dear – bad choice of illustration.
Of course Mr Darcy is full of himself and also full of it. Austen makes that blindingly obvious from the outset. What she carefully veils until the right moment to pull the rug out from under us is that so is Lizzie. That’s the hard part. Lizzie is the protagonist, and much of the time she is the point of view (the rest of the time Austen is). We identify with Lizzie, and we see Darcy through her eyes, and we see Lizzie through her eyes too. We get all her cognitive biases pleasantly spoon-fed to us, and we swallow them happily. It’s not Darcy who stands for our smug conceited selves, it’s Lizzie.
Well, both Elizabeth and Darcy demonstrate the same failings. Isn’t that the point? I don’t have P&P at my fingertips but I think Darcy makes much more explicit acknowledgment of his own errors. Lizzie makes the same realization more internally.
She makes it externally too, but in a more diffused way. Darcy cops to most of it in that letter, while Lizzie cops to it in pieces to Jane, her father, Darcy, etc.
But still – because Darcy is the one the reader knows all along is full of faults and blind spots, while we trot happily right alongside Lizzie, the latter is the better illustration of self-deception.